Show Category: Performance

Sex is everywhere. Once shunned from the public sphere, the pornographic now saturates advertisements, language, and design. For almost a decade the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen has created a body of work that explores an all-pervasive sexuality, changing how we relate to ourselves and to each other. With 21 pornographies, the latest solo in the series, the artist performs a densely edited procession of references widely ranging from de Sade to 1970s Danish Porn and sexualized torture in war. Drawing connections between sex, power, politics, and crime, Ingvartsen takes the audience on an associative tour de force that is equally stimulating, disturbing, cheerful, and sensuous.
 
*Post-show talk on Thursday, October 4.
 

Post-show talk on Friday, November 16 with Cynthia Carr.
 
Best known for his boundary-pushing body mutilations, Ron Athey has been pursuing the transcendent and sublime for more than three decades. After the Death of God (famously proclaimed by the philosopher Nietzsche who anticipated the end of religion in Western society), Athey considers it one of the artist’s roles to invent new forms of ritual and celebration, to conjure the sacred as an antidote to the empty individualism of contemporary life. For his new work, Acephalous Monster, Athey turns to the Acéphale, the figure of the headless man, which inspired George Bataille’s secret society of the same name to combat nihilism and fascism before the Second World War in France. The headless or beheaded man is a powerful symbol of radical transformation, the driving force of all of Athey’s performances pushing towards the merging of humans and gods.
 

Few artists have taken the idea of technological theater further than Annie Dorsen. Whereas most productions that address the digitization of everyday life stop at the inclusion of, say, video and computer-generated imagery, Dorsen hands the very act of creating a play over to algorithmic processes. The result of “collaborating with algorithms as full creative partners,” as Dorsen puts it, is its own theatrical form that she has termed algorithmic theater. It shatters our notion that a play’s worth lies in how aptly it reflects our humanity back to us and reveals the dramaturgical potential at the heart of the digital code. For her new work, The Slow Room, Dorsen uses more traditional theatrical means to explore the uncertain space where the virtual meets the embodied.
 
*Post-show talk on Friday, September 28.
 

 
The AIDS epidemic had a devastating, lasting impact on the downtown artist community. Some of Performance Space New York’s most influential artists (John Bernd, Ethyl Eichelberger, Ron Vawter, David Wojnarowicz among many others) died prematurely, leaving a gaping hole in this community and a subsequent generation without important mentorship. When Ishmael Houston-Jones first started working on THEM at Performance Space 122 in 1985, with a text by Dennis Cooper and a cacophonous live electric guitar score by Chris Cochrane, it was intended to be a poetic and frank coming-of-age story of gay men. By the time it was first premiered here in 1986, AIDS was ravaging queer communities, and the artists felt it would be disingenuous not to address it in the work. They consequently included coded allusions to the epidemic and turned THEM into one of the most haunting pieces of art that came out of the early AIDS years.
 
*Post-Show Talk with Visual AIDS on June 27.
 

Penny Arcade is the undisputed queen of downtown performance, and Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is her biggest hit. A freedom of speech rallying cry, the raucous sex and censorship show premiered at Performance Space 122 in 1990 during the height of the culture wars, when ultra-conservative politicians pressured the National Endowment for the Arts into defunding artists who made work that was considered “offensive to the average person.” Deeply invested in the political role of art, Arcade sees a need to reassess the subject matter of censorship now—especially the “self-censorship coming from the left in the form of political correctness in today’s culture.”