By Jenn Snider At first blush, Linda Rae Dornan’s performance Calling the Cukoo exists at a crossroads of language, the body, and aurality. Standing in the center of the performing area she breathes a wheezing flow of partial words. With bright eyes, she emphasizes the nearly-there as an expression of potential in her communication. Dornan …
By Alison Cooley claude wittmann has only one egalitarian action on the list which he promised to develop over the course of Radio Equals. Fittingly, the action on his list is exactly what he has been doing all week: Have a conversation about equality while trying to be egalitarian. wittmann introduces us to the Swiss …
By Alison Cooley The floor is littered with objects in Theo Pelmus’s performance. Part installation, part stage set, the scene includes two projections on opposing walls of a small kitsch Pieta sculpture (bits of gold leaf and a stuck-on butterfly clinging to it in the wind), small bottles of baby powder, wine, and honey, a …
By Alison Cooley Terrance Houle beckons his audience closer, drawing a square around himself. I’ll admit to having let my curiosity get the better of me ahead of time—I know he’s enlisted some others to assist in his performance, and he tells me I’ll want to make sure I’m at the front. I’d interviewed Houle …
By Alison Cooley Basil AlZeri, clad in a white dress shirt, hands neatly folded across a pristine white-clothed table, announces that his performance will be called “The Death of Performance Art.” It seems absurd to me that no one has ever given this title to their work before—a cursory Google search yields only a lot …
By Jenn Snider Aidana Maria Rico Chavez enters the room whistling a happy tune. Hands clasped behind her back, she casts her eyes across the crowd. All facing toward the center scene where a blue gingham picnic blanket, a few mason jars, a skipping rope, and some cardboard lie waiting, the audience sits, smiling back …
By Jenn Snider Kurt Johannessen is at it again. This time he’s ready to play a game: a game about framing, a game about language, a game about experimentation. A game About Thoughts. “But, this wasn’t a game,” you might say if you were also in attendance last Saturday afternoon to watch Johannessen present his …
A game About Thoughts: they have knees, they move Read More »
By Alison Cooley Serena Lee begins Layers Channels Paths History by dividing the audience into sections of green, brown and “nothing.” The unexplained designation recalls Jane Elliot’s “Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise,” sets a political tone. Establishing boundaries between audience members, Lee has already begun to map out our relations to each other. Someone shoots …
By Jenn Snider There is a strong tradition of using the preparation and service of food in art as a method of connecting and enacting the power of social ritual and politics (think, for example of the well-known series by Rirkrit Tiravanija, which began in 1990 with pad thai, or the more recent A Party …
An edible experiment: Fausto Méndez Luna’s generosity and symbolic etiquette Read More »
By Alison Cooley I can hear a whip. I’m unsure if it’s against the floor, or against a body, but I hear guttural reactions to it from outside the studio. When I first enter Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro’s durational performance, it is her gaze, not the whip (which is actually a jump rope) that strikes …
Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro: History’s Yearning Read More »