Archives: Shows

Virtual 40th Anniversary Gala

If you’re able to, we ask that you make a donation to support the future of Performance Space at one of the levels below or at any amount you wish.
 
 
Host
Jeremy O. Harris
 
Honorees
Dona Ann McAdams, Chet Kerr, and Roxane Gay
 
40 One Minute Performances by 40 Artists
Adrienne Truscott, Alan Cumming, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens with Katie Bush, Carmelita Tropicana and Ela Troyano, Charlotte Brathwaite, Claire Danes, Coco Fusco, Eileen Myles, Eisa Davis, Hannah Black, Holly Hughes, Jackson Polys, Jonathan González, Julie Atals Muz, Julie Tolentino, Kate Bornstein, Kembra Pfahler, Kia Labeija, Ligia Lewis, Lucy Sexton, Lori E. Seid, Mariana Valencia, Martine Gutierrez, Mike Iveson, Monica Mirabile, Nicky Paraiso, Pamela Sneed, Penny Arcade, Peter Cramer & Jack Waters, Princess Nokia, Reggie Watts, Ron Athey, Sarah Michelson, Tim Miller, Vaginal Davis, Yasuko Yokoshi
 
Cocktails
Precious Okoyomon, Okwui Okpokwasili, SK Lyons and Casa Dragones
 
Creative Direction
Alicia Mersy
 
Audiovisual Design
Lauryn Siegel
 
 

Tickets

-Access to our Virtual 40th Anniversary Gala.

Tickets

-Cocktail Set for 2 persons delivered to your house.
-Out of Print Book “Caught in the Act” by Dona Ann McAdams
-Name on invitation (if joining by May 5)

Tickets

-Cocktail Set for 5 persons delivered to your house.
-Out of Print Book “Caught in the Act” by Dona Ann McAdams
-Name on invitation (if joining by May 5)

Tickets

-Cocktail Set for 10 persons delivered to your house.
-Edition by Kerstin Brätsch and Sarah Ortmeyer
-Out of Print Book “Caught in the Act” by Dona Ann McAdams
-Name on invitation (if joining by May 5)

 
Committee
Vera Alemañi, Sarah Arison, Todd Bishop, Kerstin Brätsch, Sammy Chadwick, Kathleen Chopin, Alex Da Corte, Ken Dale, Bridget Donahue, Fairfax Dorn, Nicole Eisenman, Urs Fischer, James Fuentes, Vallejo Gantner, Suzanne Geiss, Michael Giordano, Meaghan Gragg and Hanna Liden, Spike Jonze, Maurice Sendak Foundation, Debbie Millman, Jessica Mitrani, Daniel Mitura, Modica Carr Art Advisory, Sophie Mörner, Natalie and David Neubert, Laura Owens, Sheri Pasquarella, Russell Piccione, Poppy Pulitzer, Andrea Rosen, Chris Salgardo, Tanya Selvaratnam, Cindy Sherman, Amy Sillman, Sokoloff + Associates, Jill and Bill Steinberg, Heather Thomas, Arden Wohl and Jonah Freeman 

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.

WORK THE ROOTS

With: Lileana Blain-Cruz, Charlotte Brathwaite, Eisa Davis, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Ayesha Jordan, Joie Lee, April Matthis, Jennifer Harrison Newman, Okwui Okpokwasili, Stacey Karen Robinson, Kaneza Schaal, and others.

 

Throughout spring, AFROFEMONONOMY—a supergroup of Black femme theatermakers—takes over Performance Space’s theatres to explore themes of healing and care guided by the work of literary foremother Kathleen Collins. The artists–who have been collaborators and friends for years but never worked together as a group–plan to use the residency as a sovereign space to translate the ease, free expression, and non-compulsory ethos of their informal gatherings to their working conditions and aesthetic.

WORK THE ROOTS focuses on Begin The Beguine, a quartet of Kathleen Collins’ unproduced one-acts from 1984. Collins, a visionary writer, director, and professor with a prodigious output of films, plays, novels, and short stories, died of breast cancer at the early age of 46. Her premature death, mirroring those of writers Audre Lorde and June Jordan, begs the question of black women artists and their endangered health. Along with Collins’ one-acts, the artists will also explore Eisa Davis’ The Essentialisn’t, in its overlapping concerns regarding Black women, art, health, and balance.

The four-month-long residency interacts with the public in multiple forms: a dedicated web-based radio station broadcasts AFROFEMONONOMY’s investigations and process for global listeners, a synchronized world premiere of Collins’ texts takes place outdoors in locations around the world, and projected films and an installation with the occasional live sound interaction will unfold outside and inside Performance Space’s theatre.

Please consider making a donation to Black Women’s Health Imperative, the first non profit organization created by Black women to help protect and advance the health and wellness of Black women and girls.

Afrofemononomy // Work The Roots  is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Co-production support provided by Deadria Harrington and New Georges.

Photo: Ian Douglas (cropped into heart). Pictured: Nehemoyia Young and Katrina Reid.

FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD

 
Wet ash falls from the ceiling. It slowly empties into an algae filled stream surrounded by moss covered boulders and gravel. Responding to last year’s brutal mood of apocalypse and rapture, Precious Okoyomon’s installation creates an ecosystem that seeks to hold grief. Visitors are invited to sit or stand or lay down in the uncomfortable space of mourning that we so often avoid.
 
An important material here is the ash from the incinerated kudzu, grown for Okomoyon’s most recent exhibition, Earthseed, at the MMK in Frankfurt. The vine, originally from Japan, was used to prevent soil erosion resulting from the cultivation of cotton during slavery; a bandage intended to cover up the environmental tolls of slavery, it instead proliferated, and became known as “the vine that ate the south.”
 
With FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD Okoyomon creates a new world in the Keith Haring Theatre, a wake for death allowing for catharsis, celebration, and closing: “2020 was the reckoning of death, and we’re still living in it. We have to face it and live in it and allow it to change us and be changed by it.”
 
Medium: moss, gravel, soil, ladybugs,crickets, mud, anoles, kudzu ash, wildflowers ❤️
 
 

Weather report

Today i wake up still the assemblage associated distortions bewilder me

IN THIS WORLD I AM A SHAPESHIFTER

FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD

In the supernatural sky

I was restful as I had reached my place of salvation

The surface as a material structure neither heaven nor solace

Only the wind

Only quenched light

Lulled into covering until everything was the same

soul object well formed

the irreducible always already truth

Hidden in the trees

It is nothing i am here i am still here

desire dissolves away

glug glguhhh guhhhh i drink gulps of light

Putting myself back together

The rain pushes all the glyphosate

and

polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons down into the ground

industrial operation rehearses suffering its moves the world with terrible momentum shift me into dimensional alienation

CONSTRUCT AN OBSTRUCTION ALREADY WEAPONIZED WITHIN

THE SURFACE IS THE LOSS OF WHAT IS ALREADY MISSING WITHIN

I look up at the sky bathed in pink

longing for a liberated psyche I could rinse of any meaning into light no former shape

Like the word, the world is dying in flames

Like rapacious gloom in the empires burning afterlife

Like looking out the window a hollow flower

Like falling into the wind

Like falling into the heavy air

Like falling to limitless love

Made into air returning into the membrane of the real high shit

Pathogenic pleasure

Like we gotta make a new world

Like fade up reform resound

Open association vacate

Reframe

Like the surprising sun is blossoming somewhere and here i am blown away into the paradox of smiling

 
 

Precious Okoyomon, FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD is made possible in part by grant from the National Performance Network.

Sean-Kierre Lyons, Creative Consultant

Dion McKenzie (TYGAPAW), Sound Designer

Michael Hernandez, Sound Engineer

Jørgen Skjaervold, Lighting/Effects Engineer

Michael DeCaul, Alexander Setzko, Gabriel García, and Robin Ediger-Seto, Scenic Carpenters

Jørgen Skjaervold and Michael Hernández, Technical Sculptors

Scenic Rock Towers by Quinn Stone, StoneDog Studios

Clay, Mulch, Delaware River Rock provided by Landscape Materials Inc.

Installation Photography by Da Ping Luo

Knowledge of Wounds

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).

Photo by Blair LeBlanc (cropped into heart)
All rights reserved by Performance Space New York
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