There will be plenty to hear and see when you enter the dining hall at Camp Rockmont during Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center’s (BMCM+AC) latest {Re}HAPPENING. The sights and sounds will be part of Meg Mulhearn‘s and Kim Rueger‘s interactive audio performance “Impulse,” which combines violin, live sampling and modular synthesis to create a continuously changing soundscape as the two artists respond to each other’s improvisations.
“We wanted to observe our own impulses and what happens when we have the impulse — what made us make that decision,” Mulhearn explains.
The audience will also be invited to get in on the process. “I don’t want to give too much away,” Mulhearn continues, “but we’re going to have certain physical ways in which audience members can start, interrupt and change the cycles and sounds.”
The performance is one of 26 projects at this year’s gathering, the 13th {Re}HAPPENING since 2010. The fundraiser and art event takes place Saturday, May 3, 3-10 p.m. and features local and international works.
Everything at once
From 1933-57, Black Mountain College spawned some of America’s most influential and experimental avant-garde artists.
Today, the BMCM+AC, located in downtown Asheville, works to preserve the college’s legacy through its collections and exhibits. The museum also celebrates its namesake by inviting contemporary artists to create new works in the spirit of Black Mountain College during the annual {Re}HAPPENING.
Kira Houston, outreach coordinator for BMCM+AC, explains that the event’s name references an August 1952 performance in the college dining hall by a number of Black Mountain College luminaries, including composers John Cage and David Tudor, poets Charles Olson and M.C. Richards, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and visual artist Robert Rauschenberg.
“They called it ‘Theater Piece No. 1,’” Houston says. “And it wasn’t a timed performance. It was a kind of multidisciplinary happening. One thing would happen after the other, and everything was happening all at once. The experience surrounded you and opened up your perception.”
“Theater Piece No. 1” inspired the Happenings movement of the late 1950s and ’60s and was a pivotal moment in the birth of performance art. “People think of it as ground zero for experimental performance,” Houston continues.
Inspired by the storm
The 2025 {Re}HAPPENING includes 26 projects selected from 75 applicants from around the world. “We try to stay true to the community,” Houston notes, by making sure local artists are well represented. According to Houston, two-thirds of this year’s participants are based in Western North Carolina. The rest are primarily located in the Southeast, with one artist coming from Austria, Houston notes.
Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen, the husband-wife team of Stewart/Owen Dance, are among the Asheville-based artists performing at the college’s former Lake Eden campus. Their piece, “slu,” will also feature local electronics artists and musicians Colston Byrd, Early Gima and Douglas Carr.
According to Owen, the inspiration for “slu” began to percolate after Tropical Storm Helene forced the dance company to cancel its spring season.
“That opened up our schedule,” says Owen. “And our creative brains had a little bit of space as well to dream up something different.”
Stewart adds, “This was the first time since we lived here that we felt something would be appropriate for a setting like {Re}HAPPENING, something more experimental than we have done before.”
Though new to the event, the couple have worked with Carr, Byrd and Gima for several years.
The concept for “slu” came about during a conversation post-Helene. “One of the words that just kept coming to me as we were talking was the word sluice, which is a gate that’s used to control the flow of water,” says Carr.
“This idea of barriers breaking and things flooding” was top of mind in the storm’s immediate aftermath, adds Stewart.
“We kept playing with the concept, and then Gavin suggested shortening the word to slu,” Carr notes. The piece, he continues, will move in one direction like a river or a flowing body of water. “That’s intended to be represented in projections and also to some degree in the choreography.”
Inspired by the exploratory ethos of Black Mountain College, the group has not come together as a whole to rehearse “slu.” The plan, says Owen, is to convene the week of the event.
The aim, she adds, is to find “the sweet spot between planning and overplanning.”
Owen says they want the majority of the piece to feel improvisational. “We really do want to be authentically responsive to each other,” she notes. “But we also want to make sure that everyone understands how all of the components can work together. We want to maximize our impact together.”
WHAT: 2025 {Re}HAPPENING
WHEN: Saturday, May 3, 3-10 p.m.
WHERE: The historic campus of Black Mountain College, Camp Rockmont, 375 Lake Eden Road, Black Mountain, $15-$37
