Performance Space 122 Returns to Permanent Home, Revitalizes Programing

Performance Space 122, the birthplace of contemporary performance as it is known today, returns to its legendary home in the East Village, under the leadership of new Executive Artistic Director Jenny Schlenzka, after nearly six years presenting new works in partnership with venues across New York City. The institution will welcome the public to its newly renovated, column-free facilities at 150 1st Avenue-custom-designed by Deborah Berke Partners for interdisciplinary performance-with its 2018 Coil Festival (January 10 - February 4, 2018). Performance Space 122 will then offer a series of performances focused on the East Village itself (including Performance Space 122's own iconic history), re-anchoring the organization in the former public school building, and the now vastly-changed neighborhood where it was born in 1980.

How does one honor the roots of a legendary cultural institution without stagnating in nostalgia and sentimentalism? How does one try to understand history as a way of looking at the present and future, rather than merely contemplating the past? These are the questions that have been on Schlenzka'smind as she has taken the helm of Performance Space 122, which, over nearly four decades, has provided an inclusive haven for Penny Arcade, Ron Athey, Ethyl Eichelberger, Karen Finley, Diamanda Galás, Spalding Gray, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Holly Hughes, John Leguizamo, Carmelita Tropicana, John Kelly, Sarah Michelson, Elevator Repair Service, Reggie Watts, Young Jean Lee, Taylor Mac, Richard Maxwell, Rabih Mroué, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Adrienne Truscott, among many others. At Performance Space 122, these artists have engaged in radical experimentation and created hybrid works that existed somewhere between dance, theater, poetry, ritual, film, technology and music.

The institution is now poised to make a case for the cultural vitality and relevance of performance for the 21st century, with genre-defying programming that speaks to the political and cultural climates of today. "What I have considered my job as a curator and now as a director of an institution is to create spaces for new things to happen, things that are of the here and now," says Schlenzka, who was recently named Performance Space 122's first female artistic director, following an acclaimed tenure as a curator for MoMA PS1.

The City of New York, the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department of Design and Construction have led an extensive renovation of 122 Community Center, located at the corner of 1st Avenue and 9th Street, that houses Performance 122, The Alliance for Positive Change, Mabou Mines, Painting Space 122 and a fifth tenant to be announced soon. The new design provides Performance Space 122 with two state-of-the-art performance spaces. A formal grand opening event for the full building will be scheduled for this winter.

Performance Space 122's two multidisciplinary spaces are relocating to the top floor where the roof framing has been raised to allow high ceilings. The larger space is column-free and multi-configurable with 199 seats and windows that line both 9th and the building's courtyard, as well as state-of- the-art sound and projection capabilities. The other, smaller, space will have 87 seats and looks out over 1st Avenue and 9th Street.

Performance Space 122 first reanimates its home with the 13th annual Coil Festival,including works from Heather Kravas, David Thomson, Dean Moss, Dane Terry, Angela Goh, and Atlanta Eke. Seattle-based choreographer Heather Kravas returns to the festival with visions of beauty, a dance that evokes questions about collectivity, as nine dancers embody a clashing of minimalism and transgressive action (January 10-13). Australian dancer/artist Atlanta Eke's Body of Work(January 10 & 11) poses the question, "what is contemporary?" The performance is enacted and documented by cameras that loop Eke's image against itself-existing in the present, projecting movement into the future, while simultaneously being captured as an echo of the past. Dane Terry returns to Performance Space 122 with Jupiter's Lifeless Moons, a performance that intermixes storytelling, music, and theater, with Terry recounting surreal and foreboding stories from a bizarre zoo-working stint in Cleveland, OH (January 12-17). Sydney-based dancer/performance artist Angela Goh performs Desert Body Creep, which, per the artist, "feasts on the corpse of a post-post everything world" (January 16 & 17).

Dean Moss and his companyGametophyte Inc.'s interdisciplinary Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant-based performance, Petra,follows, transforming the themes of Fassbinder's subversive 1972 maternal melodrama into a wry critique of America's diversity discourse (January 23-27). The festival concludes with the world premiere of David Thomson's he his own mythical beast, which uses a variety of literary and cinematic influences, as well as a character modeled after Sarah Baartman (aka "the Hottentot Venus") to examine race within a postmodern society (January 31-February 4).

From February to June, Performance Space 122 will present its first themed series-a new, semi-annual mode of programming devised by Schlenzka to further expand the organization's ideal of interdisciplinarity and hybridity-not only the blurring of genres within works, but also the blurring of lines between separate artists' visions and philosophies. Through their placement within a larger themed series, the performances, installations, and readings will create a vital dialogue. The first series focuses on the drastically altered neighborhood in which the organization was established, and to which it now returns: the East Village. The series will bring together works by both Performance Space 122 veterans and newcomers alike, with programming that looks toward a neighborhood's history as a guide to its future.

As part of the East Village series, Performance Space 122 will pay homage to the punk culture that grew from the neighborhood during the 1970s and 1980s with a multiform tribute to the late postmodern punk poet/novelist Kathy Acker, featuring a group exhibit, a marathon reading, screenings, and more. Author Sarah Schulman's work, particularly Gentrification of the Mind, has examined changes in the neighborhood to critique the capitalist capacity to profit from marginal communities and their erasure-both physical (as in the AIDS epidemic and New York real estate's parisitism of the ignored and dead) and mental (in pushes towards mainstream capitalist assimilation). Schulman discusses having "loved and learned from" Kathy Acker in that book, and describes Acker's death from breast cancer at 50 as "another elimination of free space, another shrinking of the community of noncorporate thinking." Schulman and numerous others will honor Acker's legacywith a marathon collective reading of her 1978 novel Blood and Guts in High School.

Art provocateur Bjarne Melgaard's effortless rejection of the mainstream gentrification of gay culture feels born from the punk mentality, with the likes of his orgiastic graffiti-ish paintings, furiously messy multimedia pieces with titles like "The Synthetic Slut: A Novel," and meth-smoking Pink Panther replica all nodding to a time when gayness was seen as abject, and gay sex was thereby itself radical. Melgaard will co-curate a group exhibition on Kathy Acker, whose hypersexual feminism was steeped in the culture of '70s and '80s Downtown New York.

Beyond the Acker-oriented East Village programming, Choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, guitarist Chris Cochrane, and poet/novelist Dennis Cooper will revive THEM, their cacophonous and unblinking work that, in response to the AIDS epidemic, depicted the ways men could be with men, at Performance Space 122, where it made its trailblazing debut in 1986. Likewise returning to the institution is legendary Downtown New York rabble-rouser Penny Arcade, who continues to tear down oppressive conventions in her fifth decade of biting performance. The East Village series will also feature the U.S. premiere screening of shrieking "high priestess of death goth" (The Guardian) soprano Diamanda Galás' film SCHREI 27, based on Schrei X, which she performed and recorded at Performance Space 122.

New commissions from choreographers Sarah Michelson and Yve Laris Cohen will be performed in the series. Michelson has been a defining presence at Performance Space 122 through the years, presenting work like the site-specific two-part Shadowmann and Group Experience in the space, and constantly remapping the lines between audience and performance. Cohen is interested in dance as it responds to architecture; his new piece will be a site-specific work made for Performance Space 122's new theater.

Artist/filmmakerTiona Nekkia McClodden will present CLUB, an installation performance that transforms the space into a club of sorts and thereby transforms a club into a work of sculpture, with sound installations, lighting, video, objects, and ephemera referencing legendary Lower East Side clubs. Fashion label Women's History Museum, whose aesthetic is largely inspired by the vintage and consignment shops of the East Village, will bring a theatrical runway show to Performance Space 122, deepening the label's focus on feminine narratives using clothing, speech, puppetry, moving images, sculpture, sound, scent, taste, and screens. The East Village-themed season also features BRUJAS, the feminist art collective with a passion for radical politics, streetwear, and skateboarding, who will activate Performance Space 122 with an installation and programming that is to be announced. BRUJAS founder Arianna Gil grew up skating in the East Village and Lower East Side, and was known as the "Tompkins Square Babysitter" at the local skate park; now, she and the BRUJAS will bring a display of public enjoyment and expression to a neighborhood that has, since her youth, been engulfed by privatization.

Details on further programming for the East Village series, for which tickets will go on sale January 4, 2018, will be announced soon.