FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, July 1, 2014
CONTACT:
Rebecca Bailey, Publicity Coordinator/Writer
Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College
rebecca.a.bailey@dartmouth.edu
603.646.3991
Animator/performer's dream-like and intricate history of the planet
Photos: Still images from This World Made Itself. Top photo by Miwa Matreyek, bottom photos by Eugene Ahn.
HANOVER, NH—Employing her own hybrid of layered, intricate projected animation and dance-like shadow
play, Miwa Matreyek offers a dream-like vision of our planet and all its splendid dynamism in This World
Made Itself, on Friday, October 10, at 7 and 9 pm, in the Hop's Warner Bentley Theater.
The Los Angeles-based animator/performance artist incorporates the live, moving silhouette of her own body
into projections of her exquisitely rendered animations to create breathtakingly beautiful theatrical
presentations. Her works each spin philosophical, dreamlike narratives about the evolution of our
environment and the agency of human creation with a poetry, scale, and intimacy that penetrate. Wrote
FineArtsLA.com, "She seamlessly combines the would-be-separate mediums of performance art, animation,
sculpture and music to create a simultaneously whimsical and intricate experience."
Matreyek developed this art form while
an MFA student at LA's CalArts, where
she merged her interests in animation
and collage, as well as theater,
performance, cinema, puppetry and sitespecific art. "From early on, I was
interested in breaking down the
languages of theater, performance and
cinema, and I liked playing with the
structure of video," she told the KCET-TV
blog Artbound.
She has shown her work internationally
at animation/film festivals, theater
festivals, performance festivals, as well
as art galleries, science museums, tech
conferences, universities, and more—
including TEDGlobal (UK), Sundance Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Anima Mundi Animation
Festival (Brazil), Time Based Arts Festival, REDCAT, ISEA, Theatre de la Cité (France), the Exploratorium, EXIT
festival, Fusebox Festival, S8 (Spain), Animasivo (Mexico), Pixilerations, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, City
of Women (Slovenia), Santiago a Mil (Chile), Manipulate (UK), and more.
Premiered in 2013, This World is her most ambitious piece to date, a one-hour visual symphony
expressionistically exploring the planet's history from the Big Bang to the present, with radiant animated
imagery, a moody score by such musicians as Anna Oxygen and Flying Lotus, and Matreyek's own graceful
shadow, superimposed real time from behind the screen using precise visual and sound cues. Sometimes just
a hand extends into the frame, sometimes her entire body, upright, on all fours, or on her back.
Wrote Artbound, "This World Made Itself begins with incredibly beautiful animated images of molten rock and
the formation of oceans and landmasses, and then moves on to the origins of life. Richly detailed and
colorful—and yet entirely surreal—the imagery looks it was pulled from a children's encyclopedia from the
1950s. Matreyek's silhouette intercedes in the projected imagery, creating a mythic female presence moving
gracefully through the prehistoric scene. We see her swimming in an ocean of fire, walking through tall
grasses, traipsing across mountains."
Wrote the UK blog Neverunderdressed.com, "At first you feel like you’re watching a surreal video animation,
but then you realize that the disembodied, shadowy hands controlling the montage aren’t part of the film,
they’re being performed live by the artist. Calling it ‘part performance art, part animation’ doesn’t do justice
to the multi-layered, dream-like worlds Miwa…creates."
"I was coming from a place of imagining: what does it feel like to be the earth that’s just forming?"
Neverunderdressed.com quotes Matreyek as saying. "It’s all molten lava and there’s no atmosphere and it’s
just forming as a planet—and what does it feel like when the atmosphere forms, when there’s steam, when
there’s the first oceans forming. In my mind, the piece is somewhere between Disney's Fantasia and Carl
Sagan's Cosmos.''
This World Made Itself is one of several Hop shows this season involving adventurous, one-of-a-kind theater.
Others are An Iliad (September 17 & 18), a powerful modern retelling of the Trojan War tale; The W. Kamau
Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour (October 2), a solo comedy show by one of the nation's most
astute cultural commentators; and Cineastas by Mariano Pensotti (January 15 & 16), one of the few US
performances of a stunningly original, internationally acclaimed play that uses the stage to imaginatively
follow four fictional filmmakers and their projects.
Download Word.doc press release and high-resolution photos
RELEVANT LINKS
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/miwa_matreyek
http://www.semihemisphere.com/
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/an_iliad
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/w_kamau_bell
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/cineastas
Download high-resolution photos:
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScont
ent::loadArticle::article_id=A14ACB33-679C-469F-9E075A08469894E7&sessionlanguage=&SessionSecurity::linkName=
CALENDAR LISTING:
This World Made Itself by Miwa Matreyek
Friday, October 10, 7 & 9 pm
Warner Bentley Theater, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hanover NH
$22, $10 Dartmouth students, 18 & under $17
Information: hop.dartmouth.edu or 603.646.2422
A multimedia performance artist from Los Angeles, Matreyek merges breathtaking digital animation with
intricate, real-time shadow play for an experience both sophisticated and full of wonder. This World follows
the history of the earth—from the universe’s first spark to the complex, accelerated present. With child-like
awe, an “everywoman” silhouette moves through a vivid, dream-like panorama in which the fecund natural
world gives way to the stark human-made one.
* * *
Founded in 1962, the Hopkins Center for the Arts is a multi-disciplinary academic, visual and performing
arts center dedicated to uncovering insights, igniting passions, and nurturing talents to help Dartmouth and
the surrounding Upper Valley community engage imaginatively and contribute creatively to our world. Each
year the Hop presents more than 300 live events and films by visiting artists as well as Dartmouth students
and the Dartmouth community, and reaches more than 22,000 Upper Valley residents and students with
outreach and arts education programs. After a celebratory 50th-anniversary season in 2012-13, the Hop
enters its second half-century with renewed passion for mentoring young artists, supporting the
development of new work, and providing a laboratory for participation and experimentation in the arts.