Interview with IV Castellanos and Amanda Hunt (Brooklyn, NY)
[ALIVE PODCAST] By Polina Riabova Polina: My name is Polina Riabova. I am director of programming at The Ear, a performance artist, a writer and a correspondent for Performance Is Alive. I'm here with IV Castellanos and Amanda Hunt who run the Brooklyn DIY performance space Para\\el. They are also performance artists in their own right. They are going on tour at the end of this month, which is February 2020. IV and Amanda welcome to the podcast! Amanda Hunt: Thank you for having us. IV Castellanos: Thank you very much. Polina: We are here having tea at Para\\el… since we’re at Para\\el I want to ask you about your relationship to the space. Before Para\\el became Para\\el it was Panoply Performance Laboratory or PPL as it was known in our community and it was an essential, integral part of the Bushwick performance art scene and internationally; the performance community is quite small. Tell me about your relationship to PPL and how the takeover of the lease came about. IV: I'm happy to take that one on. My relationship to PPL is my relationship to Esther, to start. [Esther Neff is the originator of PPL]. I'm going to get the years maybe wrong but we lived at Surreal Estate. That was around off the Morgan L probably around 2012/2013. Esther ran the performance space in collaboration with Brian [McCorkle] in the venue. When we all scattered out of that space - there was 30 people living in that building, a bunch of art, a lot of overlap of people - is when I segued into IV Soldiers and there was a gap of time in between when Esther took 104 over, which was Spread Art at the time run by Thomas Bell.
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Performance Is Alive at Satellite Art Show NYC Artist Announcement Curated by Quinn Dukes October 3-6, 2019 Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Avenue, 1st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11206 We are THRILLED to publicly announce our upcoming programming for Satellite Art Show NYC! As usual, we will feature several artists that are local to the fair's location while integrating programming from an international group of performance and video artists. Our live performance programming will run throughout all 4 days of Satellite Art Show, featuring 17 live durational actions. Our screening program features 23 dynamically diverse works exploring performance, ritual and body politics. We are additionally honored to host a special screening featuring the work of seminal video artist, Barbara Rosenthal. Stay tuned for our performance and screening schedule. You will undoubtedly experience something different each time you visit our space. FEATURING PERFORMANCE ART from Thomas Albrecht (New York, NY), Christie Blizard (San Antonio, TX), Mairead Delaney (VT), Vyczie Dorado (New York, NY), Rebecca Fitton (NY/England), Kathie Halfin (NY/Ukraine) Markus Holtby (Larchmont, NY), Amanda Hunt and IV Castellanos (Brooklyn, NY), Amanda Kleinhans (Tallahassee, FL), SUNGJAE LEE (Chicago/Korea), Stephanie McGovern (Brooklyn, NY), Butch Merigoni (Brooklyn, NY), Matthias Neumann (NY/Germany), Christopher Unpezverde Núñez (NY/Costa Rica), Alison Pirie (Brooklyn, NY), Sandrine Schaefer (Boston, MA), Wild Actions - Patience, Carley McCready-Bingham, Ginger Wagg (Chapel Hill, NC) FEATURING VIDEOS from Carolina Alamilla (Miami, FL), Alex Apostolidis (Montreal, Canada), Katina Bitsicas (Columbia, MO), Jeffery Byrd (IO), Victor de La Rocque (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Christina M Dietz (Jersey City, NJ), Julha Franz (Porto Alegre, Brazil), Tales Frey (Portugal/Brazil), Edgar Fabián Frías (Tulsa, OK), Igor Furtado (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Rodrigo Gomes (Lisbon, Portugal), Jiang Feng (New Taipei City, Taiwan), Maria Del Pilar (PILI) Lopez-Saavedra (New York, NY), Tone Haldrup Lorenzen (Berlin, Germany), Nadja Verena Marcin (Brooklyn, NY), Rachel L Rampleman (New York, NY), Barbara Rosenthal (New York, NY), Monstera Deliciosa (NY/London), Sylvain Souklaye (Copenhagen/France), Alison Starr (Dallas, Texas), Natacha Voliakovsky (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Christopher Willauer, Cherrie Yu (Chicago, IL) PUBLIC FAIR HOURS Thursday, October 3: 5pm – 12am (VIP/Press Preview) Friday, October 4: 5pm – 12am Saturday, October 5: 12pm – 12am Sunday, October 6: 12pm – 6pm "Sing out loud, in ESTHER’S HONOR!"
The final command from Ayana Evans during Panoply Performance Laboratory’s (Brooklyn, NY) closing festival, Metamorphosis (Nov 16-18) on Saturday, November 17th. Evans’ is holding her signature sparklers as neon blue & green wrist bracelets sway in the dark to the beat in nearly every hand and the room erupts in song, “Your love is my love and my love is your love,” all faces turned towards Esther Neff. We are two thirds of the way through performances on the second evening of the festival and so it’s time for tears, time for joy, seeing soft light in the dark, yes. Co-founded by Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle, Panoply Performance Laboratory (or PPL) has served as a site of experimentation in performance art for nearly 7 years at it’s Meserole St. location in Bushwick. Before that, PPL's PERFORMANCY FORUM has been hosted by other sites, among them the infamous Grace Exhibition Space (which recently relocated from Brooklyn to Manhattan due to the rising price of rent). Metamorphosis marks the transition of a decade-worth of organizing and collaborative community work that has, both out of necessity and choice, resisted the gate-keeping capitalistic model of the art world, providing integral support to the performance scene in Brooklyn and beyond. In Politics We Trust: Observing JUST SITUATIONS
Various Locations across Brooklyn, NYC | July 2017 By Polina Riabova Sitting at Panoply Performance Lab (Brooklyn, NY) on Thursday, July 20th I am sweating buckets. “It’s so HOT in there!” I say to Esther Neff, organizer of JUST SITUATIONS (alongside Kaia Gilje and Leili Huzaibah) as I smoke in-between performances. “It’s just because there’s so many people,” Esther tells me. JUST SITUATIONS, a “hybrid-convention, festival and ‘political science fair’” with an intent to create alternative structures and “modes” of being under a capitalist, power-hungry system through performative methods, spanned a total of 10 days (July 13 - 23). For an intensive festival involving more than 60 performers (or ‘situators’), the crowd makes sense. |
CONTRIBUTORSIan Deleón Archives
July 2023
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