© Bethany Ides, 2023. Photo Ron Hester.
Canada
https://bethanyidesprojects.blogspot.ca/
Bethany Ides sets precarious parameters wherein roles & resources play actors & places as if everything extends itself uncertainly. In 2014, she founded DOORS UNLIMITED, a roving vessel for investigative operatics that proliferates communitarian-collaborative strategies for provisional-conditional experimenting with/in soap opera, encampment opera, opera-within-opera, telephonic inter-drama, dismantlement, dialectics, days & nights & both as neither, near-death, opera in bed, opera in spite of itself, opera in excess of itself, ante-institutional allusions, elations, protrusions, performance, sticks, schools, stone squares, soggy cereal blankets, very long songs, backlog, & tends to tender tendencies like mountains, fake hair, carpet squares, contact paper, play mats, currency, fluidity, emails, &/or all elaborate uncertainties.
Her multi-phasic, month-long opera, Transient’s Theme, premiered at the Knockdown Center in 2014, following a 2-month connective-convective convocation or composition involving 80 participants at a campground in the Catskills. Ides’ performance or installation-as-proposition work has also been presented for/at Mandragoras Art Space (MAAS), Fragmental Museum, St. Marks Poetry Project, Dixon Place, the Brooklyn Museum Sunview Luncheonette & PS122 in New York, CounterPULSE in San Francisco, Tritriangle in Chicago, Worksound & Half/Dozen Gallery in Portland, OR, Concordia University in Montréal, as well as for BOMB Magazine’s Instagram account.
Ides/DOORS UNLIMITED curates festivals or conferences, writes articles or poetry, records songs, builds buildings, makes meals, plans plans, & takes up temporary residence where/when invited. Ides likewise teaches itinerantly at Pratt Institute, Bard College &/or wherever calls, & currently calls Austin, TX home.
