Performance
A Broken Word Opera
Joe Diebes, a composer and creator of “performance environments” showcased his latest piece BOTCH, part of his three-year artist residency at Manhattan's HERE Arts Center.
Performance
Art
The Many Faces of Eleanor Antin
Let me introduce you to a few of the many selves of Eleanor Antin, as they are represented in the show Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves,” currently on view at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University.
Performance
The Politics of Parody: Free Cooper Union at e-flux
For a few hours last Sunday, e-flux’s Chinatown offices were bathed in red light as Free Cooper Union held an interpretive reading of the 41-page trustee meeting transcript first leaked to the Village Voice over the summer.
Performance
Surrealism's Fistfights and Adversarial Culture
An evening Dada revue organized by Tristan Tzara, July 6, 1923's Soirée du Coeur à Barbe (Night of the Bearded Heart) was the site of an infamous altercation between Tzara's associates and Surrealist don André Breton at the Théâtre Michel in Paris.
Performance
A Visual Concert of Gestures
Audience members for Tori Wrånes’s "Yes Nix" performance had to sidestep the artist, who was lying on the floor at the entrance to SIR Stage 37, as they walked in. Her feet were tied in rope, which was strung up to a running track in the ceiling. It was the most confrontational part of the 30-some-m
Performance
A Play Without Actors, Only Light and Sound
The idea of a play with no people on stage isn't new. That is, after all, what the phantasmagoria stage shows of the 18th and 19th centuries were all about, where projections of light with sound conjured a theatrical spectacle of phantoms. In Dutch artist Gabriel Lester’s Super Sargasso Sea (phantom
Performance
The Questions of Performa 13
Marianne Vitale’s “The Missing Book of Spurs,” her commission for Performa 13, features half-naked women in corsets, a man in assless chaps, and “natives” in outfits inspired by traditional Native American clothing; it features blocks of wood, a wooden sculpture that looks like a torpedo, and a larg
Art
How Writing Is Like Performance
PORTLAND, Oregon —Portland’s literary prowess is well known. Home to the truly amazing Powell’s bookstore, a number of high caliber small presses, and host to many readings, the city is a great place for people who love words. I traveled there early this month to check out another kink in this pheno
Performance
When Good Intentions Aren't Enough
I didn't know what to expect from Einat Amir's "Our Best Intentions," a work premiering in New York as part of Performa 13. I had seen the trailer, which suggests a fairly emotional experience. I had read the description on the Performa site, which says the participatory piece blends "psychotherapy,
Performance
No Easy Answers: Jérôme Bel's "Disabled Theater"
Jérôme Bel’s new piece, Disabled Theater, now at New York Live Arts as part of Performa 13, has gotten a fair amount of positive press and reviews, but it felt complicated to me, and not always in good ways.
Performance
Original Sin, Original Theater
Experiencing "The Humans" does require some stamina, as it's a three-hour long play that often dips into follies that can drag a bit long. Yet if you're interested in theater, the influences of art's obsession with forms, Shakespeare, Wodehouse, and scatological humor wrapped around a frame of the G
Performance
Does White Privilege Make You Sweat?
It's difficult to create art about white privilege. Though one can easily enough declare that white privilege is bad, distilling all its paradoxes into a poignant artistic image is challenging. And when an artist succeeds, it commands attention.