Spy Vs.Spy: Jersey City-Beijing
Inspired by the Mad magazine comic strip “SPY vs. SPY”, this piece explores how artists respond to their environment/s. Two cities: Jersey City and Beijing, White Spy vs Black Spy, two musical treatments. The Spy/s both White and Black exist in a singular form, and in a doubled form.
The musicians composed to only their city without knowledge of the other city or the musical strategy of the other composer. Throughout the piece elements fall in and out of synchronicity.The traditional expectation for conflict and contact are played out between the moments of the synchronic and the asynchronic.
White Spy/s performs Okinawan Bassai kata. This is translated by some to mean “Penetrate the fortress”. Jersey City’s landscape is shaped by New York City and the port of Newark. The piece opens with White Spy on the Morris Canal: a rocky shoreline, the Hudson River and then the mass of imposing towers that is lower Manhattan. Later White Spy is surrounded by the iconic Pulaski Skyway. This bridge now too fragile in design to allow modern trucks to traverse its expanse was once the nation’s first “super highway”. White Spy is shadowed by another. She begins to double, and her double as Black Spy makes her way to Beijing via Newark airport.
Sou Jia Cun, Beijing was an artist community that the Chinese government demolished as part of their overall land development plans to accommodate the arrival of the 2008 Olympics. The artists in response staged a show on the destroyed site. Black Spy/s performs amid both wreckage and new construction the Wu-Su QiGong breathing form which is said to give the practitioner greater inner strength.
Beijing an ancient capital now in a new ascendency, and Jersey City which historically functioned as a gateway and conduit for a 20th century empire’s premier city are places either in flux or accommodate movement. Contemporary artists are especially tuned to the interstice between homogenized spaces, and sometimes the border is between what something was to what it will become. A good way to see that future, now, is to see how it is made and remade around us: in the vista of our present landscape.
