Galen Beebe is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Although she most often refers to herself as a poet, her work is neither defined nor confined by traditional genre distinctions. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been featured in Hypocrite Reader, Satellite Collective's Telephone, and Patient Sounds. She writes about podcasts at About Media, Etc.. Follow her on Twitter.
Fontaine Capel is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and facilitator. Her work has appeared domestically and internationally: digitally, and IRL. She is a current member of the experimental performance collaborative Pup House, and is Executive Director of the alternative art space Hume Chicago. In conjunction with her studio and curatorial practice, she is a teaching artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Marwen. She received a B.A. at Oberlin College where she studied Art History and Studio Art.
Lauren Clark earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. Her poetry and translations have appeared in a number of journals, and can be found online in The Journal, DIAGRAM, Phantom Books, and the Offing. She works at Poets House in New York City.
John West makes things with words, code, and music. He has a BA in Philosophy and a Performance Degree in Historical Performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory and currently works as a web developer and writer for the online magazine Quartz. You can read some of his work in Hypocrite Reader’s Issue 31, at his website, or on his Medium page.
King of that Also is an hour-long concert of Baroque and contemporary music with accompanying visual projections, and a companion publication that includes works generated in response to the project’s themes.
King of that Also is a dynamic interplay of music, text, and visual projections, created by four artists who could only have made it together—it’s a game of telephone in which a single idea is passed from artist to artist. Each of us interpreted the themes of union, connection, and human experience through the lens of our own medium. In this game, however, the pieces build upon each other, fusing into a single work.
The central piece of King of that Also is a new, 25-minute work called “Music for a Wedding.” For this work, John West set texts by Galen Beebe and Lauren Clark to music for soprano voice, baroque violin, recorder, and basso continuo. The songs will be performed by an ensemble of professional musicians trained in historical performance.
Lauren and Galen wrote the poems that are now the songs alone, for the page, with no idea what they would become. The texts navigate relationships, circling weddings and funerals and investigating what it means to engage in union. Accompanying the music is a performance of live visual projections by Fontaine Capel. These visuals include GIFs, text, shadow-work, and more, and respond to and illustrate the themes the songs explore. The concert brings four representations of union as a physical and social experience off the page and into literal physical and social existence.
Along with the concert, we are producing a companion book that includes texts by Lauren and Galen that respond to the project, as well as images by Fontaine and the original poems that the songs are composed from. We are working with the Chicago Risograph printing studio Perfectly Acceptable Press to produce the publication and all associated materials, including a limited edition run of posters.
The concert will premiere at The Baroque Room in St. Paul on December 20th. We will show excerpts in New York City on December 27th. Our tour will conclude in Chicago, with a talk-back and two performances on February 4th, 5th, and 6th.