Performance Space New York Announces HEALING SERIES This Fall

Performance Space New York has announced the Healing Series, a year-long reflection for the organization on the political potency of healing and the role performance plays in it, in the midst of what feels like a momentous shift in art-making to center modes and practices of care. Artists commissioned for Fall 2022-the first half of the series' programming-include Niall Jones, who disturbs and reorders the site of the theater as a means to collapse matter and meaning (C O M P R E S S I O N, October 24 - October 28); Performance Space New York 02020 cohort member and Open Movement organizer Monica Mirabile, working with collaborating artists on a movement vocabulary developed through therapeutic processing (All things under dog, where two things are always true, November 16-18); and Moriah Evans, and positions choreography as an expansive social process (Remains Persist, December 10-11, 17-18).

In the midst of a pandemic that refuses to cease while politicians in turn refuse to acknowledge it; the wrenching repeal of Roe v. Wade; and the unremitting traumas caused by state violence, gun violence, and hate; the Healing Series looks predominantly to artists who situate healing as a political act. It's no coincidence that embodiment and movement are foundational to artists programmed throughout the first half of the series. Contemporary science confirms what healers and bodyworkers have known for a long time-that trauma is stored within the body and that we cannot talk or think ourselves out of it; we have to move through it to process it. Artists' distinct practices overlap as they interrogate and collapse conventional dichotomies of mind and body, often externalizing the interior, and reflecting society's machinations on the canvases of our beings. Works consider the inseparability of physical and emotional trauma, and what the ongoing processes of healing them might look like.

Performance Space New York Executive Artistic Director Jenny Schlenzka said, "There's a lot of emphasis in our society on the individual's process of healing, and, in a limited and colonial view, a separation between the body and the mind-not to mention separating the roles of artist and healer. Artists we're working with this coming year address how, if we want to transform as a society, we have to work through the traumas we've been subjected to, and address how they are unevenly distributed along the lines of our social hierarchies and power structures. Performance, dance, and embodied art forms can play a vital role in how we might transcend isolated and individualist notions of healing toward thinking about it collectively, breaking open our perceptions of the boundaries between our wellbeing and others', between our bodies and minds."

Fall 2022 features the continuation of long-standing and evolving programs including the Sarah Schulman-organized reading series First Mondays, for which authors invite their communities to experience their works-in-progress, and through which Performance Space New York explores the interdisciplinary potential of literature within a performance context; and Octopus, now renamed the John Giorno Octopus Series after the late, influential performance poet, and similarly offering artists and guest curators a chance to bring in their creative communities. (This season of Octopus specifically convenes artists whose work surrounds healing.) As these artist-centric evening-length programming series continue to unfold, they expand Performance Space's approaches to gathering around art as a potential for creating community. Open Movement-the early Performance Space tradition reimagined for today's artists and communities by Monica Mirabile and facilitated by Mirabile and Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda-offers free access to artistic experimentation, play, and disruption.

In a vital partnership, from September 9-October 15, David Zwirner and Performance Space New York will co-present the group exhibition A Maze Zanine, Amaze Zaning, A-Mezzaning, Meza-9, exploring the interaction between painting and performance, in Zwirner's 519 w 19th Street location.

See Healing Series/Fall 2022 programming details below:

NIALL JONES: C O M P R E S S I O N

Niall Jones

C O M P R E S S I O N

The Neilma Sidney Theatre

October 24 - October 28

Installation: 12-6pm

Performance: 7:30pm

Tickets

A participant,

a voyeur

metal

pipe

meddle

pry

A theater composed of scaffolding,

movable and removable parts

A stage below a stage next to a stage over a stage

Tiers

(oh the tears)

dis/place to dis/place

Networks of pushy asymmetries

in sway, slur, blur, purrr

Flash, darkrider

A performance for bodies and materials in swarm, C O M P R E S S I O N plays with and against legibility. With C O M P R E S S I O N, Niall Jones continues a practice of dis/assembling the theatrical space. The work offers other revelations and fictions about the theater, undermining the stability of positions, evincing an environment for indeterminacy and dislocation.

"I build my work through scores that rely on mechanisms of language and the circumvention of it." Niall Jones (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is an artist working and living in New York City. Niall constructs, inhabits, and explores the theater as a mode and location of instabilities. Niall received a Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in 2017, and more recently, a 2021 Grants-To-Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Recent works include: a n u n r e a l at the Shed (2022), Dark de Luxe at JACK (2022), In the Efforts of Time at the Fine Art Academy of Stuttgart (2022), A Work for Others at The Kitchen OnScreen (2021); Fantasies in Low Fade at The Chocolate Factory, New York (2019); Sis Minor: The Preliminary Studies at Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Germany (2018); Sis Minor, in Fall at Abrons Arts Center, New York (2018); Splendor #3 at Gibney Dance, New York (2017).

Niall received a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches at the University of the Arts School of Dance in Philadelphia, where he is also Producer and Co-Curator of The School for Temporary Liveness (Vol. 1 & 2).

MONICA MIRABILE: ALL THINGS UNDER DOG, WHERE TWO THINGS ARE ALWAYS TRUE

Monica Mirabile

all things under dog, where two things are always true

Co-presented with Creamcake Berlin/HAUHebbel am Ufer

Performance

The Keith Haring Theatre

Opening Reception: Nov 16 at 9pm

Nov 16 - 17 | 6, 7:30 and 9pm

all things under dog, where two things are always true, a new performance by Monica Mirabile, looks at the "mafia" as an outlaw ecosystem rising from a lack of resources to create a support structure. Working on a therapeutic level within this architecture, Mirabile builds out a collapsing of time from the combined personal histories of the performers and herself. all things under dog travels through symbolic representations of a house-with five distinct rooms dividing The Keith Haring Theatre-and a black hole. Heightening the intimacy of the work, the audience, viewing the piece in small groups, move through the rooms with the performance.

Mirabile explains, "This piece stems from my Sicilian American father's death in March of 2020, and the collapse of time I experienced in grief. Prior to his death, I had resentment towards him as I was adopting the black hole that began in his history: struggling with addiction, being part of the poverty system, stigmatized by the health care system and conditioned to ignore the body. I recognized that because of much of this, he cultivated a necessarily criminal support system even concerning wellness around addiction, that didn't deem anyone unworthy despite their status. This support system was very real and often unconditional, which has really influenced me in my life. This is me considering what this is, knowing that it's a gift he gave me, while also working through the trauma."

Collaborating with performers Joy Norton, Kate Williams, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Reed Rushes, and others, Mirabile has developed a movement vocabulary through therapeutic processing, nurturing real experience unique to each performer. Mirabile seeks to bring to the performance the "often healing, complex relationship building, life-affirmation that happens in rehearsal-and to make that felt intensely." Mirabile and fellow performers will have been rehearsing for over a year within a self-creating family and support system, mirrored in the weight-bearing movement central to the piece. (Dancers flip one another, hold one another up, shift weight from one to another to another-aligning the symbolic and physical representations of support). Much of the dance occurs in slow motion, reflecting the embodied slowing-down process of untangling, and healing from, grief and trauma.

The piece lives in bodies, in space, and in sound: the latter created to emphasize emotive responses both as a soundtrack and live sound manipulation-augmenting the sound of dancers' breath and movements. It includes original music by Aaron David Ross (ADR) and music by Eartheater.

This performance exists along the continuum of the work Mirabile has been doing at Performance Space, including leading Open Movement, and her participation as a cohort member of 02020-the future-oriented year-long project that brought a group of NYC-based artists together with the staff and board to re-vision Performance Space. She says, "These things aren't dissimilar. In both, we've worked through the question of: how do you create a system of care that rises from a lack of basic needs offered in our society? From a lack of resources? How do you distribute those resources and continue that support? I am no authority, but I do see often that there is no lack of resources, but rather poor distribution that grows from feelings of scarcity in a system that enforces insecurity that ultimately turns into behavior. So, we have to start inside. Open Movement is so much about teaching each other the tools, giving each other access to the tools, and creating an unlimited, unconditional exploration, which parallels how we've approached our rehearsal process for All things under dog."

Monica Mirabile (B. Clearwater, Florida in 1988) is an artist living in NYC. Her choreographic productions explore performance as behavior, focusing on absorption of information without consent, processing and regulating the nervous system within the slow motion coup of a collapsing state. Often accompanied by audio composition & scenographic installation; she elaborates on how authority, power, support and manipulation operate inside the body. Her work is deeply collaborative and aims to stimulate an intensely felt living system.

Mirabile is also a painter and one half of the performance duo Fluct. She has performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim, The Broad Museum, PS1, Miami Art Basel, ICA Philly, NADA, Performa, the Queens Museum among others. She has worked with musicians including SOPHIE, Blood Orange, Eartheater, Mitski & Maggie Rogers and her work was acquired into The Whitney's permanent collection in 2017. Mirabile founded Otion Front Studio (est. 2013), a performance community rehearsal space in Brooklyn, New York and currently organizes the Open Movement program at Performance Space New York in the East Village.

MORIAH EVANS: REMAINS PERSIST

Moriah Evans

Remains Persist

Dance | Performance | Installation

December 10 and 11

1pm-7pm

Tickets

December 17 and 18

1pm-7pm

Tickets

Opening Reception December 10 at 7pm

Remains Persist is a durational performance that uses expansive ideas of embodiment to explore and excavate our internal, imperceptible, and at times immaterial remains. What constitutes remains is the primary question of the work. Remains might include: historical and personal relics; remaining pieces after others have been used or destroyed; physiological residues of traumas and pleasures. By accessing and naming The Remains within a performer, Remains Persists uses choreographic scores as prompts to explore how language can make use of dance to reveal the unseen remains within bodies, societies, institutions.

Contemporary epigeneticists argue that physical and psychological traumas and triumphs as well as inherited forms of transgenerational memory are stored within the body.​​ Remains Persist seeks to transform these seemingly random and accumulated bodily histories into corporeal forces, movements, and utterances. Performers utilize their varied remains and differences-informed by racial identity, socio-economic background, sexual identity, ideological beliefs, citizenship, verbal and physical fluencies, and more-as energetic and generative resources. Evans seeks to strip away, accentuate, and reconfigure these markers of identity, to break down everyday performances of selfhood, and bring forth concealed realities within bodies and spaces.

These ideas have become more urgent over the last three years, as the social systems of the supposedly democratic state within the US have repeatedly, and endlessly, failed to support the lives of the humans that they are apparently set up to service. Remains Persist explores the potential within us to re-script how bodies occupy themselves, the stage and the world, by calling forth information that is usually hidden.

Evans says, "With this work I've been asking: How do you find remains, name them as such, and then unfurl this information into movement, into action, and into language? A proposition of what a remain could be is the attempt to fit the multiplicity of being a being into the modern construction of self. A lot of my work has been about dance, and referencing discourses within dance, but this piece uses dance to contend with discourse in the world. And with that I'm claiming dance, or the body, as a site where people can heal."

Moriah Evans positions choreography as a speculative and social process. Drawing on somatic choreographic practices and feminist critiques of visuality, her work expands a relation to dance beyond the visible, towards the different ways of sensing ourselves and our relations to each other. Developing movement from the unseen, yet felt, worlds of a body's material and affective interior, Evans' projects question default hierarchies between flesh, body, self, and subject. Evans maintains a multi-pronged approach to her art practice; creating site-specific performances, theater-based productions, gallery and museum-based participatory installations, symposiums, theoretical texts, and curatorial projects. Recent works include: Rehearsals for Rehearsal (Public Art Fund, NY, 2022); RESTOS (Espacio Odeon, Bogota, Colombia, 2021) REPOSE (Beach Sessions, ΝY, 2021); Be my Muse (Pace Live, NY, 2021; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, 2018; FD-13, Minneapolis, 2017; Villa Empain, Brussels, 2016), BASTARDS: We are all Illegitimate Children (NYU Skirball, ΝY, 2019); Configure (The Kitchen, ΝY, 2018); Figuring (SculptureCenter, NY, 2018). She initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography (2011-ongoing)-a collective investigating participatory performance. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal (2013-2020) and continues as Editorial Director, Tanzkongress Curatorial Advisor (2017-2019), Dance & Process Co-Curator (The Kitchen, 2016-ongoing). She has been a visiting professor in the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany and teaches dance and choreographic workshops internationally. Evans has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Movement Research, The New Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Issue Project Room, Studio Series at Νew York Live Arts, ImPulsTanz, MoMA/PS1, MANA Contemporary, Onassis AiR. She is a FCA Individual Artist Awardee and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She has a BA in Art History & English, Wellesley College, and MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from UCSD.

FIRST MONDAYS

Organized by Sarah Schulman

In Open Room

October 3, 7 PM

Welcome Little Puss Press: With Cecilia Gentili, Emily Zhou, Anton Solomonik and Cat

Fitzpatrick. Introduced by Casey Plett.

November 7, 7 PM

House Favorites

Sara Jane Stoner, Ken Chen, Rabih Alameddine

December 5, 7 PM

Chris Cochrane, Viv Corringham, Miguel Frasconi

One of the great advantages of living in New York City is that we can hear new ideas as they are being created, instead of having to wait years for those books to appear on bookstore shelves. First Mondays is a free program that provides free drinks, shares accomplished writers' processes as they are happening, and gives an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances.

The boundary-pushing reading series continues this Fall, opening October 3 with an event surrounding Little Puss Press, a new press run by trans women, launching their first line of books-including memoir, new fiction, poetry, and experimental prose. On November 7, First Mondays organizer, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman convenes some of her favorite writers: Sara Jane Stoner, Ken Chen, and Rabih Alameddine. As she describes, they are "innovative and forward-thinking writers with individual visions that encompass the world." In an ongoing commitment to presenting alumni of Performance Space, First Mondays features an evening of new work-in-progress by Chris Cochrane-an innovator of improvisational new music and co-creator of THEM with Ishmael Houston-Jones and Dennis Cooper-with his collaborators Viv Corringham and Miguel Frasconi, December 5.

THE JOHN GIORNO OCTOPUS SERIES

Guest-Curated Program

Organizers:

Rirkrit Tiravanija, September 22

Thank God For Abortion (Viva Ruiz), November 9

Nocturnal Medicine, December 6

Tickets

Using the Octopus's decentralized nervous system as an inspiration for Performance Space New York's curatorial practice, the John Giorno Octopus Series-now renamed after the groundbreaking poet and Downtown legend- invites artists and guest curators to organize an evening-length program with several artists working in any number of disciplines. The series is named after legendary performance poet, John Giorno, and continues Performance Space's legacy of artist-centric programming and creating space for risk taking.

This season, the John Giorno Octopus Series opens with an evening organized by Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose connections with local and international young artists, as well as his connection to John Giorno (having made the 10-hour film document of Giorno's work, JG Reads), inspired Performance Space to approach him and invite him to kick off the series. The series continues November 9 with Viva Ruiz, a community-educated artist and advocate known for the project Thank God for Abortion. Ruiz is a maker working in performance, film, writing, music, and dance with a collaborative practice grown out of their experience in NYC nightlife. The collective Nocturnal Medicine, which researches cultural-environmental dynamics and creates innovative methods for addressing them in community, closes out the series' offerings for the season, December 6. Their toolkit draws on cultural practices both ancient and contemporary, including ritual, installation, sensory immersion, experiential education, dance, and collective meditation.

OPEN MOVEMENT

Open Improvisation & Workshops

The Neilma Sidney Theatre

October 2 - December 11, 2022

Sundays |12 - 6pm (with workshops at 4pm)

RSVP encouraged but not required

Open Movement offers free weekly movement improvisations and artist-led workshops in Performance Space's theatres. Move to curated soundscapes by various artists and musicians together but in no particular way, every Sunday from 12-4pm. At 4pm shift to Open Movement Workshops where various artists share their self proclaimed practices of embodiment, dance and performance exploration. In this second season, we are working with artists who want to build these practices over multiple workshops as well as with artists who are working with one-off emerging practice forms. The workshops inform the improv and vice versa as we build on ways of regulating the nervous system and expanding what it means to process information in the body. *NO dance experience of any kind is necessary.

Check the website as we build the season.

Theatres are located on the 4th floor with elevator access, gender-neutral restrooms, and a sprung floor equipped with a house sound system.

Open Movement is a revival of the eponymous program that started in 1979 and was at the foundational and collectivizing core of Performance Space 122 (now Performance Space New York).

Open Movement is facilitated by Monica Mirabile and Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda, with workshops and musicians organized by Monica Mirabile. For any questions, Monica can be reached at monica@performancespacenewyork.org. Visitors are encouraged to take a look at Open Movement's Community Guidelines.

A MAZE ZANINE, AMAZE ZANING, A-MEZZANING, MEZA-9

A Maze Zanine, Amaze Zaning, A-Mezzaning, Meza-9

Presented by David Zwirner and Performance Space New York

Curated by Ei Arakawa, Kerstin Brätsch, Nicole Eisenman, and Laura Owens

519 West 19th Street

September 9-October 15, 2022

David Zwirner and Performance Space New York present a group exhibition curated by Ei Arakawa, Kerstin Brätsch, Nicole Eisenman, and Laura Owens at the gallery's 519 West 19th Street location in New York. They will create a living exhibition exploring the dynamics between performance and painting. The unconventional design, conceived collaboratively by the four artist-curators, examines how time is manifested on and off the canvas and invokes both risk and serendipity.

This exhibition will feature a range of works, the sale of which will benefit Performance Space. The artists include: Math Bass, Katherine Bernhardt, Judith Bernstein, Kerstin Brätsch, Cecily Brown, Theresa Chromati, Leidy Churchman, Matt Connors, Patricia Cronin, Thomas Eggerer, Nicole Eisenman, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Rochelle Feinstein, Keltie Ferris, Wade Guyton, K8 Hardy, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Sanya Kantarovsky, Marie Karlberg, Deborah Kass, Jutta Koether, Maggie Lee, Nick Mauss, Marilyn Minter, Jill Mulleady, Willa Nasatir, Jonny Negron, Lorraine O'Grady, Laura Owens, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, Borna Sammak, John Sandroni, Dana Schutz, Ser Serpas, Will Sheldon, Katja Seib, Raphaela Simon, Josh Smith, Ryan Sullivan, Mickalene Thomas, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Betty Tompkins, Stewart Uoo, Charline von Heyl, Ambera Wellmann, Jonas Wood, among others.

About Performance Space New York

Over the last 40 years Performance Space has been propelling cultural, theoretical, and political discourse forward. Futurity and world-building connect the interdisciplinary works presented here-works that have dissolved the borders of performance art, dance, theater, music, visual art, poetry and prose, ritual, night life, food, film, and technology, shattering artistic and social norms alike.

Founded in 1980, Performance Space New York (formerly Performance Space 122) became a haven for many queer and radical voices shut out by a repressive, monocultural mainstream and conservative government whose neglect exacerbated the emerging AIDS epidemic's devastation. Carrying forward the multitudinous visions of these artists who wielded the political momentum of self-expression amidst the intensifying American culture wars, Performance Space is one of the birthplaces of contemporary performance as it is known today.

As the New York performing arts world has become increasingly institutionalized, and the shortcomings within our industry were further revealed during the ravages and transformations of 2020, our focus has been not just on presenting boundary-breaking work but on restructuring our own organization towards prioritizing equity and access. We seek to build deeper relationships with our artists and communities by creating new access points. Through community programs, annual town halls, guest-curated programs such as Octopus and First Mondays, we welcome the public to actively shape our future and help us hold ourselves accountable. Programs like the revived Open Movement and the new Open Room invite the community in and reclaim the institution as a rare indoor public space in the ever-more expensive East Village.

Our search for new models is an embrace of the unknown-and an acknowledgement of transformation as a process of continuous inquiry, imagination, response, and accountability. Mirroring the spirit of experimentation artists have brought to our spaces across four decades, we strive towards something which does not yet exist. We believe this focus on changing the conditions in which art is made is just as fundamental as the art itself, and only serves to make it more substantial.

02020, the year-long project during which a cohort of salaried artists were invited together with the staff and board to re-vision Performance Space, initiated this transformation, and itself rapidly reshaped to meet artists' and community members' needs amidst the early days of the pandemic and uprising for racial justice. 02020 was a new beginning for us, a sharp and needed turn back towards artists to help rethink the institution for the future.

To post a comment, you must register and login.