An Online Performance Tribute for Alice Denney

Co-hosted by Washington Project for the Arts

Cabaret Elektronica :: Alice Travels Beyond Wonderland is presented as a live online performance workshop by the Third Space Network (3SN). This original music theater production is based on the life of the late DC art maverick and founder of WPA, Alice Denney, who passed away late last year at the age of 101. The work is a poetic rendering of Alice’s rebellious and mischievous spirit, adapted to a 21st-century digital reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Co-hosted by Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), The online performance workshop takes place Saturday, June 29, 5:00pm ET, streaming on Crowdcast.

Cabaret Elektronica, conceived, composed, and directed by media artist Randall Packer, is a work–in-progress online production performed in the newly designed Telematic Theater, an experimental multimedia theater platform created specifically for the Internet. Performers include mixed-media artist Melissa Ichiuji, tenor Charles Lane, and performance artist Katie Magician, who will be staged remotely from their studios in Front Royal Virginia, downtown Los Angeles, and Washington, DC respectively. The event will feature excerpts from Cabaret Elektronica, along with a demonstration of how the performers are green screened into virtual mediascapes. The workshop provides a window into the Randall Packer’s high-tech Underground Studio Bunker in Washington, DC, where the magic happens.

Cabaret Elektronica is supported by a Project, Events, and Festivals grant from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities.

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Randall Packer is an interdisciplinary media artist and composer. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the social revolution of the 60s. Packer’s sensibilities were shaped by the period’s counterculture, which infused his work with an exploratory spirit and a penchant for challenging conventional forms. Trained as a composer at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California, Berkeley, Packer expanded his artistic purview to include dance, theater, performance art, visual art, and new media. Influenced by such diverse artists as John Cage, Richard Wagner, and Nam June Paik, Packer’s work continually blurs boundaries, probing the liminal spaces between humor and seriousness, spiritual yearning and nonsense, the real and the virtual. In 2016, Packer established the Third Space Network (3SN), an internet broadcasting platform that explores the concept of the “third space,” staging new performance works with live remote actors, musicians, and dancers in online virtual environments. Packer’s career is a testament to his continuous reinvention and exploration of new artistic terrains. His work leverages technology not just as a tool, but as a transformative medium that expands the possibilities of artistic expression, challenges audiences’ perceptions of reality, and fosters a sense of community in an increasingly digital, networked world.

Melissa Ichiuji creates figurative sculptures and performances that are stunningly confident, bold, aggressive, playful, and original. They are full of sexual puns and possible allusions to larger traditions of Surrealist and contemporary works. Her dance experience enables her to relate to the body in a unique way and for her, the body and the creative act are always connected. A native of the Washington DC area, Ichiuji began her artistic career as a dancer and actor. After attending the Duke Ellington School for the Arts in DC, she performed in NYC with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. While later studying at the Corcoran College of the Arts, she began experimenting with performance art and her first public performance, entitled STRIPPED, staged across from the White House, garnered national press and acclaim. In 2023 Melissa launched her first series of Digital Collectable videos titled “Faces of Kali” at SCOPE Art Show in Miami during Art Basel week and last summer opened her own independent gallery as a venue to exhibit her work, collaborate with other artists, and provide learning opportunities to the community. Melissa Ichiuji Studio Galley is located in Front Royal, VA where she resides in the Shenandoah Valley.

Charles Lane is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, where he began his career pushing the boundaries of live performance and the interdisciplinary arts. He is at home both on the opera stage, as a member of the Los Angeles Opera and LA Philharmonic Chorus, as well as in contemporary new music, experimental theater, film, dance, and performance art. While singing angelically as a soloist in the Bach Mass in B Minor while a student at CalArts, Charles met composer Randall Packer forming a decades long collaboration, which led them both to the depths of the inferno in Death Valley where they created Packer’s music theater work A Season in Hell. Together they have presented new works in diverse venues and site-specific locations including CalArts, Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City, San Jose Stage at the Zero One International New Media Festival, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, the Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery in Athens, Georgia, and online on the virtual stage of the Third Space Network. Charles has performed and premiered new works by numerous composers, including Mel Powell, John King, Gerhard Stabler, and John Adams, as well as working under the baton of LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

Katie Macyshyn (they/she) is an artiste and creative play practitioner. Their new media art uses retro consumer aesthetics and camp theatricality to explore mental health, alienation, and reconciliation. They are inspired by adolescent performative play where more is more and bodies are awkward. In collaboration, performer and audience create one-of-a-kind multimedia rituals in pursuit of connection and deeper self-acceptance. Macyshyn has been featured in various performance art festivals, DIY venues, online via the virtual stage of the Third Space Network and galleries such as Arlington Arts Center, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, VisArts, and Transformer. They are also an art instructor and songstrix specializing in queering classrooms and the therapeutic benefits of creative play in early childhood. Macyshyn is a regular at experimental performance venue Rhizome DC, DCPL’s drag story time, is a resident artist at Project Create, DC, and is a member of DCAC’s Sparkplug Collective. She lives in Mount Rainier, MD and is from Toms River, NJ.

Alice Denney, who invigorated the staid if not stodgy arts scene in Washington as one of the city’s first and most prominent champions of the avant-garde, died Nov. 20 at a hospital in the District. She was 101. She looked beyond the classically beautiful and politically bland, challenging curators, collectors, donors and the public to embrace art that was new, daring and at times provocative. Relying in large part on her personal charisma, Mrs. Denney set about opening galleries, organizing “happenings” and recruiting artists including Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to exhibit and in some cases perform their works in Washington. Mrs. Denney’s most enduring creation was the Washington Project for the Arts, an organization that she founded in 1975 to provide workshop, exhibition and performance space for experimental artists. Of the personal art collection that occupied much of her time when she was not helping build that of the city of Washington, Mrs. Denney once explained her philosophy. “You have to keep looking, always looking,” she said. “And have the courage to go with the things that speak to you.” (from the obituary by Emily Langer of the Washington Post)

Théophile Clet is a media artist and designer based in Toulouse, France, who specializes in interactive projects that involve 3D animation, electronic music, and programming in Max/MSP/Jitter. He holds two Master's degrees in Digital Creation and Scientific Communication from the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and Bordeaux Montaigne University. 

Federico Foderaro, based in Munich, Germany,  received his degree in Electronic Music Composition from the Music Conservatory of Frosinone in Italy where he studied with maestro Maurizio Giri. He is currently working for Cycling ‘74 as a Max/MSP/Jitter programmer and maintains his popular YouTube channel, Amazing Max Stuff. 

The Telematic Theater on Crowdcast is an online “theater of the future” for the creation and presentation of live Internet performance. The culmination of fifteen years of exploratory research conducted by Creative Director Randall Packer in his underground studio bunker in Washington, DC, the Telematic Theater is designed as an immersive space for new forms of networked performance, staging remote actors, musicians, dancers, and performance artists in 3D audio-visual environments. 3SN stands by the message, that the network is not a substitute for theater, rather, it is its own creative medium to be mined to its fullest potential.

The Third Space Network is an artist-driven Internet platform for staging creative dialogue, live performance and activist projects: empowerment through the act of becoming our own broadcast media. A project of Randall Packer, the Third Space Network explores the Internet as a theater of the future, a place for live artistic experimentation, activism and social change.

Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) program model provides artists with the opportunity to expand their practices and experiment without absorbing additional financial burdens or capacity barriers. We provide resources to create critical connections and long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships that build artistic communities around knowledge-sharing.

Cabaret Elektronica ::: Alice Travels Beyond Wonderland, an online performance workshop