Every utopia is a social experiment, the artist suggests in this commission for the Performa performance art biennial, and we’re ultimately the guinea pigs.
Performa
Posted inArt
Tschabalala Self Dramatizes the Struggle to See and Be Seen
Sounding Board does not do what I expect from contemporary performance with its staged acting and scripted plot and dialogue, but it still succeeds.
Posted inArt
The Sounds That Get Lost in the Shuffle
We are waiting for spectacle and when the quotidian, yet incongruous actions occur I wonder whether there is any real payoff coming.
Posted inPerformance
Inspired by Nam June Paik, Performa is Bringing Back the Telethon
The 8-hour online program will debut new works, reimaginings, and collaborations by artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Glenn Kaino, Barbara Kruger, and the WideAwakes.
Posted inPerformance
Mourning through Performance, or Performative Mourning?
At Performa, Huang Po-Chih and Su Hui-Yu each staged theatrical productions concerning collective mourning and memorialization. Yet while Su built upon his own relationship to a story of loss, Huang seemed to impose himself upon someone else’s.
Posted inOpinion
A Performa Production Co-opted the Story of a Sex Worker
Without speaking with or even acknowledging the existence of critical members of the sex worker community, Performa has ultimately appropriated migrant sex worker organizing.
Posted inPerformance
Yvonne Rainer’s Conceptual Chess, Revived and Restaged
In its first performances since 1965, the recent Performa revival of Rainer’s Parts of Some Sextets prompts considerations of how we can safeguard the choreographer’s visionary oeuvre while staying true to her vision.
Posted inPerformance
Kia LaBeija Shelters a Queer, Black Femme Story of Collective Liberation
The strength in LaBeija’s Performa debut comes from her ability to use Oskar Shlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet as an outline, while organically combining the talents of people in her community.
Posted inArt
Dances of Doom and Transcendence
Choreographer Gillian Walsh takes on dance as a “suicidal tendency” and considers mysticism in a time of global crisis.
Posted inPerformance
Performa 15: Rewarding Musical Turns, and Unused Real Estate
In the final phase of Performa 15, which ended on November 22, a couple of performances turned profitably to music, creating synergies with standardized hand gestures in one case and the dynamics of theater lighting in the other.
Posted inPerformance
Dancing Around the Issue of Surveillance
Audiences entering the black box space of BAM Fisher in Brooklyn for More up a Tree found a transparent room containing a man sprawled on his back, and a woman nervously pacing.
Posted inPerformance
Performa 15: Diversity, Latex Fetish Wear, and Puppets (Plus the Renaissance)
Performa 15, the New York performance biennial, in this edition looks to the Renaissance as its “historical research anchor,” as the festival’s promotional materials put it, though in practice, the historical tie is often so vague as to be meaningless.