blog | Performance Space New York

Ivan Martinez on Why PS122

Last month, the Chairman of PS122’s Board, Ivan Martinez, took the time to write about his experiences as a participant in Choreography for Blackboards, which was presented last January as part of COIL 2012.

My name is Ivan Martinez and I’m the chairman of the board of Performance Space 122. I’ve been on the board since 1998. I was never an artist or performer and my involvement has been mostly to help support and manage the institution. This past January, for the first time ever, I was asked to be a performance – Michael Klien’s Choreography for Blackboards which was part of PS122’s COIL festival. I was honored to be asked, but also petrified at the prospect of performing in front of a paying audience. As part of the show, I wouldn’t have a PowerPoint presentation or the scripted set of charts that are part and parcel of my day job. This was new territory for me.
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Press Roundup for Habit

We hope you were one of the thousands who experienced David Levine’s Habit at Essex Street Market this September. The audience and critical response was extremely positive. We invite you to read some of the many rave reviews Habit received, to check out interviews with the artists, and to enjoy feature articles on the piece, both online and in print. Happy reading!
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PS122 Headed to the Bessies

Next Monday, October 15 the legendary Dance and Performance awards, The Bessies, are being held at the Apollo theater in Harlem. PS122 will there to support our very own Cuqui Jerez who was nominated for 2011’s The Rehearsal. Also nominated are PS122 alums Emily Johnson, Maria Hasabi, Yvonne Meier, and LeeSaar. And the event is produced by PS122’s recent Gala honoree Lucy Sexton.

Check out how our audiences reacted to The Rehearsal when it premiered last Fall…
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PS122 Hold Music of the Month: Efterklang

When I first became the IT guy at PS122 there were some real eccentricities in the way the 100+ year-old building was hooked up. Our phone and internet came in on a frail wire which stretched perilously from a building on East 10th Street across a wide courtyard, ending up in a a rusty metal box outside the downstairs theater. Snow and wind storms were cause for week-long outages. Inside the building there were nests of phone and ethernet cables stretching to the various homemade treehouses we called our offices.
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Mindy Kaling on PS122

Mindy Kaling, writer for The Office and star of her own new show, The Mindy Project, was interviewed on Fresh Air this week. When asked about her how she got the job as a writer on The Office Mindy said her career got started at PS122 with her hit play, Matt & Ben.

I was doing a play called Matt and Ben, that I wrote with my best friend in New York City. And it had been in the New York Fringe Festival, then was transferred to off-off broadway to PS122 which is this incredible theater in the East Village

We don’t like to define ourselves by our proximity to Broadway but we appreciate the kind words and the interview is indeed a good listen. I’ve rarely heard Fresh Air host Terry Gross being so candid. In one section of the interview Terry and Mindy bonded over the passing of their mothers and later Mindy mocked Terry’s backhanded bragging about shopping for petite clothes.