PERFORMA 07 Commissions
Carlos Amorales
Sanford Biggers
Nathalie Djurberg
Japanther
Isaac Julien
Daria Martin
Kelly Nipper
Adam Pendleton
Yvonne Rainer
Francesco Vezzoli
The PERFORMA Commissions program originates new productions and supports artists in the creation of exceptional new performance. PERFORMA and Founding Director RoseLee Goldberg work closely with commissioned artists from conceptualization to presentation, providing financial and production support and producing international tours. Several PERFORMA Commissions have been made possible through dynamic partnerships with international organizations such as Sadler’s Wells, Documenta, and S.M.A.K. All of the PERFORMA 07 Commissions will have their world or US premiere in New York City during PERFORMA 07.
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CARLOS AMORALES
Carlos Amorales, Spider Web Stage (negative), 2006-2007. Installation, Milton Keynes Gallery. Photography Jerry Hardman-Jones. Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York/Paris.
Carlos Amorales’s 400-piece sculpture resembling a spider’s web is the site for an ongoing performance by a lone dancer, accompanied by a subsonic sound composition by Julien Lede transmitted through the sculpture itself. Spider Web Negative (stage) adds to Amorales’s oeuvre of ritualistic performance projects and animations, including Amorales vs. Amorales, which involved professional wrestlers and was exhibited at the Tate Modern in London and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, amongst other venues.
SANFORD BIGGERS
Multimedia artist Sanford Biggers presents The Somethin’ Suite, a conceptual exploration of the ‘Negro variety show’ popular at the turn of the 20th century. Presented in speakeasies and small variety theaters across the country, with performers (both black and white) typically appearing in blackface for white audiences, they were deeply problematic, but also catapulted some of America’s most inventive musicians, including Ma Rainey,
Scott Joplin, and Al Jolson, to stardom. Arguably the first distinctively
American theatrical form, the oppressive system behind blackface
entertainment has evolved into today??s popular music industry, Biggers suggests. The Somethin’ Suite, following minstrelsy’s traditional 3-act structure, is performed by spoken-word artist Saul Williams, singers Esthero, Shae Fiol, and Martin Luther, and DJs Christopher X and Jahi Sundance, whose talents combine to provide a sonic history of contemporary music as well as a clear-eyed examination of today’s popular music industry.
NATHALIE DJURBERG
Nathalie Djurberg, 2007. Production still (puppets for an upcoming PERFORMA07 Commission). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg presents her first live work, a claymation film with a musical soundtrack of found instruments performed onstage by Djurberg and composer Hans Berg. Known for her collection of short stop-motion films, populated by cartoonishly demented children and erotically untethered adults, and exhibited within the framework of a television monitor or small projections, Djurberg’s live, life-size debut introduces an entirely new scale for the artist.
JAPANTHER
New York-based musicians Ian Vanek and Matt Reilly’s (Japanther’s) The Dinosaur’s Death Dance (3D), with the Robbinschild dance company, combines skateboarding, video, live music and dance in a punk-rock mini-musical that contrasts the histories of contemporary music with parallel political movements ‘DIY punk and the Weather Underground, the Whole Earth Catalog and Democracy Now, Riot Grrl and The Black Panther Party. Japanther previously collaborated on the rock puppet opera Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty: Entertainment by Dan Graham with Tony Oursler and Other Collaborators (DTAOT) as well as Laugh Dance, presented with the Robbinschild company at Ballroom Marfa. The production premieres at Performance Space 122 during PERFORMA07.
ISAAC JULIEN
Isaac Julien, Untitled (The Ice Project), 2004. Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London, and Metro Pictures, New York.
Visual artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien’s first evening length production, Cast No Shadow, brings to life Julien’s extraordinary triptych of films–True North, Fant??me Afrique, and Small Boats–in a remarkable work for the stage. In collaboration with acclaimed British choreographer Russell Maliphant, Cast No Shadow uses shifting geographical landscapes–from the North Pole, to Burkina Faso, to Sicily–and bodies in motion that at times seem to spill directly from the film onto the dance floor, to reveal deeply poignant stories of expedition and migration. Cast No Shadow, a PERFORMA Commission with Sadler’s Wells (London) is co-commissioned by Dance Umbrella and co-produced by Espace Des Arts, Sc??ne Nationale de Chalon-sur-Sa??ne. It will premiere at Sadler’s Wells in October and make its US premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of PERFORMA07 and BAM’s 25th Next Wave Festival.
TICKET INFORMATION
DARIA MARTIN
Daria Martin, Harpstrings & Lava, 2007. Film production still. Photograph Thierry Bal, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.
American artist Daria Martin’s film Harpstrings and Lava, created in collaboration with musician Zeena Parkins and actor Nina Fog, conjures the atmosphere of childhood anxieties in an expanded tableaux vivant that blends film, dance, painting, music and sculpture. Harpstrings and Lava, a PERFORMA Commission co-commissioned by S.M.A.K. and Outset, will premiere at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Brussels in October 2007 and make its US premiere as a part of PERFORMA 07.
KELLY NIPPER
Los Angeles artist Kelly Nipper’s Floyd on the Floor examines the movement of a hurricane in relation to technology and human emotion. 16 contemporary dancers will lay down the hurricane’s pattern in movements determined by a square dance caller. Floyd on the Floor premieres at PERFORMA07 at the Judson Church.
ADAM PENDLETON
Adam Pendleton, The Revival New York (Hans Peter Feldman), 2007. Silkscreen on paper, 50 x 36.’
Following in the tradition of religious revivals, Adam Pendleton’s The Revival will bring together performers and audience in an intimate setting that pulses with the energy typical of the form. Audience members in the role of the ‘congregation’ will be led by Pendleton as ‘preacher’ in a ceremony that will invoke the power of experimental language to subvert everyday discourse. Pendleton will be joined by a community of singers, composers, artists, and poets. Known for his use of text and imagery in silkscreens, sculptures, installations and performances, Pendleton’s approach to the ‘meaningfulness of language’ is also marked by a keen interest in reflecting on old styles and new; he questions conventions of language while demanding a radical re-thinking of the meaning of each word.
YVONNE RAINER
Yvonne Rainer, RoS Indexical (rehearsal), 2007. Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers. Photo by Paula Court.
Yvonne Rainer looks to the controversial premiere of The Rite of Spring, the brilliant collaboration between composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, which shocked Paris audiences in 1913 with a ‘primitive’ movement vocabulary and dissonant musical score, as the springboard for a radical work of her own. Rainer reenvisions this production’s choreographic breakthrough with RoS Indexical, an evening-length work that highlights both Rainer’s persistent innovation and her profound understanding of the motifs of this historic work, one hundred years later. A PERFORMA Commission co-commissioned by Documenta, Rainer’s work premieres at Documenta in Kassel, Germany in August 2007 and in New York during PERFORMA07. A famed choreographer and director of seven feature-length films, Rainer’s influence in the international world of dance and film since her groundbreaking presence in the Judson Dance Theater of the 1960s is unparalleled.
TICKET INFORMATION:
Please email tickets at performa-arts.org to reserve tickets.
FRANCESCO VEZZOLI
In the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, Italian new media artist Francesco Vezzoli will present a restaging of Cosi’ e (se vi pare,) or There You Are If You Think You Are, by Italian Nobel-Laureate Luigi Pirandello. Using known and un-known actors, Vezzoli’s production will implicate the audience in a dramatic examination of celebrity, the relativity of truth, the necessity of illusion, and the instability of the human personality. This performance is co-produced by PERFORMA and Gagosian Gallery.