Introspective Presence
Multimedia piece represents efforts by
artists, academics to plumb meaning of self.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, August 2001
By William Loeffler 

The search for self has consumed philosophers and psychologists, musicians and mystics since a diapered Socrates first engaged in a dialogue with his mother over whether he could stay up late.

While other seekers of the self have conducted solitary sojourns—using everything from Zen to peyote—violinist and composer Lisa Miles decided her journey should be a group effort.

For “Presence,” a multimedia piece that combines music, movement and mood, she recruited dancer Michele Dunleavy and glass artists Mike Mangiafico and Joelle Levitt.

But “Presence,” which plays Friday and Saturday at the Kelly-Strayhorn theater; also draws its singular identity from several unseen presences: those of Marilyn Goldsmith and Stanley Perelman of the Jung psychology at Duquesne University.

These artists and academics collaborated in a yearlong residency in which they met to discuss the concept of self.

“We have participated over the last year in discussions with the artists about the creative process, the idea of the self, what it is, how it works,” Simms says. “And how a work of art comes into presence. Our role has been to help articulate what the artists are doing. Their role is to inspire us to think about art.”

This journey to the center of the mind came about thanks to a grant from the Pennsylvania Humanities and-the-Arts Initiative. The initiative, paid for by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, encourages public programs that demonstrate the value of the arts.

“For us, creative work has helped us find out who they are. It’s helped us in our growth,” Miles says.

“Presence” had its genesis in a poem Miles wrote. A former mental health counselor, she says she feels that confronting our assets and flaws and dropping “defensive postures” is the only way to reclaim our individuality. By “stripping away masks” we can rediscover what makes each of us unique.

“The piece is about finding a sense of self, recognizing and cultivating individual strengths, and recognizing individual weaknesses,” she says.

Miles, a Pittsburgh native who has played with symphony orchestras in Butler , McKeesport and Youngstown , Ohio , also performed at the Millvale Industrial Theater and at the 1999 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Dunleavy, also a member of the underground dance scene, worked with the Physical Theater Project and was a founding member of the DANA Movement Ensemble.

“I’ve known Michele for many years,” Miles says. “I needed a movement artist to bring this piece to fruition. I moved in various circles, and her name kept coming up.”

The two performed “Presence” in February 2000 as part of a farewell performance at the Garfield Artworks. The set featured blown glass objects created by Mangiafico and Levitt at their studio FIG (figures in glass) in Penn Hills.

Miles says she knew she wanted to develop the piece further.

“I was thinking, ‘I want this to be a repertory piece. I don’t want to put it on the shelf I want it to have further life.’”

Dunleavy, Mangiafico and Levitt signed on for this latest incarnation.

“’Presence’ is about the process of being, especially in an artistic sense of how you create,” Mangiafico says.

Like the glass objects created by the couple, who met when both were fine arts majors at Carnegie Mellon University, “Presence” has a prismatic property that absorbs the ideas of its collaborators and refracts them into something eerie, different and sometimes confounding. Forget literalism. The road map to the self is an abstract and sometimes nightmarish hegira through the swampy territory of the psyche.

As Dunleavy dances her own chorography, miles sits onstage and strums her violin, accompanying her own pre-recorded music: Candlelight dances off the glass bowls, stars and flower forms creating a trancelike, shamanistic effect.

“I like to include ritual in my work,” Miles says.

“It gives very different moods that the self experiences, from confusion to anger to rage to acceptance,” she says. “Lisa has been very careful in giving words to those different stages. The whole piece is meant for people to talk.

“It’s complex,” Simms says. “It’s like life.”

A panel discussion will follow each performance. The public also is invited to a free panel discussion at noon Aug. 26, 2001 at the Kingsley Center , 6118 Penn Circle South , East Liberty .