Performance | Performance Space New York

Tip the Ivy

 
With Geo Wyeth, Bully Fae Collins, Cornelius (fka Mica Sigourney), and Dia Dear
 
Tip the Ivy is the latest multidisciplinary opera by Colin Self. In keeping with the artist’s previous works, it foregrounds its own making as a collaborative group process. Originating from a manuscript, the work mutates through collective authorship by the five collaborators and at points even extends to the public joining XOIR, Self’s experimental methodology for group singing. Tip the Ivy relies on Polari – an underground, queer language created in the UK at a time in which homosexuality was punishable by law. The encrypted language embraces illegibility and opacity as unique forms of queer creativity, community, and survival. The opera echoes an aesthetic embodied by the story of travesti performer Vera De Vienne, who has performed in Europe for the last 50 years as a gender illusionist. Equal parts cacophony and symphony, call and response, catharsis and rehearsal Tip the Ivy’s energy is both deviant and joyful.
 

Tip the Ivy is initiated by HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark and co-commissioned by Performance Space New York.

No Diving 2

 
Watching Storyboard P dance feels like glimpsing into another world. His dancing reminds us that our conventional understandings of what a human body is, what it can do, and where it starts and ends, are insufficient. As an acclaimed street dancer Storyboard’s lineage is Flex, but as an artist he might be more of an Afrofuturist. Using an otherworldly combination of skill, beauty, poetry, and emotion his dancing collapses space and time into an alternative universe.
 
When Storyboard talks about dance, he becomes a visionary poet—speech is a vessel for body language, dance a way to speak without speaking, a slang of movement that can carry vibrations like the animation of a stop motion film. “My style is Mutant. As a mutant my power is to project a sequence of images through my body that tells an elaborate story to music. The power to storyboard / ballet / jazz / African / contemporary / bruk up / flex / boogaloo.”
 

Co-Produced with Arika, the political arts organization from Scotland, UK, who Performance Space collaborated with on I wanna be with you everywhere festival of disability aesthetics in 2019. Film Still courtesy of Cinque Northern (cropped into heart).

A BODY IN THE O

 
“For an entire generation of queer artists working in the experimental theater world—including me—Tim Miller led the way. His imagination, daring and vision continue to inspire us.”—Moisés Kaufman, author of The Laramie Project
 
Climb along with performer Tim Miller inside the giant O of the Hollywood sign – or as Shakespeare conjured it “the wooden O” of all theatre and performance–where we try to take on the big themes of our time. Miller performs a new work created from his brand new book of performances and stories A BODY IN THE O. 40 years on from when Tim Miller co-founded Performance Space 122 and was then co-director for the first three years of Performance Space, Miller now returns to a most crucial performance “O” of Performance Space New York!
 
Jumping off from a day in 1984 when Miller scrambled up inside of the O of the Hollywood sign and imagined the performance space tree house of his dreams (Performance Space New York and Highways Performance Space in L.A.), A BODY IN THE O journeys through the hoops of the Department of Homeland Security, a queer boy’s truth-telling, a performance at Performance Space 122 in 1980 and finally a wedding day in NYC in 2013 as Miller imagines the full possibility of performance that changes the world inside these wooden Os!
 

Slipping Into Darkness

 
As a week-long performance-installation, Tolentino’s new durational work, Slipping Into Darkness, plays out in both the Day and the Night. In the daylight of the winter sun, movers breathe, labor, and shift while sheathed under the cover of a thick “horizon” made from leather, scented oils, reflective surfaces, and dense sound. In the evening, participants join in an intimate one-to-one exchange immersed in a dark pool of mineral water. Working with and below these evocative opaque surfaces, Tolentino reaches for the sensual, the subjective excess of each encounter. Loss tenders refuge. Space and time open to the accounts of Othersthe imprecisely labeled, unseen, or overlookedand the inspiring visionaries who thrive as not-of-this-world future-makers. Tolentino tunes us into spaces that generously blur yet ignite our shadowy interiors and fugitive poetics with time’s future-past to float with that which falls in and out of grasp.
 
This project will be accompanied by .bury.me.fiercely.—a 35-minute special late night performance on Dec 12th at 10pm by Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila.
 

 

Commissioned by Performance Space New York.


 

bury.me.fiercely

 
In conjunction with Slipping Into Darkness by Julie Tolentino.
 
bury.me.fiercely. is a meditation on sex and the aging body. Tracing the weight of touch and blood, Tolentino and Fila evoke an empathetic landscape, a fractured web, and a reflection of a vexed yet vital archive of tethered lives.
 

Photo by Hillary Goidell.

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