Misread Signs

Audiovisual performance featuring projected animation, animatronic sculptures, music, and movement.

Misread Signs
multimedia audiovisual performance

Duration: 16 minutes
Concept, performance, paintings, animations, sculptures and costumes by Yuliya Lanina
Music and sound design by José Martínez
Choreography by Andrea Ariel
Additional performers: Anya and Katya Lanina


Donned as one of her feathered creatures with antlers, Lanina performs within the projected animations, illuminated solely by her anthropomorphic sculptures - skeletal birds with human baby heads and phosphorescent eyes.

In the course of the performance, we see the artist desperate, but unable to tell us something. Based on her personal experience of surviving brutal rape and becoming mute for five days afterward, this piece examines the inability for someone who just went through a traumatic experience to express or even connect with how they feel.

Her collaborator, composer José Martinez, uses recordings of Lanina's voice as his audio material. He renders her heartfelt and revealing text and songs beyond recognition, while transforming her voice to the extreme in order to convey the urgency of expression.

Lanina's images are inspired by the Surrealist and Dada approach, with the subconscious taking the lead, and leaving analytical thinking behind, and by embracing the nonsensical and surprising. By exploring the life of fantastic and bizarre creatures, the artist is able to reach places unavailable to her rational self, inviting the audience to do the same. In this piece, most of the characters on the screen are masked. At first, they are aloof, unmoved by Lanina's pleas; Later, they urge her to, "let go of the past," a sentiment re-addressed by Lanina to the audience.

The piece transcends the particulars of the artist's painful experience into a universal story of survival and redemption.

The show borrows its title from a poem by Jennifer Atkinson.

This project is supported in part by Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, I-Park, Puffin Foundation, grayDUCK gallery and The Center of Women and Their Work Inc. 

The piece was premiered with three channel projection, creating continuous immersive story. Since then, it has been modified to one channel projection for theater and gallery performances.

Photos by Scott David Gordon and Leon Alesi

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