St. Mary Majak’s | Christopher Givens

HISTORY of Majaks (Pronounced May-jax). [written March 13, 2017]

Born from the desire to find a creative community of artists, performers, writers, and cinema-goers

The seeds were planted in college, where Josh Stover (of New Orleans) and Chris Givens (of Monroe, LA) were the kind of movie-crazed film students who would watch whatever they could get their hands on, always plunging further back in time, farther across the globe, and into the deepest depths of genre. Having been to L.A. and NYC, Paris and Prague, they were keenly aware of how underserved they were as filmgoers. There were few theaters taking any chances on much of anything in the city. So rather than move, they did something about it.

Over the course of six years, maintaining their constant film-watching habit all the while, they accumulated the tools (projector and sound system) and then finally the space to fill for themselves the gap in repertory and alternative film programming they’d always felt in New Orleans.

In Winter of 2014, the inhabitants and originators of Majaks began a program of weekly screenings in their open floor planned shotgun in Lower Garden District. They began formalizing monthly schedules, inviting friends into the space, and leaving cryptic messages across the city, signals to draw other real-deal film-heads to their cine-sanctuary. This spawned the first iteration of Majaks, a cine-club of a dozen or so members, drinking wide and deep, particularly buzzed on the French, Japanese and American New Waves.

In the months and years to follow this project of engaged cinema and investigation would produce an assemblage of people from diverse backgrounds and interests resulting in an ongoing effort to produce original performances in the fields of theater, music, and dance as well as the creation of immersive installations and collaborative works that combine all of these things.

To date, Majaks has screened over 200 films, produced 6 theatrical pieces, 4 large-scale installations, and hosted innumerable solo and group musical acts and performance artists, in addition to providing rehearsal and work space for many more artists.

majaks.com

St. Mary Majak’s production archive, photograph 1 of 27

Mission

We actively promoted a culture of engaged cinema in New Orleans by facilitating discussions of contemporary, historically important, culturally relevant, unjustly forgotten, and maligned films from all eras, genres, and regions.

Majaks treated film as having an almost religious value: films show us how to be and how not to be; they encourage compassion and understanding; they preserve a century of societies looking at themselves and their place in the world. Supplementary writing and member-led discussions framed cinema as an ongoing dialogue rather than a consumable event.

The space also allowed artists of many kinds to hone their craft and put on work with minimal limitations. Visual artists, musicians, painters, playwrights, and dancers came together under one roof to practice what they did best, stretch beyond their comfort zones, and try something different.

Screening series and printed materials

The screening program began as a weekly cine-club and expanded into four years of repertory, international, experimental, independent, and unjustly neglected cinema. Majaks’ printed materials framed each screening as an invitation into an ongoing dialogue; members later developed their own series, special screenings, and post-film discussions.

Click any of the sample programs below to download or view the PDFs.

Brief chronology of selected werks

2015 · B0XER

Immersive art installation and concert; artist. A site-specific cave-like environment was constructed from rope, zip ties, and found cardboard. Open for two nights, it included premieres of original pieces by an orchestral ensemble and band, live video projection, and walls on which visitors were encouraged to leave messages.

2015 · Waiting for the Sun

Short play, 19 minutes; designer and producer. A two-act play by Blake Bertuccelli, inspired by William Blake and Nicolaus Copernicus, about a small community on another planet navigating a dreamlike reality where the sun rises once every hundred years. Premiered at St. Mary Majak’s on November 6 and 7, 2015.

2015 · Leaves

Installation, dance performance, and concert. A collaboration with visual artist Daniel Miller, choreographer Pilar Poeschl, and composer Jeff Pagano.

2016 · Splash Sponge Dark and Hidden Away

Short play, 15 minutes; actor and director. Three bodies awaken in bathtubs and must decipher their surroundings, acclimate to their senses, and discover their place and purpose. Performed at St. Mary Majak’s April 1–3 and 8–10, then at the Fortress of Lushington April 15 and 16, 2016.

A contemporary review described three figures—two naked and submerged, one dressed in a dry business suit—slowly coming into awareness, uncertain whether they had been born or transported from another dimension. Its wordplay recalled modernist poetry: strange, physical, and evocative.

2017 · Thieves Playing Pool

Play, 72 minutes; designer, director, and producer. The premiere of Tim Adams’s full-length play. Three thieves acquire a map, lay their palms on pool-table felt, and wrap their fingers around whiskey while a bank robbery takes shape inside the absurd logic of night. Language and loot become unattainable objects of desire the thieves will not sleep until they possess.

2015–2018 · Producer of new works

Eraserhead Live, an orchestral performance of original compositions to David Lynch’s film; Five Times, a one-act showcase; Leaves; Strict/Split; Dreamers; and the April 2017 one-act showcase.

Strict Split · 2016

A live performance and installation made collaboratively by a writer, a painter, and a dancer.

The work staged a dialogue between two regions of the subconscious: one literal, logical, and precise; the other imaginative, abstract, and saturated with color. Plastic walls divided the writer from the painter. The dancer moved through and over this tunnel until the barrier was torn away, leaving only its framework.