Through December you are invited to join artists in exploring worlds that extend beyond human perspective. Rather than positioning human consciousness as the primary source and content of all art making, the contributions to the Posthuman Series often blur distinction between ‘the human’ and its other: namely nature, technology, animals, and gods.
In light of dramatic technological and scientific developments such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, the idea of an autonomous human being with agency over the world is rapidly becoming obsolete. Furthermore, as an invention of Renaissance humanism, the classification ‘human’ has implicitly always been reserved for white heterosexual men, and has therefore rationalized the exclusion and oppression of those who don’t fit into that narrow category.
Theater and performance are by definition anthropocentric. Shakespeare has been lauded as the inventor of the human, and we go to the theater to watch human bodies perform, reflecting our own humanity back to us from the stage. In that respect the Posthuman Series envisions an alternative space for a theater that reacts to the changes of its time by challenging the very idea it is based on—the human—and embraces the nonhuman, alien, and unexpected.
Archives: Series
Focus on Kathy Acker
Avant-garde writer, punk poet, fashion icon, misfit. Few artists embody the radical and uncompromising attitude of the artistic era Performance Space New York emerged from more than Kathy Acker. As part of the East Village Series, we cast a focus on the life and work of the iconic writer who died twenty years ago, and whose deep and often-unacknowledged influence calls for reassessment.
Coil 2018
Since 2006, Coil has presented works from the world’s most exhilarating and thought-provoking performers and interdisciplinary artists. Between January 10–February 4, 6 projects mark both the first performances in the newly renovated spaces at 150 1st Avenue.
East Village Series
Welcome to the East Village Series at Performance Space New York. Between February and June you are invited to join us in contemplating the past, present and future of our art organization and its immediate neighborhood, the East Village.
Performance Space New York was born in the East Village in 1980 as Performance Space 122 when a group of local artists occupied the empty building that had been home to Public School 122 and started making performance work as a passionate rejection of corporate mainstream culture.
Today, almost 40 years later, Performance Space New York is faced with a radically transformed neighborhood unaffordable for young artists and a national political climate that feeds off social inequity more than ever. Moving back into our newly renovated spaces, the inaugural East Village Series asks what kind of art organization we need to become in light of this ever-more exclusionary social and political context.