A runaway at thirteen, a reform-school graduate at sixteen, a performer in the legendary New York City Playhouse of the Ridiculous at seventeen, and an escapee from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene at nineteen, Penny Arcade (born Susana Ventura) emerged in the 1980s as a primal force on the New York art scene and participant of what came to be called performance art. This autobiographical trilogy of plays represents her at her best.
Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! is Penny Arcade’s raucous sex and censorship show (which continues to tour around the world), featuring the daily life of a receptionist in a brothel, the upbringing and rearing of a “faghag,” the evolution of the New York gay scene in the 1990s, and a participatory “audience dance break.” The title work, Bad Reputation, portrays a young teen runaway’s coming of age in a Catholic reform school (run by nuns who are former fashion models) and her subsequent life on the streets of 1960s New York. La Miseria, a rare depiction of working-class Italian-Americans from a woman’s point of view that portrays the clash between working-class morals and compassion during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, rounds out the trilogy.
[amazonify]1584350695[/amazonify]Bad Reputation is the first book by and on Penny Arcade. The complete scripts are accompanied by a new interview with Penny Arcade by Chris Kraus, a range of archival photographs of the East Village scene and Arcade’s performances, an introduction by playwright Ken Bernard, and contributions by Sarah Schulman, Steve Zehentner, and Stephen Bottoms.
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About the Author
Born Susana Carmen Ventura to an immigrant Italian family in the small factory town of New Britain, Connecticut, she became Penny Arcade at age 17 while on LSD in an effort to amuse her mentor and patron, openly gay photographer/artist Jaimie Andrews. It was Andrews, a member of The Playhouse of the Ridiculous, who introduced the young Arcade to legendary director John Vaccaro. Vaccaro, then directing Kenneth Bernard’s potent play The Moke Eater, subsequently gave Penny her theatrical debut in the groundbreaking production. Soon after, Arcade became a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory with a featured role in the Morrissey/Warhol film Women In Revolt but quickly found the life of an upcoming pop tart too one dimensional and fled to Amsterdam.
In 1980, La Mama’s Ellen Stewert and Vaccaro invited her to recreate her 1970 New York role in Ken Bernard’s play Nite Club. She returned to New York after nearly a decade of abroad to resume her apprenticeship with many of the greats of American experimental theatre including Jack Smith, Jackie Curtis and Charles Ludlam. In 1985 Arcade began creating her own improvisational and unscripted solo work. In 1989 she began to create group work, beginning with her commission from Engarde Arts for whom she created A Quiet Night for Sid and Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel.
1990-91 was a prolific period for Arcade during which she wrote four full length shows, including the core of her autobiographical trilogy; Based on A True Story, Invitation to The Beginning Of The End Of The World and La Miseria. It was also in 1990 that she created her most famous work, her sex and censorship show, BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE! A blend of political humanism, freedom of expression and erotic dancing, BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE! toured the world twice both as an international festival as well as a commercial hit in 20 cities around the world.
In the time since BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE! Penny has seen Bad Reputation her all girl show (with a few gay men who wanted their own dance number!) premiere in NYC at Performance Space 122 in March of 1999 and later in Manchester, England, and Glasgow Scotland. Her New York Values – an autopsy on the death of Bohemia and the commodification of rebellion – also had its premiere at PS 122 in spring of 2002 as a group show and has been performed as a solo show in Los Angeles, Austin, Frankfurt, Heldelberg and the Royal Festival Hall in London.
Since 1999 Penny has spearheaded the award winning documentary series Stemming The Tide of Cultural Amnesia, The Lower Eastside Biography Project, an oral history and downtown performance project cum training program sponsored in part by Manhattan Neighborhood Network. She is a member of Feminists for Free Expression, The National Coalition Against Censorship, Visual Aids, and the artist/art professional caucus that produces Day Without Art each December 1 st. In addition, she is a founding member of FEVA (Federation of East Village Artists) the producer of The Howl! Festival of the Arts. (from the official website)
7pm – January 28, 2010 X INITIATIVE 548 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 T: 917-697-4886 E: info@x-initiative.org Wu Ingrid Tsang, Zackary Drucker, and Mariana Marroquin with a video by Rhys Ernst
Addressing notions of misinformation and revolutionary impulses, PIG is a performance that stages a meeting of politically involved “girls.” This multimedia work places the trio of Zackary Drucker, Mariana Marroquin, and Wu Ingrid Tsang within a dialog about contemporary trans politics as it relates to the history of civil rights movements. Inspired by non-hierarchical forms of social gathering, PIG uses tropes of consciousness-raising and group therapy to explore language, identity, agency, and the societal construction of trans as a “monstrous biological joke.”
Born from Italian parents in Lausanne on October 8th, 1965, Massimo Furlan, after having followed training at the Beaux-Arts School of Lausanne (1984-1988), initiates an operating cycle centred on the themes of the memory and the forgetting. He exposes regularly since 1987. He’s interested in scenic representation and collaborates with several dance and theatre companies. In 2003 he establishes Numero 23 Prod, pointing out performance and installation. Thence will arise projects such as “Furlan/ Numero 23”, “International Airport”, “(Love story) Superman”, “Palo Alto”, “Numéro 10” and “Les filles et les garcons”.
The main thread of Massimo Furlan’s projects is biography. A simple and banal story, the story of a kid born from Italian parents in Switzerland, the story of a teenager like any other. There is no will to speak about himself for himself, as of something unusual. The evoked memories are those of all, at least those of a generation, born in the middle of the Sixties. His work is focused on the memory. The projects arise from memory images: the picture of a singer that hang in his sister’s room (“Je rêve/je tombe” and “Live me/Love me”); moments during which, as a child, he played football on his own in his bedroom while listening to the radio broadcasting matches (“Furlan/ Numero 23”); or when, before going to sleep, he wandered around in his pyjamas with a scarf around his neck imagining himself to be a Super hero (“(Love story) Superman”); or when, as a teenager, he fell in love with a girl and didn’t know what to say to her (“Gran Canyon Solitude”, “Les filles et les garcons”). Each work has its roots in an anecdote, a true story, made of simple elements. From the anecdote one goes to the narration, to the construction of the fiction.
Never bothered by the question of limits between styles, his performances consist of « long images ». They are almost motionless images. With very simple actions (a gesture, a movement, a glance) which remain a long time in front of the spectators, forcing them to enter, to become active, and to make some sense out of it: to build their own story.
In the course of his work, Massimo Furlan questions the act of representing: he revisits icons, tackles the question of failure and the distance between the model and the living, producing in this way a burlesque and poetic effect. Around his projects, he brings together performers with different backgrounds, from top professional players to closest friends.
Each project starts with a cycle of visions: dreamlike, phantasmagorical, enigmatic images. Those images show up higgledy-piggledy; some are related to intimate memories, and other are stuck to the present, redounding on contemporary history. Little by little bonds of sense and formal bonds appear between those images; overlapping images create a third one. Then comes a more concrete phase related to dramaturgy: the sense-identification process and the highlighting of that sense. A subjacent narration is built. The project is then presented to the collaborators. The third phase is the meeting of the whole team on stage or in the space to be invested. The construction in itself starts (light, sound, interpretation, costume, video, etc.). At this moment the images gain their own duration, their rhythm, their balance.
The choice of the places
Each project proposes a reflection about the place and establishes a dedicated space. The place depends on the story, the anecdote and the thence generated vision.
For project “Furlan/Numero 23”, the place was a stadium: « When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a major football star and winning the championship or, even better, the world cup. I dreamt about all this, alone in my room, listening to the matches live on the radio. With a little ball, I mimicked all the actions described by the commentator ». To speak about that, the wish sprang up to use a true stadium, with a true commentator, and true broadcasting, and of course, a true match in its entirety. The spectators were invited in a stadium to see a match with only one player.
For the project “(Love story) Superman”, it was a theatre stage: the images and sounds had to come out of the dark, the characters had to be isolated, lost in darkness. Theatre techniques allow all that.
To talk about the memory of the parents taking the kids to the airport on Sunday afternoons to watch airplanes take off (“International Airport”), the best thing to do was taking the spectators to the airport in order to experiment these emotions: the beauty of the place, the melancholy of remaining there and going home afterwards. In a certain way, being in the place facilitates the mental journey. It is an additional level of narration.
The concept of time is fundamental in scenic work. The duration of the images quickly became an essential point: most of the works have in common to be « long image(s) ». Long images are based on the paradoxical fact that an image in itself doesn’t have an established duration. It does not have a limit of time. Nowadays, we are used to look at many images and get quite fast bored with them, and so we wish to see other, being at this level influenced by television, publicity, and cinema. There is wish for rapidity. However, time is necessary for an image to be understood and interpreted. The images shown in the exhibition are simple images, due to the absence of speech or spectacular visual variations. They are almost motionless images. With very simple actions (a gesture, a movement, a glance) which remain a long time in front of the spectators, forcing them to enter, to become active, and to make some sense out of it: to build their own story.
“Furlan/Numero 23” is in itself one single image. It lasts 90 minutes, the duration of an entire football match. The project reproduces a match everyone knows – Italy/Germany, the 1982 World Cup Final -, but played by only one protagonist: Furlan. It’s a single image because the story is already known by everyone. It’s like a form one can immediately contemplate in its entirety. Then one starts looking at it better, « visiting » it, going round it. Time is necessary to do all that.
For the work “Girls Change Places”, the spectators take a train, by night. The train takes them to small stations where they see figures, characters, in expectance, tired, lost. The work finds its origin in the view of the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest in which Patrick Juvet took part. The train trip is built around ten stops, ten stations, ten forms, ten images. Ten moments of several minutes during which the public watches situations with characters that are motionless, or almost. The superposition of these ten enigmatic images gives one long image. The superposition is possible because the ten situations are proposed with enough time. The long image, the total experiment of duration, allows the spectator to start his own story.
In some cases, the spectator must be active to make the performance exists (“Live me/Love me” or “Me & Myself” for example) and in other he just needs to sit down and watch. In some other, he gets there by chance (“Superman Cosmic Green” or “Old Station Heroes”). It all depends on the object itself, on the themes used. To have the spectator sing, take the bus, the train or simply to make him/her sit down on an armchair in a theatre depends mainly on the anecdote and the best manner of transforming it into a story. The stadium seems to be the most logical place to speak about the dream to be a major champion. The airport is an obvious place to talk about the idea of flight, of departure.
By confining the spectator in specific positions which reawaken memories in him/her, some kind of multiplication effect happens, the sharing of a common memory, of something collective and personal at the same time.
The images built leave much place for the spectator, for his imaginary. In “Furlan/Numero 23”, the public of contemporary art and theatre, considered as being very reserved, began to play the role of supporter with much commitment and warmth during 90 minutes. The public of the performance had learned the role of football public. Anyone has in mind or experienced something connecting him/her to childhood and to the football world. Undoubtedly the vision of this solitary attempt to rewrite history, in such a pathetic and comic way, and at the same time so spectacular and simple, allows each one to find a way for him/herself, in relation with his/her own personal story. In a certain manner it is the same reaction the spectators have when they attend “(Love story) Superman” : the question of the fancy dress and childhood in relation with the question of time and ageing. All are concerned.
Performancelogía is a project dedicated to Compilation, Publication, Dissemination and Interchange of Documentation about Performance Art and Performance Artists.
Since 2006, we create this space as a Virtual Archive of Documentation with all kinds of documentation about Performance Art, understanding documentation both the photographic and video registries of performances, then an essays, theoretical texts, reviews of events and anecdotes about this discipline.
Simultaneously of compile, publish and disseminate documentation of performance art, we maintain our activity in the open call of continuing collaborations by e-mail and postal sends.
PERFORMANCELOGÍA is a project highly collaborative and participatory.The updating of this archive is continuous and permanent. We invite all performance artists, researchers, curious and interested to collaborate with this project, sending their records and documentation about performance art through email:performancelogia@gmail.com
PERFORMANCELOGÍA All about Performance Art and Performance Artists
Compilation, Publication, Dissemination and Interchange of Documentation about Performance Art and Performance Artists
Big Art Group (New York) seeks male, female and trans-variant performers and artists for their new group work, FLESH TONE, rehearsing Feb – March with performances April 15-18, 2010 at Abrons Arts Center. Diversity is important to the group. Big Art Group is a New York ensemble of performers and artists. For each new group work they aim to add one or two people to our company. To be considered, one must be adventurous, creative, dedicated and be open to a rigorous experimental practice. Applicants must live in NYC. Paid. Non-Union.
Send Cover letter/resume/pic to casting(at)bigartgroup(dot)com Subject: FLESH TONE – Open Call
*Please remember to include a cover letter in the body of the email telling us who you are and why you would like to be a part of our practice.
Scott Herondiscovered the joy of dancing while studying liberal arts at Colorado College. A move to Austin, Texas led to an accidental meeting with radical dance pioneer Deborah Hay. He participated in four of her large group workshops and has continued a long relationship with her, occasionally touring as a guest of the Deborah Hay Dance Company and interpreting her works from written texts. He is featured in her books “Lamb at the Altar” and “My Body the Buddhist.” In the mid ‘80s he performed with her company in New York City and then stayed there to pursue a career in dance.
Bypassing any formal studies, he quickly fell in with the East Village scene where he danced and performed continually with a group of experimentalists and improvisers centered around Movement Research and Performance Space 122. During this time he performed in the works of just about anyone who asked him to, including Jennifer Monson, Yvonne Meier, Carmelita Tropicana, Karen Finley, Sarah East Johnson, DD Dorvillier, Linda Austin and countless others while developing his own work as a choreographer and performer.
His solo and group work has been presented in practically every downtown New York venue including The Kitchen, Movement Research at Judson Church, Dixon Place and especially Performance Space 122 which has commissioned four evening-length works. Musical collaborators include instrument builder/bassoonist Leslie Ross and guitarist Chris Cochrane. He received a 2003 New York Dance and Theater “Bessie” Award for his body of work as a performer.
Trusting the intelligence of his whole body his dances stem from a process of open practice of the unknown. Transformations, wigs, heels, and sumptuous sets made from trash often make an appearance. Unafraid of bizarre and passionate states, he nonetheless finds classical elegance and beauty while dancing too.
He is a founding member of Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok, a gender bending, free, outdoor, political theater troupe. He has been developing his skills as a juggler, stilt dancer, tumbler and slack rope walker every summer in the parks and gardens of the five boroughs for a dozen years. He is also a long time member of Cathy Weis projects, performing her quirky low-tech video dance poems across the U.S. and Eastern Europe. More recently he has begun a continuing relationship with Hijack Dance of Minneapolis and has performed collaborative works with them across the U.S. and in Russia. (from Scott Heron
Caden Manson / Big Art Group’sCinema Fury is an ongoing series of experimental video art and musical collaborations; a spontaneous, open framework continually in production and evolution that both references the company’s history and research for current creations; resulting in unique performance-installation events. For Rhizome’s invitation at The New Museum the company is creating an evening length (1 hour) event that explores the idea of corruption in the information age, and the chaotic possibilities that arise in errors, interpolations, and interruptions in the exchange of digital transmissions. Through performative strategies of imperfect replication of characters, noise and feedback interference of texts, and the disturbance of the image of the performer, Cinema Fury opens up new interpretive pathways to understand the process of contemporary mediatization. Texts include selections from Big Art Group’s upcoming new production Flesh Tone 2010 and No Show 2011.
A phone is ringing in an empty office on the 40th floor of the IDS Center…you pick up the reciever and embark on an hourlong personal performance experience that crosses continents, dissolves borders between audience and performer, and challenges cultural expectations. German collective Rimini Protokoll has created “a thrillingly intimate production, which asks us to make the decision to be an audience member in an unusually active way” (Time Out New York). This event is a part of Out There 2010.
January 8-31 $20 ($16 Walker members) Appointments (on the hour): Tuesday-Friday, 5-10 pm; Sat-Sun, 12 noon-9 pm IDS Tower, 40th floor, 80 South Eighth Street, Minneapolis
This is a solitary performance experience. Two appointments are available each hour, and reservations may be made in pairs. Please make your advance reservation soon; spots are limited. Call 612.375.7600.
Our presentation of Call Cutta in Box in January has people intrigued and perhaps a bit anxious. Allow me to allay some fears. I caught the work last January in NYC but before I made my appointment, I waffled through my own slight suspicions … this sounds so odd – how could this be entertaining? … there’s a real chance it could be dull or simply intrusive … maybe I’m not wanting to give anything of myself today. I chose to ignore my instincts and take the plunge. It proved to be one of the most memorable performance experiences I have had, and believe me, I’ve had a few.
Maybe it was the anonymity (if I felt inclined, I could tell this person anything I wanted, we would probably never meet), or being alone in a strange office, or perhaps it was the thousands of miles between us. Whatever it was, I was completely engaged in this piece and found it absorbing, subtly mysterious, and utterly charming. My call center agent, Alakananda, elegantly guided me along our increasingly interactive (and surprise-filled) conversation, and we freely exchanged ideas on geography, work, religion, art, family – not exactly soul-searching metaphysical stuff, but I felt that there was a deeper connection, like she was an old dear friend that I had just met.
As this “phone play” is a connection between two people that shadows in and out between performance and real life, no two interactions will be exactly alike. So I’d suggest you make an appointment with a friend (we have set up the piece so that it runs in two offices simultaneously), then grab a pint or some palak paneer after the experience and talk it all over. Take a 60-minute chance – it may change the way you think about our weird wired world, who we are, and why on earth are we in Minnesota in January. This memorable experience (with great views from the IDS Tower!) is certain to spark contemplative smiles and a fresh set of questions.
Support provided by Producers’ Council members King’s Fountain/Barbara Watson Pillsbury and Henry Pillsbury: Performance space provided by Lindquist & Vennum PLLP.
The 7th edition of the Festival “CONTEXT – Platform for Contemporary Dance” is entitled “Anaesthesia of Emotions”. The starting point for the programme is the observance that in recent times emotions have been granted a special amount of attention. However it remains to be seen whether we are dealing with a boom or with a taboo concerning emotions. The sciences are already speaking about an “emotional turn”, while the arts sections of the newspapers have controversial debates about the appropriateness of speaking about emotions. What is the current state of our individual and collective emotional life? Are emotions on the advance, or are they being increasingly suppressed?
CONTEXT #7 takes a closer look at how emotions and attitudes are being staged with the means of the theatre. The main focus is on dance productions, performances and installations that reflect on strategies of producing and manipulating affects. In addition to that, and in co-operation with the cluster of excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin, there will be a series of lectures on January 30 and 31 on the Festival’s topic in its cultural and social context. In two workshops in Authentic Movement and Body-Mind Centering the link between motion (movement) and emotion will be explored under the guidance of international experts.
Yesterday the Village Voice published a piece by Tom Sellar titled “The City’s Best (And Not So Best) Progressive Theater”. Its one of the only “end of the year/decade” piece to focus on progressive/experimental/avant-garde work and companies. In it he poses…
Ten years into the 21st century, it seems a fitting time to look at the state of New York City’s theatrical avant-garde. How has it evolved over the past decade? Who’s doing the most inventive work, and who’s coming up short? What exactly constitutes a vanguard these days, and where is it heading?
Big Art Group, Radio Hole, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Thomas Bradshaw, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Les Freres Corbusier, Cynthia Hopkins, Elevator Repair Service, Witness Relocation, The TEAM, Taylor Mac, Sibyl Kempson, Improv Everywhere, and Mike Iveson are discussed among others.
Ultimately, there are degrees of “avant-garde”: Not many artists today call for, say, burning down museums and libraries in the name of new technology, as the Italian Futurists did a hundred years ago. Nor do we hear many downtown voices calling for a new order, or even for an end to a disastrous war—as theatermakers here did in the 1960s. In 21st-century New York, aspirations look milder and more careerist: Experimental stage artists want creative outlets and a responsive public. Understandably, they also seek good publicity and financial relief. But in the next era—now under way—there’s an appetite and opportunity for enlarging the theatrical experience in New York. If anyone can seize the day, it may be Big Art Group, Nature Theater, and anyone else with the intellectual muscle to build up the vanguard.
A runaway at thirteen, a reform-school graduate at sixteen, a performer in the legendary New York City Playhouse of the Ridiculous at seventeen, and an escapee from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene at nineteen, Penny Arcade (born Susana Ventura) emerged in the 1980s as a primal force on the New York art scene and participant of what came to be called performance art. This autobiographical trilogy of plays represents her at her best.
Born Susana Carmen Ventura to an immigrant Italian family in the small factory town of New Britain, Connecticut, she became Penny Arcade at age 17 while on LSD in an effort to amuse her mentor and patron, openly gay photographer/artist Jaimie Andrews. It was Andrews, a member of The Playhouse of the Ridiculous, who introduced the young Arcade to legendary director John Vaccaro. Vaccaro, then directing Kenneth Bernard’s potent play The Moke Eater, subsequently gave Penny her theatrical debut in the groundbreaking production. Soon after, Arcade became a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory with a featured role in the Morrissey/Warhol film Women In Revolt but quickly found the life of an upcoming pop tart too one dimensional and fled to Amsterdam.
In the time since BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE! Penny has seen Bad Reputation her all girl show (with a few gay men who wanted their own dance number!) premiere in NYC at Performance Space 122 in March of 1999 and later in Manchester, England, and Glasgow Scotland. Her New York Values – an autopsy on the death of Bohemia and the commodification of rebellion – also had its premiere at PS 122 in spring of 2002 as a group show and has been performed as a solo show in Los Angeles, Austin, Frankfurt, Heldelberg and the Royal Festival Hall in London.
