Featured: Dean Moss / Gametophyte Inc. (Brooklyn, USA)

ABOUT:

GAMETOPHYTE INC.
Gametophyte (ga•me´to•phyt´) the company name is from the greek meaning to marry and to grow. The word refers to the sexual generation of small pioneering plants found world wide that produce in true form neither flowers, fruits nor seeds. A plant commonly called “moss”.

A hybrid production, performance and consulting company, founded in 2002 by Dean Moss, Gametophyte Inc. is the support structure through which he organizes his various creative endeavors. It supports performances, video projects, multidisciplinary collaborations, and composition workshops. It also seeks to share, in a holistic manner, creative experience with artists, art professionals and the public, internationally. Gametophyte Inc. is based in Brooklyn.

Board of Directors: Dean Moss, President; Marya Warshaw, Secretary; Charlotte Mendelaar, Treasurer.

As an artist working in both dance and video, I use the irrational logic of the body to articulate personal, cultural, and socioeconomic, forces that impact our perception of self and environment. Physically demanding, dense and visual, the resulting works reflect not only a desire to participate rigorously in the world of ideas, but also an interest in twinning a variety of forms and metaphors into visceral immersive performance experience.

In recent years I have developed a practice of conceiving multidisciplinary, and often transcultural collaborative projects. These works include: “figures on a field” (2005, with painter, Laylah Ali), “States & Resemblance” (2007, with actor/photographer, Ryutaro Mishima and Indonesian traditional dance artist Restu Kusumaningrum), “Kisaeng becomes you” (2008-09, with traditional Korean dance choreographer Yoon Jin Kim) and “Nameless forest” (2011, with sculptor, Sungmyung Chun). This collaborative process also extends into teaching. In 2002, I conceived a choreographers composition workshop focused on separating the dance artist from the dance work, now called “Performance Praxis”, it has been co-directed and is co-facilitated with choreographer and Critical Correspondence editor, Levi Gonzalez.

Another central element of my practice is to examine the role and experience of the audience. In “figures on a field”, this was manifested through a docent lead group tour of the work during the performance, which allowed it to shift subtly between its’ personal, political and aesthetic meanings; in “Kisaeng becomes you”, audience members were invited to embody and speak the poems of the Kisaeng – artist/courtesans of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty – making visceral the experience of the “other”, and in the current work, “Nameless forest”, performance artists immersive relationship to community will be investigated. The pattern of my practice seems to run parallel to my life as a curator, a traveller, and as an artist now looking to deepen both the articulation and impact of his work.

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