Post-show talk on Friday, November 16 with Cynthia Carr.
Best known for his boundary-pushing body mutilations, Ron Athey has been pursuing the transcendent and sublime for more than three decades. After the Death of God (famously proclaimed by the philosopher Nietzsche who anticipated the end of religion in Western society), Athey considers it one of the artist’s roles to invent new forms of ritual and celebration, to conjure the sacred as an antidote to the empty individualism of contemporary life. For his new work, Acephalous Monster, Athey turns to the Acéphale, the figure of the headless man, which inspired George Bataille’s secret society of the same name to combat nihilism and fascism before the Second World War in France. The headless or beheaded man is a powerful symbol of radical transformation, the driving force of all of Athey’s performances pushing towards the merging of humans and gods.
Archives: Shows
The Slow Room
Few artists have taken the idea of technological theater further than Annie Dorsen. Whereas most productions that address the digitization of everyday life stop at the inclusion of, say, video and computer-generated imagery, Dorsen hands the very act of creating a play over to algorithmic processes. The result of “collaborating with algorithms as full creative partners,” as Dorsen puts it, is its own theatrical form that she has termed algorithmic theater. It shatters our notion that a play’s worth lies in how aptly it reflects our humanity back to us and reveals the dramaturgical potential at the heart of the digital code. For her new work, The Slow Room, Dorsen uses more traditional theatrical means to explore the uncertain space where the virtual meets the embodied.
*Post-show talk on Friday, September 28.
The Slow Room is commissioned by the Spalding Gray Consortium – On the Boards in Seattle, Performance Space New York in NYC, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. The Slow Room is also commissioned by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Creative Team
Director: Annie Dorsen
Scenic Design: Marsha Ginsberg
Lighting Design: Isabella Byrd and Cheyenne Sykes
Dramaturg: Tom Sellar
Costume Design: Robert Croghan
Sound Design: Ian Douglas-Moore
Producer: Natasha Katerinopoulos
Algorave Arcade
Performance Space New York X Babycastles X LiveCodeNYC
Performance Space New York teams up with artist-run collectives Babycastles and LiveCodeNYC for this special East Village edition of an Algorave inside an Arcade.
Unplug and enjoy the creative side of technology through music and games. We’ll be presenting an Algorave, a code based dance party with visuals and music programmed in real time, inside an arcade filled with games made by independent videogame artists. Using systems built for algorithmic music and visuals, such as IXI Lang, puredata, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Extempore, Fluxus, TidalCycles, Gibber, Sonic Pi, FoxDot and Cyril, musicians are able to compose and work live, breaking down artificial barriers between the people creating the software algorithms, the people making the music, and the people on the dance floor.
Babycastles
Babycastles is a non-profit artist-run collective with roots in New York’s D.I.Y. culture. We are dedicated to building platforms for diversity in video games culture at every level. We connect the independent game developer community with the broader New York art community, identifying exciting new voices from around the world and providing them exposure to new audiences.
LiveCode.NYC
LiveCodeNYC is a group of coders, designers, gamers, musicians and digital artists who practice performative programming in real time. We view live coding as a methodology that is not medium specific. We organize events including workshops, talks, festivals, and Algoraves. We run these events out of love for making cool things with code. The core of what we do is share live coding, whether discussing types at our meetups or teaching a system one of us built.
Algorave Arcade is co-presented by Performance Space New York with an implementation grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for the Building Demand for the Performing Arts Program.
Gala 2018
Performance Space New York’s Gala
Honoring Eileen Myles
Visionary Award Anna Deavere Smith
Tribute Deborah Berke Partners
Hosted by Jennifer McSweeney, Michael Stipe
Dinner by Angela Dimayuga
Creative Direction Leilah Weinraub
Editions:
Kerstin Brätsch and Sarah Ortmeyer
Collier Schorr Photograph of Anne Imhof’s Faust
Longsleeve by HBA’s Paul Cupo and Bjarne Melgaard
The Gala funds our 2018 programming.
Eileen Myles
is a poet, novelist and art journalist. Evolution (poems) will be out from Grove in fall, 2018. Afterglow (a dog memoir) came out in 2017. Other books include Cool for You, I Must Be Living Twice (new & selected poems) and Chelsea Girls, re-released in 2015. They have received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, The Foundation for Contemporary Art and in 2016 were awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in Art Writing. They live in NYC and Marfa TX.
Anna Deavere Smith
is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author. Her most recent play and film, Notes from the Field, look at the vulnerability of youth, inequality, the criminal justice system, and contemporary activism.
In 2012, President Obama awarded her the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal. She was the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts. In 2015, she was named the Jefferson Lecturer, the nation’s highest honor in the humanities. She was the 2017 recipient of the Ridenhour Courage Prize. She was the 2017 recipient of the George Polk Career Award in Journalism.
Smith is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University, where she is also University Professor at Tisch School of the Arts.
She serves on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art, The Aspen Institute, The Yale School of Drama, The American Museum of Natural History, and the Playwrights Realm.
Deborah Berke Partners
is a New York–based architecture practice led by partners Deborah Berke, Maitland Jones, and Marc Leff, and senior principals Stephen Brockman and Caroline Wharton Ewing. Together, they distill complex considerations—environmental, social, and aesthetic—to their essence. From visionary master plans to the focused details of interiors, Deborah Berke Partners works at all scales with transformative outcomes. The firm’s most significant work includes the 122 Community Arts Center in New York City; the Distribution Headquarters for Cummins Inc. in Indianapolis; the Rockefeller Arts Center in Fredonia, New York; the interior architecture and design of 432 Park Avenue in New York City; 21c Museum Hotels across the US; the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut; and numerous residences for private clients. The firm received a National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in 2017.
Kiki Ball
In 1993, the AIDS Service Center NYC (now Alliance for Positive Change) opened its Lower East Side Drop-In Center in the same building as Performance Space 122. Among the locals impacted by HIV/AIDS—the population the organization supports—are many young LGBTQ people of color who are members of the Kiki scene.
Emerging out of the historical House/Ballroom community, the Kiki scene is a highly organized and creative youth-led organization. It centers around so-called houses, with complex kinship structures, that function as vital support systems—support systems that the government and biological families often fail to provide. The underground scene is best known for its lavish balls, where performers present their unique looks and movement styles, competing in different categories for their respective houses. Kiki Ball celebrates 25 years of neighborship between Alliance for Positive Change and Performance Space New York, and the shared believe that community and performative expression can save lives.
This event was made possible with support from the Howard Gilman Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.