Living For The Thing Itself: Little Cinema Makes Real Art for ‘I Am The Night’ (A NoPro Night Out)
NYC’s Little Cinema transformed LA’s Chateau Marmont into an unforgettable art party
Sometimes the job takes you unexpected places.
I’d heard stories about Chateau Marmont, we all have, but I’d never had cause to be there. I’m just a pixel pusher, I don’t run in those circles. But that night I had an invitation from George Hodel to see some “real art.”
Not the real Hodel. He’s dead. All that’s left of him are a legacy of unsolved cases and descendants who live in the shadow of trauma. Part of that legacy is the new TNT series I Am The Night, which tells the story of Fauna Hodel, his granddaughter. Fauna’s story is as strange as they come, and I’m not going to do it justice in a few lines. Suffice it to say themes of identity are wound tightly into her life: Fauna was raised by a black woman she thought was her mother and believed she was biracial. It was in her teens that she found out she was adopted, and that her heritage wasn’t exactly what she thought it was.
The visit to the Chateau was, truth be told, for the afterparty for the LA premiere of the TNT series. It was the latest in a line of “immersive premieres” that TNT has commissioned from New York’s Little Cinema. As Little Cinema’s Jay Rinsky told me on the podcast this week, TNT acted less as a client and more as an art patron this time out, giving them both free reign and access to the show’s dailies in order to craft something that would surprise and delight the cast and crew.
A team of artists from New York and LA, including artists and designers from Sleep No More’s McKittrick Hotel and Rogue Artist Ensemble were brought together by Little Cinema to recreate the vibe of the avant gaurde art parties depicted in the series. That effort created a mini-festival of performance and installation art, with famous pieces recreated and reenacted which added to the vibe without demanding that those who were just there to have a good time give it their full attention.
It gave the party a funky edge, and under the surface there was even more going on.
Upstairs, in Room 29, those who received an invitation or knew who to ask were able to see some of that “real art.” Which, was actually real art. An original video/performance installation piece folded into an immersive wrapper hidden in the heart of the party. Like a series of nesting Russian dolls.
The piece itself was assembled out of the dailies Little Cinema was given access to and conversations they had with Fauna’s daughters. Built as a tribute to Fauna, using her words as spoken by actress India Eisley, who portrays her in the series and embodied by a dancer. A roughly ten minute tone poem of spoken word, projection, dance and song that flitted between live and recorded material unfolded in the suite. There was a light amount of interaction, as two audience members were brought inside the Lightbox — a scrim and a screen separated by a Marley dance floor — to bookend the performance.
The piece by itself captured the unsettling edge that the series, which explores Fauna’s personal identity and a family history that entwines itself with the infamous Black Dahlia murder. By happenstance I was part of the audience when both the series director, Patty Jenkins, and Fauna’s daughters were in the room as well. Jenkins was taken into the Lightbox at the start of the piece, and it was one of Fauna’s daughters who was taken in at the end.
At the time I didn’t even know it was Fauna’s daughter, but as the actress playing Fauna stepped out from behind the scrim and offered her hand to the tall black woman sitting in the front row you could feel something shift in the room. The idea that this might be her daughters hit me then. (It would be confirmed later.) They stood in the box, looking at each other. By the end, as more of the audience were pulled in, the daughters and Jenkins stood in the center having a moment all their own. We had accidentally become voyeurs into something deeply personal, a moment that had become the thing itself.
When I was an actor, and now as a critic — or whatever the hell I am these days — I’ve always chased the elusive moment I call “the thing itself.” It’s when the art takes off and stops being artifice, becomes a moment of real connection between artist and audience, one soul and another. It can be accomplished through performance or design. It is always a little miracle. Or in this case, a major one as the stars aligned and delivered us an art work about an art work about a real woman, presented to the family of that woman. A moment in time that can never happen again, facilitated by thousands of hours of living and work.
It wasn’t my moment — and sometimes it seems like immersive is all about chasing moments for oneself — but it was their moment. I just happened to have the honor of witnessing it. Of being reminded that the power of immediate, immersive work isn’t just about its personal impact for you, but how it touches others. That we’re in a web that connects each of us to the past, present and future of every person around us. Even when we aren’t aware. Especially when we aren’t aware.
Now no one is going to have that experience of the Lightbox that Little Cinema built again. Heck, no one that night did. Yet the care they took rippled, and the way they built the world of the show into the Chateau moved me from “curious” about the series to buying it on iTunes via my phone the next day. That wasn’t the point of the premiere, but hey — they got my $15.
The event was also a good primer in Little Cinema’s brand of remixing elements of film and bringing them to life. Something that the NYC based collective does regularly at the House of Yes and the Brooklyn Art Museum. Which you can learn more about in this week’s episode of the podcast.
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