Category: blog

Dear Friends,
 
For the past 11 years, it has been my privilege to be the Artistic Director of Performance Space 122 (PS122).
 
As the organization prepares to move back into our spaces at 150 First Avenue, I’ve decided it’s the right time to step down and allow new leadership to take PS122 into the next phase of its history. I feel strongly that the ribbon on these beautifully renovated spaces should be cut by a new leader, one who has the ideas, energy, and passion to take the organization forward in the long term and continue to build Performance Space 122’s role as an essential anchor of New York City’s cultural life.
 
Leadership change is essential for contemporary organisations to remain vital and responsive to their communities. For PS122, it is time for some new blood.
 
I will not leave until the new leadership is fully embedded into PS122, which I estimate to be towards the end of 2016. I’m making this announcement now in order to provide adequate time for a robust search for the new Executive Artistic Director as well as a meaningful hand-off period. PS122 is in great health, with big ideas in the pipeline for the new facilities and sites beyond. We have a phenomenal staff and board, all of whom are chomping at the bit to move back in, ready to succeed beyond measure in the new spaces.
 
I want to thank the current and past teams whom I’ve been privileged to work with over the last decade or so. I am so very proud of what they and the artists we’ve worked with have achieved. We’ve constantly sought to put our audience’s experience at the core of our thinking, and have been equally as steadfast in advocating for improved industry standards and providing robust resources and support to our artists.
 
We’ve commissioned and presented countless new ambitious ideas, invented a little festival called COIL, toured New York artists around the world through our GLOBAL program and presented work in locations all over the city. We’ve thrived through a massive renovation of the beautiful building in the East Village that we share with some fantastic co-tenants, and we are getting ready to move back in.
 
I’m excited to see what fresh eyes and a fresh brain can bring to a Performance Space 122 that is ever more critical in a New York City in constant flux, whose dynamic and generative culture needs our spaces, energy, and community to thrive.
 
Thank you to all of you for making this work possible – for making things with us and being a part of the glorious community that makes Performance Space 122 so very special.
 
Cheers, 
Vallejo

Yara Travieso’s RAMP residency is live streaming today at 2pm over on dancefilms.org Tune in to see her version of La Medea on this rainy Sunday.

We’re so excited to announce Karl Allen as Performance Space 122’s new Production Manager! Karl was previously the Technical Director of PS in the ‘aughts and more recently tour with Andrew Schneider’s acclaimed YOUARENOWHERE.

Karl says, “I’m excited about coming home to PS122 and helping start a new chapter in our history!”

Welcome, Karl!

For a more enhanced experience, PS122 has committed to commissioning program notes for each major production. We’re hoping that through these writings we can provide a deeper connection to the ideas that are prevalent throughout the work or the artist’s body of work and how these ideas relate to contemporary issues permeating throughout society. Our goal is to foster dialogue so if you feel compelled to share your thoughts, leave a comment.

Program Notes for COIL 2016: o’ death by Findlay//Sandsmark + Pettersen
Notes written by by Lane Czaplinski, Artistic Director of On the Boards in Seattle

#1
I had a conversation with Iver a few months ago. He was worried about the timing of the run of o’ death in NYC. Was the “show” going to get lost in all the industry madness? Would any producers see it?

A day or so before I asked Iver what he means when he says he hates theater. I say the same thing all the time. “That’s a good question,” he said.

Another conversation a few years ago with an artist at a PS122 after party: “No one is making anything worthwhile,” said The Artist, “and everyone is scared to say so.”

Theater sucks and no one cares. What’s an artist supposed to do?

#2
I saw o ‘ death as part of a festival at the Black Box Theater in Oslo last March. There was this tiny cafe around the corner from where I stayed, a mom and pop shop where I took refuge each day from the snow dumped city. I always got the same thing: curried butternut squash soup with overly hearty bread. I usually ordered a second bowl and I’d sit there pretending to read old Norwegian magazines while I watched Mom and Pop interact with their customers. It was this improbably perfect little universe. Mom cooked and Pop worked the counter. Every day the same thing. I’d go there right now if I could.

o’ death is like that place.

My last day in Oslo I talked at length with Mom and Pop. They asked why I was in town and what I did for a living. When I told them I was there for a theater festival as part of my job at a center for contemporary performance in the states, it ruined everything.

#3
Rustling leaves, flickering lights, a landfill worth of styrofoam and Marit’s defiant body. That’s a full liquor cabinet. And if an artist doesn’t succumb to depicting this or telling that or other show making mumbo jumbo then anything can happen. It’s generous to create something that gives the viewer space for reflection and relief from the needless suffering inflicted by cheap mimicry. It’s not only generous but caring, too.

#4
They hate theater?
No, not exactly.
It’s a show?
Yes, but not like that.
No one is making anything worthwhile?
That’s ridiculous.
Will whatever this is get lost?
I hope so.

© Feature Photo by Maria Baranova

For a more enhanced experience, PS122 has committed to commissioning program notes for each major production. We’re hoping that through these writings we can provide a deeper connection to the ideas that are prevalent throughout the work or the artist’s body of work and how these ideas relate to contemporary issues permeating throughout society. Our goal is to foster dialogue so if you feel compelled to share your thoughts, leave a comment.

Program Notes for COIL 2016: Song by Ranters Theatre
Q&A with composer and performer James Tyson from an interview in Turkey’s Radikal news outlet

Can you explain in your own words what the Song project is, what it aims to achieve?

With Song, we were interested in placing the form of a “song” at the center of a piece, perhaps something like what Sibelius pioneered as a “tone poem”, yet also drawing on what are often quite familiar forms, such as a band playing a gig which similarly places sung music at the center of a performance. Here we were attempting to look at the place in which we, as an audience, or a group of artists, can listen to songs. So the question of environment, and the positioning of the musicians and performers, became very important.

Song is a project which furthers an ordinary audio/visual installation. What is Song’s contemporary artistic practice in the arts world?

I think through the history of art, people have attempted to bring together how we sense and receive art, whether it is listening to a story, or observing cave paintings, or hearing a piece of music. We do not listen or see it in abstraction, but it is an experience that is sensed through a whole body.

How do the visual arts affect one’s mood and inspiration? What are the triggers for Song?

Every artwork is a rethinking of another. The poet John Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” not sitting in the garden listening to a bird, but after seeing a painting in a gallery. Song was first made and presented in Melbourne, Australia, which for me coming from the UK, is on the other side of the world. It has its own deep culture, complexities, and not least, the ever-present relation to the natural environment of animals, birds, and insects.

How do you posit Song within the contemporary art world globally, and can you see any particular trends arising in this still quite new area of this kind of performing arts practice?

I think perhaps in the contemporary art world, there is a recurring fascination with a sense of “living”, that is to say, the thing that cannot be valued, or objectified, or put in a frame. Yet perhaps the art world also completely relies on this “frame” for its functioning. This paradox is a peculiar dance that different artists or institutions find different practices for how to negotiate. Aside from what I have said above, about the hearing (in the sense of the German word “hören” relating to the sense of “hearing” as a sense of “belonging” as Gadamer has talked about) of meaning and how we communicate and observe what is around us, maybe Song is reflective of this kind of situation in the art world.

© Photo by Arion Doerr