MLTI READS ME is a multi-year project by siblings Rufus MK Nicoll and Laura K. Nicoll, combining historical research, video collage, dance, and a desire to come together to make live art across Maine during the times we find ourselves most often in––between election cycles.
Click here to read more in the Portland Phoenix
Chapter One––A TALL ORDER, is dedicated to three Maine-affiliated individuals who died in 1995: Margaret Chase Smith, died age 98, May Sarton died age 83, and LaRue Spiker, b. 1912. The script is assembled from transcriptions from recordings of interviews with Margaret Chase Smith by Angus King, John Greenman, and Patsy Wiggins and recombining the text. A recording of this text provides the bulk of the soundtrack for performers to move to. The workshop of Chapter One was built in, inspired by and presented in partnership with Mechanics’ Hall in Portland, ME and performed by Janoah Bailin, Sharoan Cohen, Rachel Jane Henry, Yuki Kawahisa, Annie Kloppenberg, and Matt Korahais.Support for Chapter One was provided by the American Rescue Plan Maine Project Grants, a subgranting program administered by SPACE Gallery for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Chapter Two––‘SO YOU’RE THE NEW SEER’ is derived from 'Take the Time,' a video history produced with Angus King and Ed Muskie and split into four expandable parts, PEOPLE, PRESIDENT, CONGRESS, and COURT. The imagined setting is a combination of a municipal cafeteria, a school gymnasium, an empty church, an abandoned parking lot.
MLTI READS ME is a series of live events and sculptural video installations that work together to facilitate public inquiry and socializing through co-participation in ongoing polylogues between historical figures, contemporary performers and their shared technology environment. It is a public performance of archival research as well as an experiment in a site-specific approach to group process and assembly.
MLTI READS ME unfolds in three chapters between November 2022 and November 2024. Each chapter is structured by an original script, a performance workshop and a video installation. For the live workshops, teams (casts), will have time for private rehearsal before inviting the public into the space to witness the work of making the show. Everything will be documented by everyday video-recording technology. The documentation becomes recycled material for the multi-monitor video installation and future performances.
Each chapter is both pre-determined and improvisatory, both fun and serious, rooted in specific times and places. This cumulative effect resists singular, superlative narratives and implodes the following binaries: high-tech vs. low-tech, liberal vs. conservative, dance vs. theater, and rural vs. urban communities. Each chapter scaffolds on triumvirate dedications, serving as an invitation to today’s audiences to reconsider their elders' diverse origins and a reminder of our ever-present heterogeneity even within what might appear to some to be homogenic unity.
The transcriptions of the interviews are woven together as practice in parsing research material using our human heart-brain-bodies as they interface with all kinds of electronic devices.
MLTI READS ME presumes an explicitly non-screen-shaming environment and helps us look accurately at history in our shared multi-screen society, conscious of Wikipedia and @youtube, public television, and cable news. — Rufus MKNicoll
MLTI READS ME Chapter One source material
Transcribed, assembled and formatted by Rufus MKNicoll
Youtube Playlist here — time codes are per video, Total length:
143:55 (2022)
58:03 Angus KING. Interview (1988) pp. 1-23
08:49 Daily Schedule (intr. Bill LEWIS.) (1964) pp. 24-30
00:30 Patsy WIGGINS. Ch. 6 spot (1985) pp. 31
02:30 Cheers Theme Song pp. 32
18:03 SMITH Declares (1964) pp. 33-44
27:04 Patsy WIGGINS. Interview (1992) pp. 45-51
28:56 John GREENMAN. Interview (1994) pp. 52-66
Final word to Ricky HENDERSON pp. 67