Archives: Shows

In the dance performance and video installation [siccer], Will Rawls experiments with stop-motion filmmaking techniques, wherein still photographs are strung together to produce a moving image, to consider how Black gestures are relentlessly documented, distorted, and circulated in lens-based media. Throughout [siccer]’s live performance, Holland Andrews, keyon gaskin, jess pretty, Katrina Reid, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste are suspended in stop-motion film shoot. When the camera’s shutter closes momentarily between photographs, Rawls and collaborators play within the intervals, taking advantage of a gap in surveillance.

The project’s title is driven by the Latin adverb “sic” which indicates incorrect spelling within a quotation and which is often employed to contrast Black vernacular speech with standard English. Rawls turns this conflict on its head in order to illuminate the verbal and physical play of Black performance as something that eludes capture on screen and in language—and that speculates on the potential of strategies for narrating the world, uncorrected.

This presentation represents the long-awaited New York premiere of the work. Co-presented by Performance Space New York and L’Alliance New York, the live performances of [siccer] accompany the artist’s exhibition at The Kitchen, a book published by Wendy’s Subway, and an album published by the artist.

We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers departs from the mainstream commemoration and reflection by Vietnam and the United States of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. While the injuries of the past remain present decades later and have been well-examined by Vietnamese-American artists, the history of experimental performance in Vietnam has emerged amidst a negotiation of ambivalence and resistance to government interference. The title of the project comes from unreleased lyrics by Ngoc Dai, a former soldier turned avant-garde composer, inferring that a radical existence can be both a refusal of the ambivalence of those in power, and enabled by that same ambivalence. 
 
To instigate a global conversation around art-making and censorship, the program provides self-determined Vietnamese-centered environments and contexts within which audiences may engage with contemporary Vietnamese practitioners. Supported by long-term residencies, conversations, and provocations in Performance Space New York’s theaters over the course of a month, the program will culminate in debut performances by four intergenerational artists, and conversations with the program’s instigators and co-organizers Anh Vo, maura nguyễn donohue, and Lumi Tan.
 
We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers is a part of a broader series of events featuring talks, screenings, publications, and more, collaboratively organized between organizations during the fall and winter seasons. Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #62 will be entirely dedicated to experimental Vietnamese performance, featuring reflections from 15 Vietnamese artists and curators including Tuong Linh Do, Vu Duc Toan, Viet Le, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Phuong Linh Nguyen, Nhung Dinh, and Tra Nguyen. Public programs include a virtual engagement with artists ahead of their residency as presented in partnership with the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University; a conversation between Lumi Tan, maura nguyễn donohue, Anh Vo, and Do Tuong Linh around the origins of the project at Asia Art Archive in America; and a series of screenings and discussions exploring select key foundational figures of experimental performance in Vietnam including Truong Tan, Vu Dan Tan, Dai Lam Linh, and Kim Ngoc.