A story of transformation, transgression, and the formation of new transcestral lines. 

Boy mother / faceless bloom is a collaboration of Degenerate Art Ensemble, visual artist Senga Nengudi and musician/performer yuniya edi kwon. Threading mythology and autobiography, while drawing from the diverse lineages of queer, anti-colonial, and care-based artistic practices, Boy mother / faceless bloom is an interdisciplinary performance work. Dance, music, poetry, ritual, and sculptural installation converge to tell a story of transformation, transgression, and the formation of new transcestral lines.

From the group’s statement: “Our work is intensely collaborative, rooted in the deepest respect and love we hold for one another. Through an intentional, transformational process, we build a world within which we can be free. Our bodies live in fear, in the shadows of beginning-less violence, in joy and in care. Through ritual and embodiment, we find openings for healing and growth and invite others to arrive. We are trying to tell a story we never want to end.”

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In the press

“Juni One Set mix dreams, delirium, and daring at On the Boards“ by Andrew Hamlin for Northwest Asian Weekly | December 11, 2024

“Interviews with Degenerate Art Ensemble and DAIPANButoh” by Xavier Lopez for Public Display Art | Volume 3, Issue 2, Jun-Aug 2024

“December Brry Brry Cold Outside…Warm Theater Inside!” by Miryam Gordon for Seattle Gay Scene | December 5, 2024

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Artists

• CREDITS

  Created, Directed, and Performed by Juni One Set:

  Senga Nengudi: co-creator, sculptural & costume design, movement, reader

  yuniya edi kwon: co-creator, music, movement

  Haruko Crow Nishimura: co-creator, movement, music

  Joshua Kohl: co-creator, live musician, sound design, stage design

  Degenerate Art Ensemble Artists and Production Team

  Projection Designer, Cinematographer, Editor: Leo Mayberry

  Lighting Designer: Jessica Trundy

  Costume assistant: Willow Fox

  Production Manager: Maximilian Sarkowsky

  DAE Assistant / Road Manager: Ashley Hickey

  Creative Support

  Associate Costume Designers: Hisham Dawoud and Willow Fox

  Costume Support: Jasmine Dillavou and Evelyn Bittner

  Sound Contributions: Tomeka Reid and Jean Cook

Funded by the National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Colorado College in partnership with Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information, visit www.npnweb.org. This project is supported by the National Performance Network (NPN) Documentation & Storytelling Initiative. For more information: www.npnweb.org. Boy mother / faceless bloom was made with financial and residency support from BASE Experimental Arts (Seattle) and Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn).

Honorary producer for the On the Boards presentation: John C. Robinson.

Photos by Bruce Clayton Tom and Wolfgang David

Degenerate Art Ensemble

Photo by Steven Miller

Seattle based Degenerate Art Ensemble, led by Haruko Crow Nishimura and Joshua Kohl,  makes performances inspired by punk, comics, cinema, nightmares, and fairytales driven by live music and their own style of physical theater and butoh-inspired dance. They combine projected imagery with the movement and sound to create new mythologies, revealing other dimensions, and challenging reality in a multi-dimensional storytelling experience. Degenerate Art Ensemble has shown their work throughout North America and Europe known for their large-scale dance and theater projects, concerts, and site-transforming experiences.  In this unique collaboration, Degenerate Art Ensemble’s artists, designers, and technicians join the Juni One Set collaboration for the creation of Boy mother / faceless bloom.

Haruko Crow Nishimura

Photo by Bruce Clayton Tom

Haruko Crow Nishimura (she/her) is a dancer, vocalist and artistic director of Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). She is always searching to discover how art can create deeper connections and awakenings. Her unique style of movement is inspired by her practices of physical theater and butoh dance. She excavates the dark corners of humanity, inventing new mythologies and reimagining fairy tales, telling stories that strive to reveal hidden beauty, confront demons, and ultimately find healing. She is a recipient of Arts Innovators Award from Artist Trust, a Creative Capital award, is a Guggenheim fellow,  received a commission with her group DAE from director Robert Wilson to re-interpret his work Einstein on the Beach (NY), created a solo dance for  legendary dancer Anna Halprin’s 95 Rituals (SF), and a large scale site specific collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects (Seattle). She has performed her dance work throughout North America and Europe. Her newest work Skeleton Flower premiered at the Spotlight USA dance festival in Bulgaria presented by American Dance Abroad, appeared in the 2021 International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City and the HCA Festival in Denmark in 2022. Skeleton Flower will be shown in San Francisco in 2024.

Joshua Kohl

Photo by Bruce Clayton Tom

Joshua Kohl (he/him) is a composer, musician and sound designer and co-directs Degenerate Art Ensemble. His approach to music is dedicated to the exploration and proliferation of genre-free music that utilizes all of the available tools of music-making, from classical instruments to electronics and new inventions - with a goal of reaching the hearts and souls of the listener through vibrational resonance. He was the recipient of Creative Capital, Artist Trust Innovators Award, MAP Fund, NEA and Music Theatre Now awards. His work for string quartet and choir was performed by the Kronos Quartet at their 40th anniversary concert in Seattle and at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. In addition to his work with Degenerate Art Ensemble he is also a passionate conductor of the music of his peers including a Lincoln center concert of the work of composer Jherek Bischoff with singer David Byrne. He is deeply honored to work with this exceptional team of collaborators.

yuniya edi kwon

Photo by Bruce Clayton Tom

yuniya edi kwon (she/her) also known as eddy kwon, is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance artist based in Lenapehoking, or New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation & transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer space & lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. As a composer-performer and improviser, she is inspired by Korean folk timbres & inflections, textures & movement from natural environments, and American experimentalism as shaped by the AACM. Her work as a choreographer and movement artist embodies an expressive release and reclamation of colonialism’s spiritual imprints, connecting to both Japanese Butoh and a lineage of queer trans practitioners of Korean shamanic ritual.

In addition to an evolving, interdisciplinary solo practice, she performs and collaborates with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Du Yun, Tomeka Reid, Holland Andrews, International Contemporary Ensemble, Kenneth Tam, Isabel Crespo Pardo, and Moor Mother. She has performed alongside Roscoe Mitchell, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, Cory Smythe, Henry Threadgill, Susan Alcorn, Carla Kihlstedt, Jessika Kenney, Lesley Mok, Satomi Matsuzaki, and others. In 2023, she founded SUN HAN GUILD, a sound and performance collective with composer-improvisers Laura Cocks, Jessie Cox, DoYeon Kim, and Lester St. Louis. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award in Music/Sound, Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Music Composition, an Arts Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, a Johnson Fellow at Americans for the Arts, and a United States Artists Ford Fellow.

Senga Nengudi

Photo by Bruce Clayton Tom

Senga Nengudi (she/her) was interested in the visual arts, dance, body mechanics, and matters of the spirit from an early age. These elements still play themselves out in ever-changing ways in her art. She has always used a variety of natural (sand, dirt, rocks, seed pods) and unconventional (pantyhose, found objects, masking tape) materials to fashion her works, utilizing these materials as a jazz musician utilizes notes and sounds to improvise a composition. The thrust of her art is to share common experiences in abstractions that hit the senses and center, often welcoming the viewer to become a participant. Formerly teaching at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, Nengudi has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasizing diversity to the communities in which she resides. Winner of the 2023 Nasher Prize for Sculpture, she is in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Dia Art Foundation, New York, New York; Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; and others.