Museum Of Moving Image And Performa Present PERSONA PERFORMA
By: Gabrielle Sierra Oct. 28, 2011
In his ambitious new Performa Commission titled Persona Performa, the internationally acclaimed multimedia artist Ming Wong has created a site-specific work for Museum of the Moving Image in response to the building's dynamic, fluid, and starkly white new architecture. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman's 1966 masterpiece Persona, in which an actress and her nurse exchange identities on the remote Fårö Island, Wong's piece is a powerful meditation on cinema and theater.
Presented as part of Performa 11, the fourth edition of visual art performance biennial in New York City (November 1-21, 2011), Persona Performa will be performed twice at the Museum on Thursday, November 10, and Friday, November 11, 2011, at 8:00 p.m. Tickets for Persona Performa are $30 ($25 for Museum members) and are available in advance online at movingimage.us or by calling 718 777 6800. Tickets are also available through the Performa 11 box office (performa.org).Twenty-four performers, each representing a frame of a "living filmstrip," will wind their way through the Museum space; the Museum itself becomes a camera, pointing at a ‘Bergman landscape' through the glass walls of the café. After a series of live action performances in the public spaces of the Museum, the show moves into the main theater, which becomes a film studio, the setting for a series of sound and video experiments.In creating Persona Performa, Wong was also influenced by the multicultural neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, and its history as home to a major film production studio. Persona Performa features actors and dancers-of different ages, genders, ethnicities, and nationalities-from Queens, as well as the other boroughs.
"The work has been developed in response to the site, architecture, and collection of the Museum of the Moving Image during my 'residency' here for the past three weeks, using the film Persona by Bergman as a framework with which to explore the notions of performance, identity, and cinema," said Ming Wong. "But instead of two personas as in Bergman's film, we are dealing with 24 different personas and identities, from a cast of actors and dancers from across the city. It has been a uniquely intense and productive experience, only possible in a city like New York."
"Ming Wong's enthusiasm for the history of world cinema and cinematic characters is contagious," said Defne Ayas, Curator at Large at Performa, who is also the lead curator of Persona Performa. "With this performance, Ming pushes himself and his audiences to an adventurous engagement-not only with Bergman's cerebral and complex material, but also with the variables of the live medium. Expect a daring leap into fragmented staging."
"Ming's performance promises to be a revelatory evening," said the Museum's chief Curator David Schwartz, "a reflection on nothing less than the history and the nature of the moving image, and the nature of performance itself, on screen and in life."
Persona Performa was developed during a residency by Ming Wong at Museum of the Moving Image.
Videos