Archives: Shows

Traversing dance and visual art, Laris Cohen’s work explores the relationship between the two fields, tracking their overlapping and divergent techniques and structures of support. He often focuses on the specific architectural and economic conventions of the black box, white cube, and sprung floor. For the opening of Performance Space New York’s new theater, Laris Cohen’s new work, P.S.122, maps aesthetic and political fault lines among the building’s tenants over the past 40 years, bringing discrete groups into ambivalent collaboration.
 

What better way to celebrate the opening of our new spaces and the East Village Series than with an expanded open house Avant-Garde-Arama – our longest running program – welcoming everybody back to the anything-can-happen ethos at 150 First Avenue. We’re excited to share the incredible lineup of artists performing simultaneously on multiple stages in our new home with you. Join us for a night of performance, drink, and dance!
 

With Nathan Young and Joe Baker
 
The New York City neighborhood we call the East Village is part of Lenapehoking, the homeland of the first inhabitants the Lenape. Manhahtaan (the Lenape word for Manhattan) has always buzzed with economic and cultural exchange, breeding rich and diverse traditions of art, performance, and trade. To celebrate this ongoing legacy, pay respect to the original caretakers of this land, and recognize the considerable influence Native American artists have had on American performance and art, Performance Space New York is partnering with the Lenape Center—the local organization dedicated to the promotion of Lenape language and culture—for the inauguration of its newly renovated spaces. The opening celebration, led by Indigenous artists and leaders, is the beginning of an ongoing relationship between the local arts community and Lenape people on Lenapehoking.
 

A meditation on the mythologies and contradictions of identity, race, gender, and the black body in post-modern American culture.

he his own mythical beast interrogates the complexities of American culture and draws from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, James Baldwin, the confession booth, Claudia Rankine, high school fights, Judith Butler, baptism, Roland Barthes, and Trisha Brown. Venus, a character that flirts with black face, gender ambiguity and sexuality, becomes a guide on this journey. Part beast and part myth, Venus is named after the Hottentot Venus, aka Sarah Baartman – an enslaved black woman who was exhibited as an exotic in the early 19th Century London and Paris. This code-shifting chimaera is Thomson’s response to the post-modern performance aesthetic that historically privileged neutrality as a means of subverting the personal narrative.

This project has consisted of several iterative installations and performances that began in 2012 and will culminate in January. It is created and co-directed by David Thomson, who also performs, and features sound and visual design by Peter Born, who also serves as co-director. Clarinda Mac Low is the dramaturg. Other performers include: Jodi Bender, Katrina Reid, and Paul Hamilton.

These performances include an installation, so please consider arriving earlier than showtime to view.

A masochistic autobiographical meditation on desire, Petra examines race, sex, and power through the lens of service and unrequited love. Moss’ new dance work is inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film, “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”, and features a female immigrant cast that transforms this subversive maternal melodrama, into a wry critique of America’s diversity discourse.

Directed by Dean Moss, with music performed live by composer Samita Sinha, the imagined and real lives of the performers merge, and parallels are drawn between theirs, his, and the film’s queer, anxiety-laced explorations of ambition, subjection and dispossession.

Drawing upon “She whose head is severed” – a Hindu goddess associated with self-sacrifice, spiritual awakening, and the erotic power – Petra features women whose roles are cast in deference to their real life relationships in New York’s contemporary performance scene: Rwandan actor/director, Kaneza Schaal as Petra; Indian vocalist/composer, Samita Sinha as Petra’s lover; Japanese butoh artist/choreographer, Mina Nishimura as Petra’s sister; Finnish contemporary dancer/choreographer, Sari Nordman as Petra’s daughter; and Filipino dancer/choreographer/co-founder of Topaz Arts, Paz Tanjuaquio as Petra’s mother. The family roles are further double-cast to form the singular role of Marlene, Petra’s mute office/personal assistant.

Video performers: Julia Cumming, Sunny Jain, Grey Mcmurray, Marya Warshaw, and Asher Woodworth.