2010 marks the centennial of the birth of the visionary choreographer Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993). To celebrate his work and legacy, Abrons Art Center is mounting this once-in-a-lifetime weekend of reunions and re-creations.
During his tenure as the Artistic Director of the Henry Street Playhouse (1948-69), Nikolais pushed beyond the boundaries of contemporary dance to create hallucinogenic wonders of movement, lighting, sound, and setting. A pioneer of multimedia technology, Nikolais’ prolific imagination shaped 20th-century performance and continues to inspire — and astound — artists and audiences today. The Alwin Nikolais Centennial continues May 4-9 at the Joyce Theater.
From the Horse’s Mouth: Remembering Nik Featuring Murray Louis & Phyllis Lamhut April 30 | 8 pm
In this celebratory “live dance documentary,” dance legends Murray Louis and Phyllis Lamhut join with over 30 other artists, teachers, students, and fans onstage to honor Nikolais’ life and enduring influence. Curated by Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham.
ALWIN NIKOLAIS 2010: A CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION April 30-May 2
2010 marks the centennial of the birth of the visionary choreographer Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993). To celebrate his work and legacy, Henry Street Settlement is mounting this once-in-a-lifetime weekend of reunions and re-creations.
During his tenure as the Artistic Director of the Henry Street Playhouse (1948-69), Nikolais pushed beyond the boundaries of contemporary dance to create hallucinogenic wonders of movement, lighting, sound, and setting. A pioneer of multimedia technology, Nikolais’ prolific imagination shaped 20th-century performance and continues to inspire — and astound — artists and audiences today. The Alwin Nikolais Centennial continues May 4-9 at the Joyce Theater.
From the Horse’s Mouth: Remembering Nik Featuring Murray Louis & Phyllis Lamhut April 30 | 8 pm
In this celebratory “live dance documentary,” dance legends Murray Louis and Phyllis Lamhut join with over 30 other artists, teachers, students, and fans onstage to honor Nikolais’ life and enduring influence. Curated by Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham.
Homecoming Featuring Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company May 1 | 8 pm May 2 | 5 pm
Don’t miss this extraordinary opportunity to experience Nikolais’ work in the theater that served as his long-time artistic laboratory. Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company remounts the iconic Imago Suite (1963), Kaleidoscope (1956), and Noumenon (1953), and the Abrons’ Dance Ensemble performs the perennial audience favorite Tensile Involvement (1953). Curated and performed under the direction of Alberto Del Saz and Murray Louis.
Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher & Vladimir Miller /Damaged Goods & Mumbling Fish the fault lines
Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher are two celebrated choreographers, each with a very distinct style. While Stuart is known for her expressive imagery, Gehmacher’s work is more subdued. After their remarkable and fruitful cooperation in the duet MAYBE FOREVER, Stuart and Gehmacher collaborated again during the summer of 2008, on a research project for Sommerszene 08 in Salzburg. For this occasion they invited visual artist Vladimir Miller, residing in Berlin. The three artists were so inspired by their collaboration that they decided to develop the fault lines into a performance installation, which will had its world première during SPRINGDANCE 2010. In the fault lines two bodies and their vulnerability are the focal point. They manipulate each other and overlap.
Marcio Carvalho (Portugal) Portuguese artist working in the field of video, performance and photography.
Urgent Artist (NYC) Arts blog – “Media, Meta, and Mess from artists who live by their work”
Carte Blanche | The Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance (Norway) Carte Blanche was established in 1989 as the Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance. It is located in Bergen, the second largest city in Norway. From here the company tours extensively in Norway and is regularly invited to perform abroad.
Vaginal Davis Is Speaking From The Diaphragm Performance Space 122
Saturday, May 15 – Thursday, May 27 Wed – Sat at 8pm, Sun at 6pm Late Shows at 10pm: Saturday, May 22 + Thursday, May 27
An episodic series of performance that dissects the heyday of 1970s American daytime television chat and variety programs, taking the format of legendary talk shows like The Mike Douglas Show and Dinah!, which starred lesbian icon Dinah Shore. Never fear – VAGINAL DAVIS isn´t assimilating into the mainstream entertainment complex – she’s autopsying a TV staple, and re-animating it with a pantheon of live and Skype guests from various worlds of literature, dance, theatre, film and art; guests with whom she has intersected in her over 30 year career as a performance and live artist, writer and cultural raconteur.
With “Guest McMahons” downtown treasure CARMELITA TROPICANA and JENNIFER MILLER, the famed bearded lady of Circus Amok (and 2008 Ethyl Eichelberger Award Winner), audiences can expect ten different days of the unexpected, the unusual and the sublime.
— Rotating Nightly Guest Stars confirmed as of April 19, 2010 — FASHION POWERHOUSES: Rick Owens & Michelle Lamy, and Pierrot; CULTURE GUARD: Guy Trebay, Bruce Benderson, Joe E. Jefferies, Glenn Belverio, Jose Munoz, Marc Seigel, Jennifer Doyle, John Edward Hayes & Zazie De Paris; FILM GLITTERATTI: Bruce LaBruce, Michel Auder, Susanne Sachsse, Uzi Parnes & Ela Troyano, Jackie Raynal of Zanzibar Film Group; MUSCIAL PRODIGIES: Gio Black Peter, Joel Gibb of the band The Hidden Cameras, Jaime Stewart of XIU XIU, Kembra Pfahler of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Glen Meadmore, Carol Pope; ART STARS & PERFORMANCE LEGENDS: Bibbe Hansen & Sean Carillo, Billy Miller, Justin Bond, Annie Sprinkle, Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny, Mashinka Firunts & Jeremy J F Thompson, and Julie Tolentino;
Fusebox is an annual contemporary art and performance festival that takes place in Austin, TX each April. This year’s dates are April 21 – May 2. The Fusebox Festival presents contemporary art and performance that spans form and geography. The festival acts as a catalyst for new ideas, new artistic models, new languages and approaches to help us better fully engage with the issues and questions that define and inspire us as artists and audiences.
DANIEL BARROW
Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors.
LUKE SAVISKY
Luke Savisky’s multi-media performances have transformed natural and architectural settings worldwide for audiences from 1 to 50,000, exploring the limits of visual media through the use of manual film montage, mobile projection, kinetic sculpture, 3D projection surfaces, live music, choreography and performers in unique and unlikely environments. His work includes I/Tx (The I/Eye of Texas), an interactive projection of viewer’s eyes onto an 85ft water tower in downtown Austin, TX and a twenty story 35mm live architectural film montage interacting with building climbers for First Night Austin. Savisky was chosen as official media artist for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including: The Texas Filmmakers Production Fund, the Austin Film Society’s 1st D. Montgomery Award, and the 2007 Austin Table of Critics Award for Best Individual Project. Savisky was also nominated for the first Arthouse Texas Prize and the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Grant.
KAIJI MORIYAMA
Kaiji Moriyama first began his career with a musical theater company in Japan, and moved to the world of professional choreography. He has worked with a number of leading contemporary dance companies and innovative Japanese choreographers such as Kota Yamazaki, Yukio Ueshima, and Aki Nagatani.
Frédérick Gravel
In its current “temporarily final” (according to Gravel) guise, GravelWorks is a showcase of moods, humour, bodies, musical colours, short dances, pop songs, personalities and friendly impertinence. Presented in “best of ” concert form, the elastic temporality of this piece (begun in 2006), has undergone a number of variations depending on the number of artists involved and the arrangement of the stand-alone pieces as an ensemble. Whether the long or the short version, it has attracted audiences at Studio 303, Performance Mix in Soho, Tangente and The Art(prononcez dehors) during the first OFF.T.A event. Constructed like a Moebius strip, it takes the spetator on a journey between the inside and the outside of the spectacle, or, as Gravel himself suggests, from the head to the heart to the genitals, in whichever order you wish.
DonauFestival 2010 FAILED REVOLUTIONS or IS THE ANAESTHETIC SIMPLY TOO STRONG TO WAKE UP THE DAMNED ON THIS PLANET?
The Donaufestival is an annual festival of music and performance that takes place each April in the Austrian state of Lower Austria. The festival tends to showcase avant-garde rock, performance art, noise and electronica artists.
Statement from the director:
Currencies and the corresponding state entities have taught it to us: Depreciation can be created by inflation. The same goes for revolutions! Hardly any other time has spawned more revolutions than our Western late capitalist era. Advertising strategists work day and night to depreciate the notion of the revolution on technological, societal and spiritual levels by generating new ones on a running conveyor belt. Fake revolutions, naturally. They stem neither from human, and thus social, necessity, nor do they have any far-reaching consequences in societal and technological respects. On the contrary! The debasement of the idea of the revolutionary in our society goes along with the instrumentalisation of protest, revolt and anarchic excess. Anti-globalisation and environmental activists equally have their place in the system like the old leftist devotional object vendors; mohawk-styled punks (and festival organisers) like the innocuous grey-haired hippies toasting hand-in-hand with dreadlocked Twitter generation kiddies to free love with the peace pipe. Every revolutionary idea is already nipped in the bud and degenerates into a fashionable application as the fertile soil has been dug out from under its roots. But also we post-heroes in our post-revolutionary society will at one point stand up to the neck in agonising crisis floodwater. And then hell will break loose at a post-post party where the virtual cobblestones will no longer fly so peacefully through the worldwide web! Deichkind’s colourful masses are social catalytic rituals, a fusion of hysterically exaggerated hedonism with references to revolutionary gestures and symbols. At the opening, they will stage their already highly animated concert together with guests, transforming it into a discourse-operetta: a spectacle like the feverish dream of a society which in its anarchic excess might plummet into a revolution. Also the 16th century was marked by collective panic when the persecuted Anabaptists fled to Münster in order to live out their utopia. Their new society was characterised by salvation rituals, free love and mass orgies, until it was brought to the ground. Showcase Beat Le Mot use this scenario not only to bathe Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas Cranach in neon colours; above all, they reveal the Middle Ages as a laboratory of the present. Two messianic figures who relentlessly challenge traditional gender themes will infuse the festival theme with sex and revolution. Peaches will revel in her highly sexualised show with band and laser harps, and as curator she has engaged the likes of electro-beserkers Cobra Killer, the young glamour performer Theo Adams and the queer performance-party collective Ssion, amongst others. As an iconic, highly stylised art dandy, the “Gay Messiah” Rufus Wainwright has succeeded time and again in driving a spear in the flesh of mainstream American society. The immaculate messianic body appears in the midst of the illegal, queer, migrant bodies of the border-crossing cyberpunks from La Pocha Nostra and within the William S. Burroughs special, which offers a new artistic interpretation of the literary revolutionary. The artist collective Implied Violence was born in the milieu of Parenthetical Girls, Xiu Xiu, Former Ghosts and Deerhoof. Following their huge success in New York, they will be in Europe for the first time with the further development of the performance “The Dorothy K.”: a hybrid of installation, performance and happening that goes to the performers’ physical and psychic boundaries; an approach not unlike that of Julius Deutschbauer and his “Theater des Verhinderns (Theatre of Prevention)”. A performative-musical mega-project will take place in the framework of the Franz Graf exhibition in the Kunsthalle. With “Iceland Hits Danube” the artist, together with Franz Pomassl, invites important representatives from the Icelandic art network. In collaboration with the Kunsthalle, various exhibitions, installations and performances from Thomas Palme and Christian Jankowski will be realised; with the arthouse cinema “Kino im Kesselhaus” an art and short film programme curated by the Diagonale and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen will be screened; and the Galerie Stadtpark will exhibit two installation works by the British artists Haroon Mirza and Richard Sides. At some moments the festival theme will step to the background, but only seemingly: for example, with the outward-oriented internalisation scenarios of Tindersticks, múm and Carla Bozulich, or with the psychedelic and electronic border-crossings of Panda Bear, Fuck Buttons, Dan Deacon, Max Tundra or Akufen. At other moments it will again be very present: for instance, in the case of Gob Squad who will stage a media mega-revolution with the audience in “Revolution Now!” And 400asa Sektion Nord who carry us off on a psychedelic journey through time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the legendary Pink Floyd concert on Potsdamer Platz through the Balkan War to the here and now. Or Alec Empire who on the occasion of the 1999 1st of May demonstration in Berlin proved together with Atari Teenage Riot that the slogan “Riot sounds produce Riot” is not just an empty catchphrase. In the company of Nic Endo, CX Kidtronik and The Ex, he will again celebrate Labour Day: “So comrades, come rally!” A re-enactment? To a better and finer failure in Krems! Tomas Zierhofer-Kin
Gob Squad – Revolution Now!
Stadtsaal Th 06.05 20:30 Fr 07.05 20:30 Sa 08.05 19:00 A production under real conditions
Imagine that the sales assistants at H&M in Bühl Centre Krems stop working; at Media Markt customers are being left alone in the middle of sales talks via plasma screens; at Tchibo the coffee machine stops and all workers assemble in Südtirolerplatz to arm themselves with apricot schnaps and Kalmuck jackets from the local tavern. The mob keeps growing stronger, buses stop, drivers and passenger join in, together with the financial advisers and service staff of Raiffeisenbank, snack stand owners and waiters. The violent among them rob the Merkur branch in Lerchenfeld, distributing the stolen salmon sandwiches among the masses. We’re not quite there yet. But Gob Squad are making a start by declaring the revolution …
The first step has already been taken: the Stadtsaal is occupied, becoming the headquarters for these revolutionists. Access to props, and, as such, to weapons and explosives, is secured. Box office and foyer have already been occupied… without bloodshed so far. Gob Squad want to electrify the masses, using all possibilities of a large-scale media-based production: cameras, live-streams, large screens, metres of wire and wireless transmitters. This way, Gob Squad transmit their revolutionary message directly out into this world. For, the revolution is live. But where are the masses, where are the people? Wasn’t there talk of 50-60,000 extras? Gob Squad bring the revolution from the archives of history back into the present, placing it in the middle of our capitalist reality.
Together with passers-by and audience, Gob Squad reenact revolutionary actions and historic moments that have made history, also writing themselves into it, albeit not without contradictions: “We’re losing the plot, losing our way, becoming hopelessly tangled up in the maze of wealth of the Western world. We have to rethink, redefine the roles. And all that in front of rolling cameras. We have to reshuffle over and over again. Who could be that today or at least take this job? We’re collecting our thoughts, asking ourselves the same question over and over again: Who are we? What do we want? And what are we willing to do for it?”
Stadtsaal We 28.04 18:00 Th 29.04 17:00 Fr 30.04 17:00 Sa 01.05 16:00
“The world taking shape onstage is molded by those who see it, not those who are creating the world they want to see.” Theatre legend Robert Wilson brought Implied Violence as Artists in Residence to his Watermill Centre on Long Island; this is where the young American performance collective began to pull the threads for a remarkable, performative large-scale enterprise entitled “The Dorothy K” which wowed the art and theatre world at last year’s New Island Festival in New York. With the further development of their work, which blurs the boundaries between performance, dance, installation, theatre and art pop while exhausting its performers to the point of physical and emotional breakdown, Implied Violence will be celebrating their European debut at the donaufestival. With the great Hermes Phettberg as guest performer! “The Dorothy K.” will open its gates for several hours every day, inviting visitors to a durative installation, the daily major-live-performance (see daily line-ups) as well as to a number of other actions and interventions which will be announced on the festival premises at short notice. Collaborating closely with Zac Pennington and The Parenthetical Girls, Implied Violence has created a piece that frequently spins out of control, manipulates the flexibility and rigidity of the American moral code, exhausts its performers to the point of physical breakdown highlighting the difference between difficult, strenuous, thrashing movement and true ecstatic fits. Zac Pennington, in collaboration with Implied Violence, has created a beautiful and menacing four-part suite beginning with “The Plague of Marcus”. These songs chart the epic fall and destruction of the principal characters in Erich Von Stroheims’ most brilliant and mysterious film “Greed”. Text sends the audience through different phases of experience as well: as quiet, delicate explanations of the subtext of images; as a chattering and full undercurrent of action, providing highly textually choreographed moments framed by the images and actions that are sitting on top of the text; as its own narrative through-line that has nothing to do with action, image, or sound. These disparate sets of text used within the play construct complex layers of codependence that illustrate the way the characters relate to one another in their moral game.
testperformancetest is a multi-year experiment founded by Julie Thornton that brings a curated mix of national and international performance work to Austin. Occasionally, the fund will commission new work performed in Austin.
Julie Thornton received her BFA in Ballet from the University of Akron. After dancing professionally and teaching for several years, she retired from dancing and now serves on the board of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, ArtPace in San Antonio, and Performa in Manhattan. She is also on board of Arthouse, where she serves as the board chair and founder of the Arthouse Texas Prize, Texas’ only statewide contemporary art prize.
The Kitchen presents Whispering Pines 10, new work by artist Shana Moulton and musician Nick Hallett, Friday and Saturday, April 16 and 17 at 8pm The Kitchen 512 West 19th Street Tickets are $10.
The Kitchen will present the premiere of Whispering Pines 10. The piece is the latest in video and performance artist Shana Moulton’s ongoing video serial about Cynthia, an anxiety-ridden hypochondriac whose constant search for health and happiness leads her to fad cures and new age kitsch, creating situations in turn comic, contemplative, and surreal. Moulton collaborates with composer-vocalist Nick Hallett to transform the work into a live electronic chamber opera, woven out of pop melodies, extended vocal techniques, alternative sound controllers and a flexible instrumentation performed by Hallett along with the soprano Daisy Press and harpist Shelley Burgon.
In Whispering Pines 10, Moulton stars as Cynthia, enveloping herself in her original multi-channel video design, which tackles the divide between low and high production values through the use of green-screen compositing and interactive technology. An adventurous use of multimedia —produced at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center—assists in realizing the dreamlike worlds of Cynthia’s subconscious. Music plays an important part in the Whispering Pines series and there is a musical theater-like sensibility which Moulton and Hallett mine in the creation of this original opera. Cynthia, who does not typically speak, experiences her thoughts as voiced in songs by Hallett, Press and Burgon.
Over the course of nine video episodes and related installations and performances, the Whispering Pines series has probed various aspects of new age culture, reveling in its allures of self-realization and otherworldliness, while also questioning its appropriation of non-Western spiritual belief systems and drawing comparisons to “visionary” approaches to the creation of art, such as those of Georgia O’Keefe and Kenneth Anger.
To celebrate 10 years of innovative work, Big Art Group takes over all three Abrons Art Center performance spaces with projects past, present, and future.
April 15-18, 2010 Abrons Art Center Henry Street Settlement 466 Grand Street, NYC t:212.598.0400 f:212.505.8329 www.abronsartscenter.org
10 Years of Big Art Video
THE SLEEP in the Experimental (NYC Premiere)
April 15-18, 2010 at 7:00pm $15
The Sleep mixes early cinema techniques, magic lantern, concept album and Big Art Group’s Real Time Film technique into a live see-though movie adapted from M. P. Shiel’s 1901 story, “The Purple Cloud,” in which a lone explorer races to the North Pole while a poison purple cloud covers the earth. His subsequent return to the remnants of civilization drives him into a crisis of being, in a classic “last man” adventure that eerily presages catastrophic climate change. Live music by Theo Kogan, Sean Pierce, and Jemma Nelson.
FLESH TONE in the Playhouse (Preview)
April 15-18, 2010 at 8:30pm $15
Big Art Group’s new project Flesh Tone is told through hybrid, hallucinatory storytelling influenced by steely Hollywood thrillers and filtered though the company’s breathtaking mediated performance techniques, Real Time Film and Green Screen Performance. A character-driven critique of the American way of looking at the world, Flesh Tone turns the visual economy of the US into an acid bath of self-exposure. Confronting social issues of economic and environmental degradation, a war-scarred national psyche, and transformed bodies, Flesh Tone queries Image-America about a possible path to reconciliation with its own transmogrified reflection. This live performance spans cinema, visual art, and spectacle in an utterly unique, compelling event.
Flesh Tone returns to the conceptual and performative model of Real Time Film and Live Green Screen Performance technique the group pioneered in 2001 with its trilogy of works Shelf Life, Flicker, and House of No More. Flesh Tone delves deeper into the techniques and the questions these hybrid forms raise, moving beyond the Film-Theatrical hybrid of the group’s earlier works to create a theatre of mediated information in which action, re-enactment and special effect create a participatory spectacle with the “active editor” audience member. For Big Art Group, the theatrical event is based not on illusion, but on a synthesis of simulation and impersonation, on the ritualized action of recreating a readable, multi-layered Image Theatre.
2 FOUR CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATIONS in the Underground
SOS/Animals was filmed on location in the industrial district of Greenpoint Brooklyn with the Animals from Big Art Group’s 2009 group work SOS.
The Imitation is based on the 2008 group work by the same name and features singers Theo Kogan and Justin Bond.
April 15-18, 2010 Noon to 10pm FREE
Ticket Info
TAKE OVER (Both shows in one day) package discounts the admission to see both The Sleep (7:00pm) and Flesh Tone (8:30pm). $25
OPENING NIGHT VIP TAKE OVER Package covers admission to see both The Sleep (7:00pm) and Flesh Tone (8:30pm) on opening night, April 15. VIPs receive a Big Art Group gift bag, an invitation to the after-performance toast with the company, and free admission to the after party at the Delancey Bar, 168 Delancey Street. $100
PS 122 Avant-Garde-Arama Friday, April 16 + Saturday, April 17 Doors open at 8PM $20, $15 (students/seniors)
With The Wooster Group curating the latest installment of Avant-Garde-Arama! one can expect two evenings of performance shorts and a nightly party that will “simulate the effects of a finely graded hallucinogen on a hyper-intelligent brain” – Ben Brantley The New York Times (on The Wooster Group). Each evening, of course, will be meta-framed by A.G.A! co-founder Salley May’s customary extravagant introduction and welcome.
Founded in 1976, The Wooster Group is an ensemble of artists who, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, make work for theatre, dance, and media. The many young people who intern there and sometimes move into positions in the company have long been their lifeblood. They are often artists in their own right who go on to make their own work. The Wooster Group’s Booty Call Avant-Garde-Arama! will feature some of these folks, people who have been drawn to the Group and in some sense share its artistic spirit.
FRIDAY:
MC: Eric Dyer of Radiohole’s “Outrageous” New Yorker ‘Whatever, Heaven Allows’
Stiven Luka & Jean Coleman
Cynthia Hopkins
Daniel Pettrow
Esra Chelen
Andrew Schneider
Band TBA
SATURDAY:
MC: Jibz Cameron/Dynasty Handbag the “Crackpot genius” Village Voice
Yvan Greenberg’s Laboratory Theater
Enver Chakartash
Jamie Poskin & Daniel Jackson’s Haptic Response Team
Maurina Lioce
Jim Findlay
Live music by: Kelley McRae
Installation by Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty *Line up subject to change
The Sleep will be performed as part of Big Art Group‘s 10th anniversary weekend festival at Abrons Art Center in NYC April 15-18, 2010 and Big Art Group has released the concept album for the NYC premiere.
THE SLEEP in the Experimental (NYC Premiere) April 15-18, 2010 at 7:00pm Click here for Tickets – $15
The Sleep mixes early cinema techniques, magic lantern, concept album and Big Art Group’s Real Time Film technique into a live see-though movie adapted from M. P. Shiel’s 1901 story, “The Purple Cloud,” in which a lone explorer races to the North Pole while a poison purple cloud covers the earth. His subsequent return to the remnants of civilization drives him into a crisis of being, in a classic “last man” adventure that eerily presages catastrophic climate change. Live music by Theo Kogan, Sean Pierce, and Jemma Nelson with toy theatre performances by David Commander and Jonathan Farmer. Direction and video design by Caden Manson. System design by Jared Mezzocchi. Associate produced by Linsey Bostwick. Supported by the Greenwall Foundation.
