First Mondays invites our communities to experience readings of unpublished works and works in progress by an intergenerational group of vanguard writers. This season we continue to gather over free drinks in our theaters to hear writers discuss what’s on their mind and get a glimpse of the future of literature.
For more than 5 years, First Mondays has brought readers and writers together to celebrate the written word from diverse perspectives and genres, all for free.
Archives: Shows
The Snow Queen
First Mondays invites our communities to experience readings of unpublished works and works in progress by an intergenerational group of vanguard writers. This season we continue to gather over free drinks in our theaters to hear writers discuss what’s on their mind and get a glimpse of the future of literature.
For more than 5 years, First Mondays has brought readers and writers together to celebrate the written word from diverse perspectives and genres, all for free.
Palabre/s en mode marron
Symposium
The Neilma Sidney Theatre
December 6 – 7
Free
Performance
The Keith Haring Theatre
December 6 – 7 | 7pm
Tickets
Artist Bintou Dembélé presents Palabre/s, a gathering of artists, academics, activists, and more with connections to Paris and the French West Indies. This program will feature a day of exchanges and encounters with conversations, film screenings, readings, DJ sets, and workshops, culminating in a dance performance by Dembélé, performed by Michel “Meech” Onomo. Palabre offers a dedicated space for artists’ voices, conflict resolution and community engagement while cultivating diasporic exchange among scholars, stakeholders, and activists (conversations with Bintou Dembélé, their guests and communities from New-York, movie screenings, a family space and a DJ set). Working collaboratively with Performance Space and L’Alliance New York to bring communities together, Dembélé demonstrates the multifaceted nature of performance.
Dembélé’s work explores ritual and corporeal memories, interrogates gender dynamics, and addresses both individual and collective wounds of the past. Palabre/s is an iteration of a series she has presented several times in the past, which, with the blessing of the Bushnengue elders of French Guiana, allowing her to invent a ‘Maroon Dance,’ a memory of marronnage – of descendants of Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean who created new, free societies on the margins of slavery and colonization.
As part of the invitation (we would like to keep the word invitation to stay within the semantics of a ritual), Bintou Dembélé also presents movement-based work (this formulation is weird – can you elaborate) that blends together this ritual practice of palabre (conversation) with the essence of Hip Hop. They assume the role of MC and orchestrate the flow of speech within the space, inviting vulnerability and fragility and enabling participants to find common ground and collectively reimagine new narratives. As an artist, Dembélé unearths the memories buried in bodies, souls and minds, as a living archive of another point of view on histories of French enslaved people and colonial histories more generally.
Organizational Strategic Consultant
What does a consultant do?
What are they offering?
What are they consulting on?
And what solutions do they provide?
“Consultants are the wackest performers of corporate America,” says artist Nile Harris, setting the tone for his year-long engagement with Performance Space New York as an Organizational Strategic Consultant. He immerses himself in the inner workings of the organization and uses consultancy as a framework to explore the intricacies of non-profit institutional governance, culminating in a lecture-based performance.
Harris seeks to engage with our staff and board members, conducting one-on-one interviews and dropping in on our meetings. His love for downtown theater draws him to research the Performance Space archives, and bridge the legacies of PS122’s avant-garde history with our evolving contemporary identity. He’s interested in serving as a sounding board for important questions like, “Why is the front door always locked?” Throughout the year, Harris will spontaneously present marginal micro-performances, such as reading the bylaws of the Board of Directors in the hallways and making slideshow presentations about his findings, ultimately consulting on…(?) With a background in nonprofit administration and as the co-artistic director of New York theater company, Ping Chong and Company, Harris poetically reflects on his genuine interest in bureaucratic systems and structures that he himself is deeply familiar with. Harris refers to the writings of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten who lament, “The consultant is not here to provide solutions, innovation, or even advice. The consultant exists to demonstrate access in the era of logistical capitalism.”
Through this consultancy, Harris lovingly reveals the circuitous, nonsensical, and bureaucratic nature of nonprofits, holding up a mirror for us to examine our own organizational structures.
Open Movement
As we approach our 100th Open Movement workshop, we continue our tradition of providing an open platform for movement exploration and artistic expression. Curated and organized by Monica Mirabile, Open Movement is a free program open to all ages, abilities, and levels of experience that offers both space for self-guided movement practice and artist-led workshops.
Every Sunday from noon to 4pm, we welcome you to the Performance Space New York theaters where Open Movement is held. Here, participants are invited to move in whatever way feels comfortable to them—stretching, drawing, dancing, rehearsing, and observing if they don’t feel called to move. Many in the Open Movement community describe this environment as a sacred space for self-discovery, connection, and feeling present in their bodies.
At 4pm, our program shifts to feature workshops guided by artists and practitioners. Each week, these sessions offer a unique opportunity for participants to engage in two hours of participatory practice, exploring a range of themes from movement techniques, to performance philosophies, wellness practices and beyond. Open Movement workshop facilitators are a part of our extended Performance Space network: many of these artists have been regular participants in Open Movement and have created or hosted programs in our theaters. This season will feature workshops by Elliot Reed (who presented a performance commission, You can hear footsteps, as a part of our 2023-2024 season), BE HEINTZMAN HOPE, Alexandra Tatarsky, Joni, Samer Ghadry, Zion the 83rd Lion, Morgan Bobrown-Williams, Reed Rushes, Danyela Brown, and Whitney Mallett who will also participate in this season’s performance program.
As part of our commitment to process-focused initiatives, throughout the year we also host WIP Feedback Front, a showcase of works in progress from emerging artists, many of whom are part of the Open Movement community. Artists present their projects in a casual, supportive atmosphere to get feedback while the works are still being developed. Audience members are invited to share their responses anonymously, creating open exchange between creators and observers.
At Open Movement, performance is for everyone, whether you’re experienced or a newcomer. Our mission is to provide a welcoming space for curious-minds to reconnect, ground themselves, and expand their perspectives, wherever they may be on their journey.
Alex Tatarsky, a clown by trade, is interested in all the ways we can fall apart on stage, break down, break things down, be in the brokenness, decay, decompose, and uncivilize ourselves. Let’s stop workshopping. Let’s stop working. Let’s stop shopping. No more development. Time to undevelop. What might that look like? Sound like? Feel like? In this class we will embrace the rude child and the elemental: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon. And especially where and how these elements encounter and transform one another. Water meets earth and becomes mud. Now duet with the mud. Speak from the mud. An attempt to seek pleasure in impossible circumstances. Take delight in the dirt. Turn our shit into gold.
A workshop for sluts and goblins who wanna get a little messy, in the name of making dances!
With a playful approach this workshop explores socialized notions of sexiness, while referencing the concept of the ‘hungry ghost’. In eastern philosophy the hungry ghost represents the insatiable hunger alive in people often associated with craving and addiction. It is represented most popularly by the spirit character ‘no face’ in the Hayao Miyazaki movie Spirited Away and is a focal point in Gabor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. The hungry ghost can also be found in the Gollum/Sméagul character of J.R.R. Tolkein’s novel, The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings.
We’ll be workshopping ensemble scores, playing with ways to quickly assemble group choreography.
Free with RSVP!
Counterparts. Count her parts. A workshop looking at the production and organization of body-made noise. Finding sonic meaning within body-generated sound. Listening and following Noise produced by hair growth, aging, bruising. blinking. . .
A 2-hour expansive sound journey to incite creative exploration between waking and dreaming
This practice combines meditation, sound bathing, and psychedelics-informed experiencing, using sound as the medium. Learning to incorporate the entire soundscape into our daily practice, and taking this into a darkened room as a group exercise to amplify the acoustics and become sensitive to group energetic synchronization via shared audible experience. Ideally we will craft a “waking up ” segment at the end to bring light back in slowly, or have a tea and humming moment in the cafe afterwards to further reinforce the quietude and simplicity of the state of being after 2 hours of sound meditation.
The Power of First Thought: Lessons only intuition can teach.
The Untapped Power of You: Cellular Regeneration, Healing the UnHealable.
(Includes healing foods The West will never teach, healing techniques for your teeth and healing movements for the Spine)
A series of somatic and relational exercises exploring the relationship between movement and language.
Zero point energy is the past present future. It is endless possibility. Initiation. Endless resource. Endless potential. Maximum capacity. Fullness of being. Freedom and play. Multi dimensional sensation. Fluctuation. Being.
Zero point energy is everything and everywhere.
Impressions – i press on you, you press on me. we press on it and it on us.
This workshop uses daydreams, visualizations and image making to generate free movement and embodied experiences that challenge what we experience as inside and outside, internal and external.
Using impressions – how we impress on each other and are impressed on by the textures, architecture, objects, sounds of the room and how we in turn impress on them – this workshop will explore and undo the edges of things. Undoing and moving through the edges between walls and space, bodies and thoughts, emotions and objects, messing up any natural order of “things.”
Maybe we will reach a collective feeling of boundless interconnectedness or maybe we’ll hit an edge thats just too hard to budge..
For the session the room is a room that we move through. For the session the body is a room that moves through us.
Inside us are rooms of multitude.
Radicalism is a hot commodity in our world, but counter-hegemony is precluded the moment we buy into competition. The purpose of this workshop is to name the lines we dare not cross in our art, our love and our lives. I will not be rapping and you will not be dancing, until we negate negative liberty.