"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.
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Last December #AliveAtSatellite artist, Ayana Evans, presented "Slick and Gritty" - a video screening and panel discussion organized to benefit Geraldo Mercado's family members who fell victim to the disastrous path of Hurricane Maria. The family farm was destroyed and US aid was minimal in their rural area of Sierra Alta. Geraldo's grandparents, Ruder and Brunilda Caraballo, as well as his great-aunts Rosa Sanchez and Catalina Sanchez, struggled to replace the roof on their homes.
The initial fundraising goal for Slick and Gritty was successfully surpassed per the tireless promotion and advocacy of Evans. The family has been busy with repairs and I thought it would be a perfect time to re-connect with Ayana and Geraldo for updates and event reflections. There is still much work to be done in Puerto Rico, please consider donating to the Viajero Hurricane Relief Fund. 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. We are back to the business of sharing our top performance event pics with you! Get ready... the artists presenting performances this month are the type of thoughtful and inquisitive artists that we love to support. See you in the live performance realm... - Quinn Dukes
Performing our Reality / Dreaming our Escape - Notes from Satellite 2.0 by Alexandra Hammond1/13/2017 Performing our Reality / Dreaming our Escape - Notes from Satellite 2.0
Alexandra Hammond for Performance is Alive It’s just before the opening of Satellite 2.0 and the Parisian hotel in Miami Beach is as ready as it will ever be. Each room has been cleared of furnishings and occupied by a gallery, curatorial project, artist collective or publication. Many have been transformed beyond recognition while others, including our booth for Performance is Alive, revel in the dingy tones of cream and pale-peach paint, making use of the vaguely sordid yet standardized markers of the hotel’s architecture of transience: dated carpeting, wall-mounted televisions and lamps. We have covered the linty carpet with an uncanny layer of adhesive plastic rug-guard topped with beige drop cloths. Artist, Curator and Performance is Alive founder Quinn Dukes has been performing and managing performance events for years and knows that “performers get messy”. She is keen to support the artists and tend to the realization of their works as much as possible under the constraints of a nonexistent budget and the hotel setting. The only rule: no fire. After a day and a half of nearly round-the-clock preparation (more for many of the elaborate booths) the Satellite Art fair feels like a possible setting for a Borges story: a world within the world, with its own sense of time and cultural mores. The lobby is now equipped with a giant cereal bowl, titled F+++ Off, fashioned from a modified Doughboy pool and filled with enlarged Captain Crunch pieces sculpted out of foam. A bubble-bath fountain shaped like a giant milk carton pours down from above. Its creators, Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw don bathing suits and float in doughnut-styled inner tubes from time the fair opens until it closes each day. They take their job seriously, just like the exotic car rental agency that normally shares the lobby of the Parisian and continues its usual business throughout the fair, tending to and lending out a small stable of Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces that are parked out front. Curator Jesse Firestone (creator of the Soothing Center and an organizer of the fair along with Founder Brian Whiteley) stops into our booth for Performance is Alive. Jessie, Quinn and I joke that if we had to stay at the Parisian forever, we would survive and make our own world. Like the Eagles’ Hotel California, but with more exuberance and less downfall. The fantasy of the self-sustaining art-pod was particularly poignant in the days immediately following the presidential election. The final dissolution of the myth of American exceptionalism calls for action, and the temporary world-building represented by repurposing a hotel for a few days of art viewing (even as it participates in the commercial crush of Miami art week), can be seen as a utopic gesture, perhaps even an act of love towards a world that has revealed itself as a more troubled place than we had imagined. Nestled on the second of three floors of this most wacky and artist-powered of the Miami art fairs, Performance is Alive’s room 15 was poised to be occupied by the first of its politically-charged performances. Artists addressed the interconnected subjects of landscape and environmental destruction, race, gender, consumer capitalism, labor, violence and eroticism. In short, the range of issues that arise when the medium is the ever-political, ever-present body. We have been hard at work reviewing hundreds of performance proposals from incredible performance artists across the globe for #AliveAtSatellite, Performance Is Alive's non-stop programming at SATELLITE ART SHOW during Miami Art Week 2016. We are incredibly delighted to present these daring projects from an amazing group of artists. Throughout the fair’s duration multi-media performance artists confront a myriad of contemporary issues such as body politics, race, economic inequality, climate change and intimacy in the digital age. Over twenty short form, durational and video based performance works will be presented throughout SATELLITE 2.0. We hope to see you in Miami but if you can't join us on the beach, stay tuned for live stream details! - Quinn Dukes + Alexandra Hammond SATELLITE ART SHOW // The Parisian Hotel, 1510 Collins Ave., Miami Beach, FL 33139 EXHIBITION HOURS PRESS PREVIEW: December 1st: 12 – 3 pm December 1st: 3 pm – 10 pm December 2nd: 12 pm – 10 pm December 3rd: 12 pm – 10 pm December 4th: 12 pm – 6 pm Confirmed artists include: Agrofemme and Ian DeLeon (NYC), Thomas Albrecht (NY), Trevor Amery (CA), Joseph Bigley (NC), Monica Jahan Bose (DC), Hector Canonge (NYC), Alberto Checa (FL), Dominique Duroseau (NYC), Ayana Evans (NYC), Sean Fader (NYC), Whit Forrester (Chicago), Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Chicago), Philip Fryer (Boston), Elan Jurado (NYC), Olga Kozmanidze (Moscow, RUS), Jenna Maurice (TN/CO), Sergio Mora (FL), Violet Overn and Emma Sulkowicz, Miriam Parker in collaboration with Christina Smiros and Jo Wood-Brown (NYC), Sarah H. Paulson (NY), Miles Pflanz (NYC), Selma Selman (Bosnia/Herzegovina) Alexandra Sullivan (NYC), Marcela Torres and Chase Calloway, J.R. Uretsky (RI) PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
What will we do, and how will we survive doing it?
Arahmaiani and Ayana Evans in performance during 21st Century Suffragettes at Grace Exhibition Space. The term “suffragette” was coined in 1903 by London journalist Charles Hands to mock and ridicule members of the Women’s Social and Political Union in the UK. Long since reified, curator Jill McDermid uses the term to conceptualize a contemporary “suffragette” in her Spring performance art series at Grace Exhibition Space and Rosekill Farm, 21st Century Suffragettes. The right to vote is analogized here by a right to perform, to speak, to present viewpoints and personal histories, to effect change regarding the positions and situations of women around the world. Performing on Friday, April 29 at Grace’s famed second-floor loft on Broadway, neither Arahmaiani Feisal (who goes only by Arahmaiani) and Ayana Evans claim to represent all women, or put forward any specific changes to legislature. Instead, their feminist activism is personal, social, and rooted in the political contexts of their embodied lives. Arahmaiani appears initially without costume, without need for a signifying white dress favored by late Edwardian-era European suffragettes and previous performance artists in this series alike. She wears jeans and clogs and walks into the center of the performance space carrying a white candle and meditation bells. Matter-of-factly, she describes her history of persecution and political censorship in and forced expatriation from her home country of Indonesia. She begins by stating simply that she will ask audience members to perform. Because, she says, “in 1983 I was forced to leave my home after being arrested by the military…” As a woman with mixed religious background and as a columnist, artist, and human rights activist, criticism and challenge to fundamentalist Islamist military regimes in Indonesia and Malaysia have left Arahmaiani under attack throughout most of her adult life. She has received death threats (to “drink her blood”) due to her art works "Ëtalase" and "Lingga-Yoni" and her columns and writing about LGBT issues and Buddhism in the newspapers Suara Merdeka ("Voice of Independence") and Kompas have endangered herself and other members of all-women artist groups. Arahmaini has escaped to Sydney, Perth, and Singapore, each time she is attacked refusing to stop criticizing the politicians and corporations that, Arahmaini writes, are usually supporting radical Islamists, using fear and terror to distract people attention from the “real serious problems politically and economically.” Arahmaiani references “morality police” (shariah law enforcers) near the end of her speech and we are reminded of the 2013 proclamation in Lhokseumawe that women must sit side-saddle on motorbikes, since straddling is “sexually suggestive,” “unfeminine” and “un-Islamic.” In this light, Arahmaiani’s casual and “masculine” performance garb make sense and appears to be far more political than it may seem to Western women; instead of bloomers and short-brim round late Edwardian hat, Arahmaiani presents herself partially through her lack of a headscarf, her bare forearms, her powerful gaze coolly pouring into the eyes of the audience members sitting, crouching, and standing in a semi-circle around her. December is an active time for performance art events in NYC! Here is a sampling of events that we recommend!
Grace Exhibition Space Directors, Erik "Hoke" Hokanson and Jill McDermid-Hokanson | photo by Miao Jiaxin Grace Exhibition Space launched the Great American Performance Art Festival (GAPAF) in February 2015. The festival runs thru June 2015 and is the long-term vision of Jill McDermid-Hokanson, (chief curator, director and co-founder of Grace Exhibition Space). Thus far the festival has offered performance workshops, lectures and of course- live performances from both local and international artists.
I was astonished to receive an invitation announcing live performances by seminal performance artists, Linda Mary Montano and Martha Wilson in conjunction with GAPAF. Both Montano and Wilson have presented performances around the world since the 1970's. They shared the roster with both seasoned and new performance art practitioners. As the evening grew closer, the artist roster grew. Ultimately, I witnessed nearly 5 hours of performance art from 9 performers! The following day Preach R. Sun led a street action as a continuation of the festival. Overall the programming was truly inspiring. After a weekend of viewing historic performances, I was reminded of the incredible significance and influence of the curator. The Great American Performance Art Festival is a wonderful example of artists curating artists. It provides an audience and space for performance art- a medium that scarcely receives funding. Of course, GAPAF is not the only festival of its kind (thank goodness!). Rapid Pulse in Chicago is currently in its final days of an equally compelling group of performers and events. For this week's post, Jill McDermid-Hokanson provides further insight into curating performance art in America. All too often the efforts of curators are overlooked, so I am pleased to share our conversation with you. Enjoy! -Quinn Performance artists are often met with the challenge of the performance art archive. What to do with the video footage and hundreds of performance stills following a live action? Do they convey the same energy as the original performance? Did the live performance meet the artist's expectation?
Ayana Evans and David Ian Griess explore these very questions in a discussion about their recent collaborative work entitled "Frying Chicken." Enjoy! -Quinn |
CONTRIBUTORSIan Deleón Archives
July 2023
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