The title to this evening is borrowed from the title poem of Eileen Myles’ latest collection Evolution

On Tuesday June 11th Perdu welcomes the internationally renowned poet Eileen Myles for a reading of and a conversation on their latest collection of poetry titled Evolution. This program will be followed by a radical read-in and a screening of Eileen Myles’ and David Fenster’s short film The Trip on Wednesday June 19th.

The poems in Evolution have been described as ‘upending genre in a new vernacular that enacts - like nobody else - the way we speak (inside and out) today.’ In our navigation of Myles’ work we will take this poetical quality of everyday language or everydayness as a starting-point.

Myles’ writing inhabits a specific American coolness or casualness as well as a deeply introspective sensitivity. Their poems tend to cut right to the feeling of the thing experienced, each one of them stemming from Myles’ ‘desire for certain language to kind of fit over some curve of a moment’. When reading Evolution one at times might feel like one is taking a city walk, somehow navigating the language, as if it were spatial. Identifying as a working class queer poet, issues of class and accessibility are prevalent in Myles’ writing, adding a political dimension to their use of everyday language and mundane poetics.

For this evening, Perdu has invited choreographer and performer Noha Ramadan to collage a dance piece in response to the thematics in Myles’ work. Noha’s dancing weaves together somatic, visual and imaginative information to construct a hybrid, augmented spatiality within which she navigates. Using cinematic and gestural languages, her dancing often slides between gesture, image and action; moving through known signifiers to reassemble patterns of feeling and knowing. This performance is made in response to and draws from commonalities with Myles.

Programme in English

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their twenty books include Evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You, I Must Be Living Twice (new and selected poems), and Chelsea Girls (novel). Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they'll be teaching at NYU and Naropa University and they live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Noha Ramadan (b. Sydney) has a background in music, dance and political economy. Her work explores spatiality and proprioception and often involves the construction of large-scale fantasy spaces through various manifestations of performance, moving image and text. Noha often instigates projects in close proximity with other artists and works as a performer and educator in the field of contemporary dance and visual arts. In 2017 she co-founded Jacuzzi, an artist run space for dance and performance in Amsterdam.