WGXC-90.7 FM
Tongue and Cheek: Facilitating Embodiment with Shaun Leonardo
90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
http://www.wgxc.org/
wavefarm.org/listen and 1620-AM at Wave Farm
https://audio.wavefarm.org/transmissionarts.mp3
Voiced and led by Timmy Simonds, Aaron Lehman, and Emma McCormick-Goodhart.
Facilitating Embodiment—with Shaun Leonardo— A conversation with Shaun Leonardo around bearing witness, the embodiment of another, and the stakes of imagination in his work “You Walk…”, “Between Four Freedoms”, “I Can’t Breathe”, “Primitive Games,” and Recess’s diversion program, Assembly. Leonardo leads exercises on the politics of walking, kissing and orientation.
Joined by Shaun Leonardo.
Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—a diversion program for system-impacted youth at the arts nonprofit Recess, where he is Co-Director—is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.
Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, is a recipient of support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice and A Blade of Grass, and was recently profiled in the New York Times and CNN. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, and New Museum, with a solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, recently presented at MICA, MASS MoCA and The Bronx Museum. elcleonardo.com
(Socialise)
First broadcast on Montez Press Radio as Tongue and Cheek- Ep31: Facilitating Embodiment—with Shaun Leonardo- Saturday, October 30th, 2021, 11AM-12PM
A radio series of proprioceptive exercises, interviews about practices of communication, and archival sound. A routine for warming up our means of communication. Presented monthly as a combination of live and prerecorded sessions.
Lend me your ears!
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works… Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are' he said. 'Here we are' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were' he said, 'Eeyop! Here we are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.' "
-- Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”
To reach an arm out of one’s mouth, peek through one’s ear, and speak out of one’s eye. Communication happens by any means possible. It is the different ways bodies extend themselves, as limbs that bridge things—reaching out, stretching and sometimes touching, with a light tap, “Marco!”
How we voice, how we gesture, how we manner, how we empathize.
Exercises to find all ways of thinking of language, and to exercise them as their own paths of communication.
To empathize over radio. Invite to do the same—feel, mimic, echo. “Polo”
The sound of leading, of following, of teaching speaking.
And learning to make a body of a limb.
Tongue and Cheek was first developed and aired on Montez Press Radio beginning in the summer of 2018. Montez Press Radio is an experimental radio station and commissioning platform for unexpected works from artists and other creative voices. MPR continues to air new episodes of Tongue and Cheek during its monthly live broadcast at 46 Canal St in Chinatown, New York.