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The Least Important Things, 2014, performance, 1 hour
with Anthony Edwards, Jr., Daishawna Rogers, Davie-Blue, Ela Aldrete, Emma Zakes Green, Gilbert Molina, Heyward Bracey, James Michael Cowan, Kestrel Leah, Loren Fenton, Nicole Disson, Terrence Luke Johnson & Richard Pluim
Curator: José Luis Blondet
Translator: Débora Antscherl
Assistant: Deena Selenow
Costumes: Angi Ursetta
Props: Vincent Richards
Lights: Ellie Rabinowitz
Sound: Zach Alterman
Stage Manager: Corey Rogers
Assistant Stage Manager: Madeleine Lederer
Camera: Martin Dicicco
Edit: Vanara Taing
Production: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) with funding from the Harpo Foundation and a CCI Investing in Artists grant
Special thanks: Fundació Joan Brossa, Barcelona

Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in March 2014 and made possible by funding from the Harpo Foundation, a CCI Investing in Artists grant and the Fundació Joan Brossa in Barcelona.

Joan Brossa (1919-1998) was a Catalan poet, playwright, graphic designer and visual artist who made work about the limitations of language and its material nature. He treated language like props, embellishing it with gestures, and distilled texts to their very essence, at times boiling entire plays down to two or three sentences. By reducing verbal artifice to a minimum, Brossa framed fragments in the manner of an objet trouvé and erased any possible poetic effects. His works, which he called “staged poetry”, embraced incoherence, the everyday and popular forms of entertainment such as magic, cabaret and comedy routines. Brossa wrote under Franco’s regime at a time when both artistic innovation and the Catalan language were illegal. As a result, he remains little known outside of Spain and the majority of his texts await full-scale productions.

Mast worked with the Brossa Foundation in Barcelona and a Los Angeles based translator to sort through and select a diverse range of Brossa texts which were then translated into English so that they could serve as scripts for live performances. The Least Important Things assume the form of a procession of free-standing theatrical vignettes (none of which will take place in an actual theater) that unfolds in eighteen different venues throughout the LACMA campus. They are staged in intermediate spaces that reflect Mast’s and Brossa’s interest in the undefined.