Delta

∆ (Delta)

“∆” (“Delta”) is the title character of a site-specific performance that took place over the course of a month in Bee Canyon Park, in the Granada Hills section of Los Angeles—across the street from the Metropolitan Water District’s largest drinking water treatment plant, and nearby to the super-leaky Aliso Canyon methane storage facility. Every day from 4—6pm, a new performer or group of performers assumed the ∆ persona anonymously.

Like a pool of water being treated—flowing in, changing state, flowing out—∆ signifies difference, a changing state, dislocation, in process and in dispute. ∆ is a mercurial messenger, a conduit, and a portal existing in multiple locations at once—present, accessible and responsive to both local and remote sites (∆ could also be Delta, Utah; home to the Intermountain Power Project, which burns coal to make electricity for Los Angeles, 500 miles away). Embodying the remote “grounding” of LA’s water and power infrastructure across vast distances, ∆ is of the landscape, a bit of sediment washed down from the San Joaquin River Delta, not a guide, but a transplant from the source.

delta

Each performer or set of performers assuming the role of ∆ made use of a “toolkit” that lived on-site—a specially-designed container made to hold scores, objects, and materials for use in daily tasks, interactions and meditations. Sculptural as well as functional within each performance, objects in the toolkit served alternately as props, costumes, and staging materials (a banner becomes a garment, becomes a blanket, becomes a shelter, for example); tools for documentation, communication, sound-making, writing, and analysis; and elements in choreographed exchanges, dances, and musical gestures.

Every day ∆ opened the toolkit to find instructions and resources for performance and engagement with visitors—ceremonial exchanges, as well as actions staged for video, photographer, or sound recorder—remote cartography (tracing boundaries and topographies), and processes of filtering, purifying, processing, and transmitting. At the end of each day, ∆ returned the contents to the toolkit where they are stored until the next day.

download / view toolkit “README” as PDF