Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano

Elegy for Jean Genet

A Live Salon Performance
Saturday, November 9, 2019

Elegy for Jean Genet is a 30-minute expanded cinema performance based on a musical composition by John Zorn—a film scored to music entitled “Elegy for Jean Genet”—and an homage to the writings of Genet. Using re-photographed gay male porn from the seventies, Elegy eroticizes the male body within current pop culture. Role playing, leather fetish, blooming red roses, languorous smoking, pink rubber corsets, lacquered nails, dark movie theaters, belt buckles as mirrors all abound.

Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano play with film projectors as if they were musical instruments, improvising on structures like a jazz musician. Using color gels, filters, prisms, handmade slides, they commune the image from multiple film and slide projectors, building heavily layered images into a thematic narrative.

Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano have performed together for over ten years, originally in clubs and alternative art spaces and later in museums and established musical venues. They last performed Elegy in 2018 at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn.

About Tessa Hughes-Freeland
About Ela Troyano