By Mary Tuomanen
Haverford students shuffle into a small movie theater, confronted with
a disheveled figure with half-purple hair (the inimitable Annie
Wilson). She murmurs her deadpan into the microphone, thanking the
college for having her in residence to work on a documentary on
“Selfie Culture”. She reflects on her career as a documentarian, which
began in her “squat in the east village in the 80s” where she “stole a
camera from a party at Dennis Hopper’s” and began documenting her own
life, which inadvertently became a document of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
She shows the students a section of her seminal film; a young queer
named Tiny appears on the screen, talking about his favorite spots to
dance in 1980s New York City. Moments later, the students are ushered
out of the movie theater and into a larger space — suddenly Tiny is
there, in the flesh, joyously dancing, inviting the students to dance
with him.
This was the beginning of our showing of This Is On Record, a new show
about society’s documenters. The show follows a songwriter and a
children’s author from 1968, a radio broadcaster and a curator from
1988, and a filmmaker and live-streamer from 2014. The community
members and Haverford students who attended our showing got a taste of
the out-of-time experience of this piece: two women earnestly
discussing resistance to gentrification in 1968 while above them, a
snarky text conversation is projected from 2014. A first-person
shooter game is played while at the same time we hear a radio dj
protest apartheid, while FBI files fall from the balcony. We are
excited to continue these experiments and see how different eras speak
to each other about resistance, power, and how a culture tells the
story of itself.
Through support from the Friend In Residence Program and the Herford
Center at Haverford, App Mechs were able to rehearse and perform in
the Visual Culture, Arts and Media Center, a brand-new
state-of-the-art facility, which you can check out here: VCAM!
You can hear a little more about the Friend In Residence Program that
brought us there in this NPR interview between Mary Tuomanen and David
Heller: INTERVIEW!
A great shout-out of gratitude to Haverford and its wonderful staff
and students for their help making this show possible, especially
James Weissinger of the VCAM and the incredible Walter Sullivan of
Quaker Affairs, who is one of our favorite Philly heroes. THIS IS ON
RECORD is going to the Glass Factory in Brewerytown June 20 – July
1st! Don’t miss it!