Nobody Wade Never Too Much
Geo Wyex
JOAN Los Angeles
@joanlosangeles
Oct 23 - Dec 21st
Voices by Geo Wyex, S*an D. Henry-Smith
@lil_sunchoke , and Constantina Zavitsanos
Creative and install support by Kamron Hazel
@yea.mhmmhm
Audio engineering, sound artistry, creative support by Ghaith kween Qoutainy
@_._k.w.e.e.n_._
ASMR conductor and demolitionist NDNMK Solutions
@ndnmk_solutions
Dramaturgical support by Will Rawls
@willjrawls
Poster by Geo Wyex and The Rodina
Photos by Evan Walsh
With generous support from
@mondriaanfonds
and
@theicala
Thanks to
@suzymh__ ,
@whateverjeanne , and
@sentimentalprof
××××
Nobody Wade Never Too Much centers around Wyex’s new script, based loosely on Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s 1952 absurdist classic, Waiting for Godot. Organized as a circular conversation between three professors of Muck Study, the text is staged with office chairs turned into sound machines. The characters and related cosmologies reverberate at the edges (i.e. in the “muck”) as they meditate on the failures and possibilities of a shared sense of identity—in the landscape, in the body, between bodies, and beyond the confines of institutional walls. Further ruminating on what political action can look like, and how organizing strategies can be enacted in our contemporary moment, the work performs a deeply inside job: it refuses separation from the conditions of race, class, and gender, but raises the possibility of connection, pleasure, and insurgency in excess of what is made legible or apparent through and by institutional structures. Audio recordings, including Luther Vandross’s 1981 hit “Never Too Much” and the sound of Wyex’s piano being gently dismantled in Rotterdam, intersect with the transmission of the professors’ voices over FM radio signal, moving in and out of both visible and less visible spaces. This convergence allows for a loose constellation of meaning that complicates the boundaries between the audience and the characters, between inside and outside. Wyex invites his audience to wade with him through the sonic, the historical, the embodied, and the shimmering, offering possibilities for new frameworks of study and transmission.
