Donate today to help El-Funoun continue their 45-year legacy of Palestinian cultural resistance and liberatory, groundbreaking art.
Members of the premiere dance group in Palestine, El-Funoun Dance Troupe, will offer a special performance and presentation about dabke as a form of cultural preservation and resistance.
Dabke, the traditional Palestinian dance form performed at weddings and other celebrations, is the foundation of El-Funoun’s innovative dance style. The dancers will discuss the history of El-Funoun as a vital Palestinian cultural institution and the challenges the troupe and its members face in sustaining cultural production and performance amidst a military occupation aimed at silencing, suppressing, and erasing Palestinian society and culture.
After the presentation, audience members will be invited to learn dabke dance steps, participate in a traditional dabke circle, and meet with the dancers. The performance and workshop will be followed by a reception with food and drinks.
About El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe:
For 45 years, El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe has been preserving, promoting, and reimagining Palestinian culture. Established in 1979 by a small group of artists, the Troupe today comprises close to 300 volunteer members. The Troupe is committed to dance education, running its own dance school and youth troupe, Barem El-Funoun, in Palestine and conducting dabke training in Palestine and around the world. Through its work, El-Funoun aims to challenge oppression and resist Israel’s attempts at cultural erasure. The Troupe is currently working on their seventeenth major production, Zaff, about life in a refugee camp.
El-Funoun refuses conditional funding from international aid agencies and aid from organizations that have failed to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, which has had significant material consequences.
Show Category: Gathering
A Memorial for Catherine Christer Hennix (1948-2023)
Blank Forms and Performance Space New York present a commemorative day-long program honoring the life and practice of Catherine Christer Hennix (1948-2023). Marking nearly a year since Hennix’s passing, this memorial program offers an opportunity for friends and admirers to experience a large-scale realization of her final sound work, Kamigaku, and reflect on her life and work.
For this memorial program, members of Hennix’s ensemble—Ellen Arkbro, Amir ElSaffar, Mattias Hållsten, Marcus Pal, Susana Santos Silva and Amedeo Maria Schwaller—will present Kamigaku in her absence, following the sonic ideals and performance practices that she specified. The structure of the long-form presentation will abide by a principle of ethics that Hennix had formulated and committed to already in her 1976 realization of Chagaku: that musicians should be allowed unrestricted space and time for them to be able to play (only) when they feel inspired and (only) for as long as they feel inspired. Part of what this meant for Hennix is that no predetermined performance schedule should be given, since the forms of attention and inspiration required for playing can not be scheduled in advance. Therefore, as per Hennix’s wish, the space will function as a sound environment throughout the day-long program, an environment in which Kamigaku will be heard only occasionally, and when occasionally subsiding the space will be considered a space for sustained sonic contemplation while we all await the next wave.
Growing up in a vibrantly musical context in Stockholm, Sweden, Catherine Christer Hennix spent her formative years immersed in modal music, attending concerts by John Coltrane, playing jazz drums, and learning trumpet from Idrees Sulieman. In parallel to developing a rich practice as a musician, poet, and visual artist, Hennix obtained an advanced degree in mathematical logic, which would later lead her to do substantial work on ultrafinitist mathematics with Alexander Esenin-Volpin. Hennix wrote poetry and extensive philosophical prose on the ontology of being and the nature of subjectivity, blending Parmenidian metaphysics, topos theory, Brouwerian intuitionism, Japanese aesthetics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Sufi notions of monism and divine love.
As a composer and sound artist, Hennix was part of the downtown school of sustained harmonic sound and was closely engaged with some of its key figures such as La Monte Young and Henry Flynt. For years, Young and Hennix worked collaboratively on developing and refining Young’s theories of the harmonic ordering of continuous composite waveforms, while Flynt became both a musical collaborator and life-long philosophical interlocutor. Following the advice of Young, Hennix started learning from Pandit Prān Nāth, a renowned vocalist from the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music, which further deepened her understanding of sound as a path to contemplative transcendence. Through her relationship to Prān Nāth, Hennix was introduced to Sufism—first in the Chishti Order, and later when taking hand with Sheikha Fariha in the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Order—and was dedicated to its practice from then on. Hennix formally converted to Islam before relocating to Istanbul, where she spent the final years of her life.
In the early ’70s, inspired by Young and Terry Jennings’s use of precisely-tuned reeds and harmonically distorting amplification in Pre-Tortoise Dream Music, Hennix formed her Stockholm-based ensemble The Deontic Miracle, wishing to develop ways to maximize the psychophysical impact of combination tone harmony. In 1976, as part of their seminal 10-day presentation at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Deontic Miracle premiered Chagaku, Hennix’s collection of works of high-intensity combination tone harmony for justly tuned renaissance oboes, the Chinese mouth organ sheng, and precision-controlled harmonic feedback distortion. Almost 50 years after what became both the first and last public presentation of the Deontic Miracle, Hennix formed a new ensemble which would revisit the aesthetics and ethics of perception that had motivated her early work. Her composition, Kamigaku, featured a new instrumentation centered around the Japanese mouth organ shō and expanding onto a section of trumpets and a refined system for combination tone distortion. Kamigaku was Hennix’s primary focus as a composer and musician in the last two years of her life. Through long periods of rehearsal and a total of ten public presentations, she developed and refined the composition in close connection with her ensemble.
Hennix’s own words about Kamigaku, as read out loud to her ensemble before her penultimate performance:
“Kamigaku is a practice of sound which seeks to mediate and draw out the presence of sound’s transformative agency of non-cognitive, enhanced synoptic activities when initiated by certain families of intervals, which are made to live together in a continuous, distributed composite sustained sound waveform in an enclosed designated space. Kamigaku opens up this enclosed space to the audible harmonic spectra that are present by calling on the generating frequencies one at a time using its instruments’ (shō, trumpet) capacity for precision intonation. The establishment of a generating frequency takes place by a gradual process of interiorizing the gradient of its exact frequency, which is being probed by the fundamental frequency of the instrument being activated for this prehistoric interval formation. This process is characterized by a gradual diminishing of mind’s cognitive faculties, while its non-cognitive faculties become increasingly occupied once the probing frequency locks on to the concurrent generating frequency, the combined effect of which results in a resonance phenomenon by which mind becomes enveloped by its interior by a vibrational dynamics which feeds forward what it feeds back, forming a conjugate pair between sound and mind’s total attention and submission to the former.”
I wanna be with you everywhere
Image description A gray tabby cat lounges in a glass bowl, the image is mirrored down the middle, so there are two lounging tabbies looking at us. The background is a cool blue gradient with geometric tiles and the entire image is vignetted by the shape of a heart with a diagonal fold or cut removing the heart’s top right curve.
IRL/In-Person
122CC Courtyard
June 21 | 2 – 10pm
URL/Virtually
Zoom
June 21 | 2 – 10pm
Audio Program for I wanna be with you everywhere
I wanna be with you everywhere, a gathering of, by, and for disabled artists, returns to Performance Space and your space—wherever you are—for an outdoor summer 2023 event. We want to be with you at Performance Space, on beaches, in transit, online. Our purpose is specifically social and our only goal is getting together, conjuring, celebrating, resting, and reveling in our means beyond ends. There may or may not be audios and visuals or impromptu performances. There won’t really be an end as this is actually just the beginning again, second round around, encore before—in continual rehearsal. We’re only here to celebrate that we’re still here and to hold space for those of us that now join from other forms. We come from traditions of healing and need in and beyond any need to be healed, made whole, or cured; we come incomplete and holographic, welcoming wounds, healers, wisdom, and fools anywhere on the body-mind-spirit-soul continuum in k/crip, chronic, incurable, incalculable, and quarantined, mad love.
Our General Access page has info on access provisions in the URL space + IRL space, our audience travel fund for those who reside locally, how to make general access inquiries, plus so much more information about the event.
On Zoom, a shifting cycle of online Hosts begins:
Johanna Hedva, Neve Mazique Bianco, Amber Hawk Swanson, Akemi Nishida, Risa Puleo, and Taraneh Fazeli.
Performance Text:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Spanish translation by poet Apolinar Islas)
Invocation: English and Spanish + Large Font English + Large Font Spanish
Poems: English + Spanish + Large Font English + Large Font Spanish
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
Ellis’s processional, precessional cessation and continuation of movement and music comes to us via his forthcoming release Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed Editions, 2023). At Performance Space JJJJJerome brings his sax, his laptop, his incomparable style to the stage, to the aisles, and to the surround: carrying forward the memory of his grandfather’s sermons and spirit. This sonic ionic offering will undo lineage while keeping us family–family with flowers, with humans, with bells, and, always, with the wind.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.
This is a scheduled break, but breaks are also in between events and unscheduled self-determined, breaks are welcome at all times; there are Quiet, Low Stim, and Chat rooms available both on site, inside PSNY, and on Zoom in Breakout rooms.
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART, Spanish, large-font written script available online and in print.
Performance Text: PDF + Large font
With lo-fi dreams and high-def humor, Bande brings MC vibes to the day. Interluding music with spoken performance, the live extimacy of Bande’s presence reaches out via emo-techno-bridges. Her humor is a vessel that holds deep feelings sprinkled with softly misted relief. Her languages speak of collective anger and desperation, of laughter, of tears, of love, and of how we care (and don’t) for one another. This is illness talk, COVID forever talk, talk of disappearance, disposability, denial, but also talk of kinship, of gentle brushes of truth, and of mutual connection and disconnection. Bande will bring songs and meditations: welcome.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.
Access: Audio and image description (AD + ID), ASL, CART
Performances, offerings, artworks shared by, for us
Our Zooms are unmuted, our mics are open, and our hearts and bodyminds are receptive. We give the floor online and in person to you–to those of us who wish to share, those of us who have been dying to say something, those of us who are dying because we said something–those of us who have been living moment to moment without the audiences and responses and applause and vibes we know are out there. We give the floor to those of us whose community is, at present, a future dream and a past memory. We ask that your offerings be in the spirit of community even as we might be figuring out what that word even means. We know that there is beauty and vulnerability and care in trying something out for the first time–even when you’ve done it before–and we hope that you’ll feel our intentions (and our shared vulnerability!) in trying this whole thing out for the first time with you.
Interested in sharing? Show up online or in person and we will do our best to give you the stage, moving between offerings URL and IRL. Depending upon the number of people wanting to share, time limits may be implemented. Our MC/hosts will help field interest from IRL and URL audiences. Access workers will provide audio and image description, and any description provided by artists is welcome.
Advance open stage/screen/mic submissions are appreciated but not required. Works in by June 16th @5 PM EST will help our Access Teams prepare. So far we have a gorgeous line up featuring short works by Agustine Zegers, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Alx Velozo, and Geelia Ronkina. We’re so excited for more! To add your work to the queue please send audio, visual, textual, or other material with your name and the subject line JUNE 21 OPEN MIC to boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.. Or sign up the day of.
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
Performance Text: Poems + Large Font
What to do about a telethon other than fuck it up? Poet, tarotist, artist, and librarian Cyrée Jarelle Johnson returns to IWBWYE to read the 1980s and ’90s for what those decades were: practice for now. As our host and guide, he joins us in pissing on pity as Jerry’s Orphans did, while celebrating the wealth of nothing about us without us. From Performance Space’s courtyard his primary relationship will be with the camera and all of us beyond its lens. Some of this is technological, some of this is a means of direct address and embrace, some of this is a series of observations Cyrée has stored up for some time–and today you’ll be lucky enough to receive them all.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.
Access: Audio Description (AD), ASL, CART
Amid the blur of erotics, the jangle of poetics, and the fetishizing of sickness and disability, the heat of Panteha’s performance and sculpture freezes all. Just try and take their temperature; it’s immeasurable. As they do elsewhere, Panteha’s presence at this solstice gathering will intervene in the black k/cripness of sex, showing us how sometimes the body is an object and a thing and sometimes the body is a spur–a fragmented piece of verse redacted, shredded, underlined, and written over and over and over again.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.
Access: Audio description (AD), ASL, CART
Coming to us from Taipei, Yo-Yo sends us elsewhere while bringing us back with her to the timezone of tomorrow. A dancer, media artist, and choreographer who makes multi-dimensions and realms, Lin’s amplification of energies and connections across bodies devolves the separations we are taught to abide. Inviting us into the online platform your world of text, Lin offers us a space to write, feel, and enunciate collectively, simultaneously, asynchronously, and anonymously throughout the day. A little bit like a bathroom stall, school desk, game of telephone, or cut up poem remix: Lin’s open text field will informally archive our gathering, stretching time and space into the disabled decolonial futures we all need.
If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.
Altar: Odes to the Lost/ never lost
Access: Image description (ID), ASL, CART
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha offers us a crip grief transformation and witness altar. A portal for our salt water honey rose bitter tears, wails and loss. A place to sit and breathe, remember our dead, wash our hands and leave offerings to and for loved ones we’ve lost- and for ourselves. As guide and gift to this solstice convening, Leah joins us again in the wake of when we last gathered in 2019. Their altar will open up space for asynchronous emotions and intimate practices of mourning, space to not be alone anymore with our loss, space to get curious about our grief. Leah will be with us throughout the day, reeling in prophetic poems and prose beyond the isolation visited upon us, against all odds and healing into the evening, finding our loves never lost. Later there will be fire and a little bit of smoke. Maybe a mirror, most definitely magic. Somewhere in the blur of grief and celebration, joy and pain, this poet will wade with us in the non-opposition of life and death. The sun will set and quiet hours will commence. Come find each other forever round the fire.
Those with RSVPs are welcome to bring small offerings including pictures of beloveds for placing on the altar. If you have any questions or access requests please email boxoffice@PerformanceSpaceNewYork.org.
ASL Hang / Quiet Hour
Access: ASL and CART
As the event comes to a close, we will be invited to sit with our intentions, offerings, and remembrances. After the sun sets on the longest day, Performance Space’s courtyard will center D/deaf social space, with conversational interpreters available for those who do not speak ASL. We ask that the sound volume in the courtyard be kept low during this time. This quiet hour concludes the entire event, ending at 10:00 pm.
Communal Shrine
Following a year of grievances and uprisings, Performance Space’s Staff has organized a Communal Shrine intended as a place for collective mourning, remembrance, healing, and organizing.
We invite you to bring objects and offerings for wake and futurity in the hopes of engaging in life-affirming interactions. Whether a picture, an art piece, a vow or a wish, a plant, an object of remembrance or release, a book, a letter, or a manifesto.
Knowledge of Wounds
Visit the Official Knowledge of Wounds Website
Knowledge of Wounds is a ceremony, a digital fire, a calling to vibrate in good relations across Indigenous time and space. Curated and led by SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation), Knowledge of Wounds will unfold as a series of digital events throughout 2021, foregrounding Indigenous methodologies and leadership to create new spaces for knowledge exchange between First Nations communities across the world.Knowledge of Wounds is one of the first programs of its kind to focus specifically on the intersections of Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and the body. Centering Indigenous practices of care, sovereignty, and accessibility, the Knowledge of Wounds virtual platform will remain as an Indigenous led and held archive, handing back centuries of archival and epistemological authority from settlers to Indigenous communities.Honoring Indigenous time and space in the spirit of the Wiradjuri term Yindyamarra—which refers to the qualities of respect, going slow, honoring, and taking responsibility—the structures and principles for these virtual gatherings are being developed by the curators in early 2021, with individual events being announced throughout the year as the program evolves. Please sign up to the Knowledge of Wounds newsletter for regular updates.
Following the first edition of Knowledge of Wounds—held in-person in January 2020 at Performance Space New York—organizers Norman and Pierce have expanded the program to become a global digital gathering which is collectively supported by five leading experimental arts organisations: Performance Space New York (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PDX), The Momentary (AR), Ballroom Marfa (TX) and Performance Space Sydney (NSW, Australia).
Following the first edition of Knowledge of Wounds—held in-person in January 2020 at Performance Space New York—organizers Norman and Pierce have expanded the program to become a global digital gathering which is collectively supported by five leading experimental arts organisations: Performance Space New York (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PDX), The Momentary (AR), Ballroom Marfa (TX) and Performance Space Sydney (NSW, Australia).
Photo by Blair LeBlanc (cropped into heart)