SPLIT BILL #45
LUNA BELLER-TADIAR | TIDBIT COLLECTIVE
Top photo by Julia Discenza. Bottom photo by Kyle Livsey.
OCTOBER 23-25, 8PM
EARLY BIRDS
$22 / $30 SUPERFAN / $50 🌟 SUPPORTER
$17 HEARTS
AT-THE-DOOR
$26 / $30 SUPERFAN / $50 🌟 SUPPORTER
$17 HEARTS
All seating is general admission
Photo by Karina Macchioli
LUNA BELLER-TADIAR
Mercury / from our oceans they took their cloud
Mercury thinks about the ongoingness of colonialism in the age of AI, about bodies and capacities under conscription and capture, with a nod to the anthropological observations of Southeast Asia among the origins of cybernetics. Inspired by invisibilized Filipino service labor, and by queer and diasporic labors of transformation, Mercury presents a mercurial body that becomes a substrate, a platform for shifting codes of use, uncannily animated by unseen forces. Undeniably live, yet, to a modern/colonial viewer, not quite human, this figure plies the continuities between NPCs, the robot, the animal, and the colonized. Through the body's transformations, sociality erupts into the nowhere, non-space of the virtual, making sensible worlds that are the lifeblood of the machine.
Luna Beller-Tadiar (she/they) is a queer mixed-US-Filipinx multi-media artist and performer who works in movement, words, and images. Her work excavates a body language made up of fragments: remnants of lands, peoples, and machines. Drawing on movement training in aikido, capoeira, tango, and contemporary dance, she takes inspiration from queer collaborative fabulation; from postcolonial Filipino practices of mimicry and re-use; and from contemporary interfacing of the body and technology.
Luna’s choreography-performance work has been shown at Movement Research Judson Church; Ailey Theater; Mark Morris Dance Center; the 92NY; ADF’s Movies by Movers festival; CICA Museum; Duke University; Yale University; in La Union (Philippines); in Buenos Aires (Argentina); and in 2024 earned her recognition as a Jadin Wong Artist of Exceptional Merit from the Asian American Art Alliance. Luna teaches queer tango, regularly in NYC at The Center for LGBT Life, and as invited (Berkeley, Paris, Lyon, Detroit, Buenos Aires). @lunalunabt
Photo by Kyle Livsey
tidbit collective
v500 (working title)
We are exploring the multiplication that happens with the updating of the self: v1, v2, v50, v500, each with individual trajectories but a shared point of inception. How it feels to be searching for sameness while insisting on your individuality to the point of evolution. Synthesizing the infinite landscape of sociocultural output and the resulting weight of an urgency to comment, to connect our experiences with others via participation in pop culture, content creation, having an opinion. Searching and yearning for an echo, someone else who is saying what we’re saying but with a sharper vocabulary or a hotter take or someone who is saying exactly what we’re saying but in a cooler outfit and from a more stylish apartment.
tidbit collective is a women-led collective that is engaged with methods of worldbuilding as a means to reconstruct the everyday. Our work architects spaces of possibility using the conditions of performance as an indicator of reality. We use the generational consumption and digestion of media paired with our individual and collective subscriptions to pop culture as a main source of material for our work. tidbit has performed at the 14th Street Y, SAA, 28th Street Theatre (TADA), La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, PAGEANT, and Arts On Site. @tidbit_collective