blog | Performance Space New York

Memorial for Derek Lloyd – May 4

This week we are continuing to mourn the passing of our Director of Production Derek Lloyd. He would have loved Sunday night’s pub crawl – we saw faces from many years of Derek’s life and lots of toasts to a man who brought warmth into our lives and helped countless artists realize their visions.

On Sunday, May 4th from 4 – 6pm, join friends, family and co-workers for a memorial service at Abrons Art Center, 466 Grand Street in Manhattan.

Information and photos will continue to be posted on our new memorial page for Derek: ps122.org/derek

A note on our friend, Derek.

The staff and board, and all at Performance Space 122 are devastated by the news that Derek Lloyd, our long time Director of Production, unexpectedly but peacefully passed away yesterday.

There are those in theater who are content to make things possible. Derek made them better.

Thousands of artists, and tens of thousands of audience – whether they knew it or not – benefited from the passion, love and care with which he approached getting live performance on stage. This was matched only by the passion for his wife, Mary Rose-Lloyd, his family, his cats, his cooking and the Mets.

He was a mentor and teacher to hundreds of young technicians and artists, a designer, a sparkie wrench head techie of the highest order. Derek raised the bar of what PS122 could do for its artists, and enabled them to create stronger, better work. He pushed us all to be better and to do better. With little equipment and very modest infrastructure he made PS122 somewhere people wanted to work, wanted to create. He said yes to impossible dreams.

Performance Space 122’s current transformative renovation would quite simply not be happening without him. Derek spent the last seven years dreaming of what could be in these new spaces, and was a passionate advocate for the possibilities they offered.

Derek was a true, loyal friend to many. A big, gruff hugger who unashamedly teared up when he saw injustice. Not all will understand this but as we say – he had a heart as big as Phar Lap’s.

We will miss him, and are poorer for his loss.

Memorial services are to be determined and we’ll keep you updated via our blog and social media, however please join us for an informal gathering of friends and colleagues this Sunday evening, April 27 from 7:30pm on. We will meet at Dixon Place for the announcement of the Tom Murrin Performance Award (a dear friend and colleague to Derek) and proceed from there up First Avenue in the East Village. Please follow Little PS’er Nyc on facebook or @PS122 on twitter to meet us en route.

Thank you to all who have shared your kind words, memories, funny stories and condolences,

Vallejo, Winnie, Chris, Lori, Alex, Bevin, Jess, Jeso, Lauren, Sean, Mike and Gavin

PS122 Board – Ivan, Chet, Jason, Howard, Vivian, David, Enrico, Anne, Ain, Gavin, Lionel, David, Adam, Michael, Eli, Kambiz, Frank and Carmelita

Tom Murrin Performance Festival

East Village performance legend and PS122 favorite Tom Murrin is being celebrated tonight with the kickoff of the first annual Tom Murrin Full Moon Performance Festival at Lamama.

A celebration of the wildly inventive works of Tom Murrin
featuring plays, readings, street performances, art, and more.

More info: https://lamama.org/now-playing/tomfest/

Here’s a video of Tom performing at PS122:

RAMP Rundown

For the past six weeks, PS122’s new residency program RAMP has been full roll at The Chain Theatre in Long Island City. We gave three New York City based artists – Molly Lieber & Eleanor Smith, Glass Ghost, Kaneza Schaal – money, time and space to start creating new work.

The results were greater than what we imagined. Not only were the artists able to expand on thoughts or try out risky new ideas, audiences were able to see the seedling of a new work. PS122 presents fully produced works from all over the world, yet RAMP allows us to support the beginning stages of a piece of an artist from our home city.

Thanks to you for coming out, sharing a beer and your opinions with us. Special thanks to the artists for sharing their work at such an early stage. Below are some highlights from the residencies. Share yours on our facebook, twitter or instagram. (Feel free to just tag us in everything @PS122 #RAMP)

Hyperallergic Review on Glass Ghost’s RAMP showing Welcome to LYFE™.

NYTimes featured blurb for Molly & Eleanor’s RAMP showing.

From Kaneza Schaal’s RAMP showing. Photo by Kate Hess.

From Glass Ghost’s RAMP showing. Photo by Ilan Bachrach.

Bruce Andrews Twitter Project

On April 1st, 2014, PS122 will be participating in Bruce Andrews 25 Hour Twitter Project, an experimental performance piece from poet Bruce Andrews.

“The Bruce Andrews 25 hour piece is meant to use Twitter as sculptural documentation, becoming a real time archive of Bruce Andrews’s current poetic writing and the responses it elicits in real time. Using a social media platform as an exhibition space, Maria Chavez will tweet a Bruce Andrews language text, every 5 minutes for 25 hours. That’s the 300 parts of a new poetic sequence, ‘Improper’, designed and edited for this occasion.

Each twitter post will also have a link leading to a Soundcloud web page made specifically for the piece, with audio recordings of Andrews, performing each tweeted ‘poem’ individually.”

Follow the project @BruceAndrews25h, and watch @ps122 for our retweets.