Commissions
The centerpiece of the Performa 09 biennial is its internationally renowned Performa Commissions program. Initiated by Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg to create new performances for the 21st century, the Performa Commission invites artists — many of whom have not worked ‘live’ before — to create new work especially for the biennial. “I wanted to encourage artists to write the next chapter of live art,” Goldberg says, “to take us in a direction never seen before.” Performa supports its commissioned artists at all levels of development and production, and presents the final work in the context of a world-class biennial, including international touring following the New York premieres.
The 11 Performa 09 Commissions include new works by 9 individual artists and 2 multi-artist projects:
Filmed and edited in-camera over the course of twelve months, Guy Ben-Ner will present an unusual “live film” that captures an ongoing phone conversation he has with himself, flying to and fro between Berlin and Tel Aviv, as he sorts out the lives and relationships that he maintains in the peripatetic lifestyle that has become common for the global artist.
Video and installation artist Candice Breitz presents “New York, New York,” her first-ever live performance, which features two nearly-identical casts composed of four pairs of identical twins—with each pair of twins split into two groups of four actors each—presenting two evenings of improvised performance. The performances will be based on intensive “character development sessions” that Breitz will hold with each set of twins to develop a single character that both will play.
Interested in probing and unsettling the relationship between history and memory, Omer Fast will trace the arc of a story traveling from a first-person account to an improvised actor’s dramatization in an investigation of how personal experience can take flight from reality.
Visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and composer and performer Ari Benjamin Meyers collaborate in K.62, a musical mystery that involves an audience, an orchestra, a little bit of magic, and a lot of imagination, inspired by Orson Welles’ unforgettable film version of The Trial (1962).
Photo and moving image artist Yeondoo Jung will present his first live performance, Cinemagician, in which the audience will be simultaneously shown the reality of a stage production and the illusory effects of cinema, as created live onstage by popular Korean magician Eunkyul Lee.
In the Judson Memorial Church, Mike Kelley will present Day is Done Judson Church Dance, three short performance pieces inspired by the darkly funny vignettes in his 2005 film and video installation Day is Done, including “The Horse Dance of the False Virgin,” “The Judson Church Horse Dance,” and a new “Battle of the Bands”-style work involving 13 people assembled on and around a large ladder playing largely improvised music on horns.
On New York City’s Marathon Sunday, avant-garde music pioneer Arto Lindsay will present SOMEWHERE I READ, a multidisciplinary arts parade featuring over 50 performers marching through the streets, using cell phones as musical instruments and carrying large screens that will receive projections invisible to the naked eye, in an inventive re-thinking of the standard parade format.
Wangechi Mutu will present Stone Ihiga, a multi-layered performance and installation created in collaboration with the riveting vocalist/composer Imani Uzuri. Centered around the practice of lapidation, and specifically inspired by stories of women who have been found guilty of adultery or promiscuity, Stone Ihiga will be a rumination on the fragility and tenacity of our humanity and spirituality, adding translucent surfaces and a live dimension to Mute’s exquisite collage works.
Christian Tomaszewski and Joanna Malinowska will consider how the future was imagined by the Communist regimes of the former Soviet Bloc in Mother Earth Sister Moon, an archaeological investigation into the fashion and style of the era culminating in a fantastical fashion show with clothing, choreography, set design, and sound.
Inspired by the lost Futurist film Vita Futurista (Futurist Life, 1916), Futurist Life Redux is a new film featuring contributions by an incredible group of contemporary film and video artists—Trisha Baga, chameckilerner, Martha Colburn, Ben Coonley, George Kuchar, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shana Moulton, Shannon Plumb, Aida Ruilova, Matthew Silver and Shoval Zohar (The Future), and Michael Smith—re-imagining the eleven segments of the original Futurist Life for the twenty-first century.
In Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners, curated by Italian composer and musicologist Luciano Chessa with Performa’s Esa Nickle, an incredible group of musicians and composers from the experimental music world—Blixa Bargeld, John Butcher, Luciano Chessa, Pauline Oliveros, Mike Patton, Anat Pick, Elliott Sharp, and Jennifer Walshe with Tony Conrad, among others—will present an evening-length concert of original scores and newly commissioned compositions for the Futurist instruments intonarumori, or “noise-intoners,” being reconstructed for the first time in their entirety by Chessa for Performa.
PERFORMA PREMIERES
The Performa Premieres program showcases extraordinary live works that have never been shown in New York before. Working closely with each artist for as long as two years or more, the Performa team searches for the perfect venue to host each performance, and makes sure that every detail of the artist’s vision can be fully realized.
For Performa 09, Performa Premieres will be presented by 6 artists:
In History in the Making or The Secret Diaries of Linda Schultz, Israeli visual artist Keren Cytter’s first evening-length theatrical production, Cytter combines dance, video, and music to tell the story of liberal activist John Webber and graphic designer Linda Schultz, who are each unexpectedly transformed into the opposite sex in a performance that uses the artist’s trademark “kitchen-sink existentialism” to wittily address the frustrations and confines of social roles.
A stunning 16-millimeter, feature-length film showing Merce Cunningham and his company rehearsing an Event in the craneway of an abandoned Ford Motor factory in Northern California, Craneway Event, by Tacita Dean, marks the second collaboration between Cunningham and Dean and the last appearance made by this legendary choreographer on film.
Alicia Framis presents Lost Astronaut, an ongoing performance-installation exploring the possibility of living on the moon through the ironic and fictional character and activities of a female astronaut, who will live in a tent for three weeks during the biennial, residing among drawings and prototypes by artists and writers—including Marina Abramovic, Brian Keith-Jackson, and Rita McBride, among many others—that aim to both parody and make a claim for women’s presence on the moon.
In Loris Greaud’s project for Performa 09, a video of a breathtaking fireworks display in Abu Dhabi (designed by internationally acclaimed pyrotechnicians Groupe F in collaboration with Greaud, and involving the hip hop group Anti-Pop Consortium) that recreates the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures through flashing blue lights in the night sky will be shown on the giant MTV screen in Times Square.
A comic and visually dazzling performance by renowned South African artist William Kentridge, in I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, the artist himself gives an unusual presentation related to his current opera-in-progress: a work inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose, based on the Nikolai Gogol short story of the same name.
Reading Dante, a large-scale performance by video and performance pioneer Joan Jonas, is based on elements from Dante’s epic fourteenth-century poem the Divine Comedy, collaging footage shot in four locations—the Canadian woods, 1970s New York, a ruin surrounding a lava field in Mexico City, and a shadow play in Italy—together to translate Dante into Jonas’s own remarkable “infernal paradise.”
ADDITIONAL PROJECTS COMMISSIONED FOR PERFORMA 09
Performa has also commissioned new works by An Architektur, Tamar Ettun and Emily Coates, Marti Guixe, , Circular File (Performa TV), Dexter Sinister, Paul Elliman, Bradley Eros, James Hoff, Ahmet Ogut, Darius Miksys, Katie Paterson (Performa TV), Lucy Raven (Performa TV) Nick Relph (Performa Radio), Karen Schneider (Performa Radio), Marije Vogelzan/Proef, nOfffice (Performa Hub)
PERFORMA COMMISSIONING FUND
The Performa Commissioning Fund provides production grants and support to artists creating new work for the biennial. For Performa 09, artists that are receiving support from the Performa Commissioning Fund are Brody Condon and Maria Hassabi.
