Chez Deep do something different with drag. As the fourth video in the Money Makes the World ‘Round series, produced in collaboration with the New York-based performance collective —as well as Director of Photography Daniel Rampulla and second camera Tyler Mariano —‘Four Walls’ explores the unique practice of a house shared by Chez Deep as much as the four artists that live there.
Featuring performances by Alexis Penney, Colin Self, Sam Banks and Bailey Stiles (you can watch all four in full here), ‘Four Walls’ presents Chez Deep as the holistic, “super futuristic” and androgynous troupe it is. Against global capitalism and for community (and with communities left behind); entirely in public; and without a single language of performing or hope for interpretation – Chez Deep’s lip-sync, dance and art-rooted performances are “the repository of questions, fears and anxieties about a lot of things.”
Their new performance, ‘Gloria’, explores “violence and the uglier sides of human nature in performance” (video coming soon). It’s something they’d rarely touched on, when they were interrupted by the landlord who’d instructed them to shift years worth of a previous tenant’s wood and rubbish from the apartment roof. The rent in the apartment goes up by $100 each year, while Chez Deep’s financial means “seem to stay unchanged.” In the face of this, the house, like ‘Gloria’—and ‘Dea Nova’ before it —remains a model for “a deeper conception of home, of what a house can be; trans-dimensional, metaphysical, a deep ecology of how to be.”
Art and economics is central to the Money Makes the World Go ‘Round series –exploring art and artists in a global market in collaboration with Video in Common –to publish every fortnight from the last day of March to July, 2015. It features six artists from cities around the networked world. **
Watch the video embedded above and see here for Part Two.
This project has been made possible through the generous support of Arts Council England.
