LIBRARY is a four act performance program that celebrates the library as a space for communal gathering in an expansive reconception of a traditional reading that includes poetry, dialogues, and live performance. Whitney Mallett is the curator and organizer of LIBRARY and the founding editor of The Whitney Review—a new publication that features reviews and criticism of new writing and interviews with writers.
Mallett found inspiration in Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 story The Library of Babel, which conceives of the universe as an infinite library, reimagining its “labyrinthine…hexagonal galleries, corridors, staircases, mirrors, and reflections” as a strip club, casino, and convention center. The program features a performance by Kellian Delice engaging choreographies of processing; a conversation between Esmé Naumes-Givens, contributing writer to The Whitney Review, and their father David Givens, writer and librarian; a demonstration of poet and painter Whitney Claflin’s language-based card game, its hyper-mediated presentation inspired by televised poker tournaments; and a performance by poet and performer, Maya Martinez, and writer and deputy editor of The Whitney Review, Mani Mekala, combining dance and spoken word.
The Whitney Review creates community around the printed word and LIBRARY embodies the communal function of the library, inspired by the many contributors to The Whitney Review. As the program unfolds, audience members are invited to participate in the ongoing narrative, the infinite act, where the spirit of the library lives on.
Show Category: Reading
Celebrating the First Family of American Letters: The Greenidge Sisters
One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays allows us to share accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening and gives us an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. Join us every first Monday at Performance Space New York for a special opportunity to hear the future.
Highly Anticipated New Books!
One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays allows us to share accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening and gives us an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. Join us every first Monday at Performance Space New York for a special opportunity to hear the future.
Illuminators
Access Provision: ASL Interpretation will be provided.
One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays allows us to share accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening and gives us an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. Join us every first Monday at Performance Space New York for a special opportunity to hear the future.
Tales from the Memory Vortex
Access Provision: ASL interpretation
Black Quantum Futurism presents Tales from the Memory Vortex, a two-hour immersive performance event featuring a curated selection of guest poets, musicians, and scholars. This multidisciplinary gathering delves into readings of thought-provoking essays, evocative poems, and performative lectures centered on themes of Black anthropological discoveries, Black temporalities, quantum physics, and the intricate tapestry of African and Black Diasporic time and memory rituals. Employing a retrocausal framework, Tales from the Memory Vortex spirals backward through time and space to examine our origins and trajectories.