Performance Space New York Reveals Fall 2023 Programming For Themed Series Invisible Cultures

Performance Space New York has announced its Fall 2023 programming for Invisible Cultures, its latest series of thematically coalescing interdisciplinary work, organized by Performance Space Director Pati Hertling in collaboration with their Keith Haring Curatorial Fellow X Arriaga. Here, live performances, film screenings, installations, discussions, and lectures journey into terrains of queer coexistence within ancestral, oceanic, and microbial realms.

 

Communities of microbes swirl invisibly on and within our bodies, enriching and contaminating. The corpses of whales decompose and unleash nutrients into the magnificence and muck of poisoned oceans. Imprints of our past and visions of the future commingle with the present. Invisible Cultures celebrates a primordial queerness in worlds whose ancient, amorphous, fluid structures metaphorically evade the grasp of colonialism and capitalism—yet are nonetheless physically vulnerable to their exploitation and destruction.

 

A submerged, oceanic, and decomposing approach to dance characterizes mayfield brooks' upcoming work Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall (October 26–28). This work continues the artist's exploration of whale fall, the phenomenon that occurs when a whale's carcass plunges to the ocean's depths and breathes new life into it. This cyclical process resonates with the nonlinear nature of the ancestral and futuristic visions offered in programs from Black Quantum Futurism (December 2) and Knowledge of Wounds (presenting Tracey Moffatt's uncanny 1993 horror film beDevil, the first feature by an Australian Aboriginal woman, October 17). An Anicka Yi-curated evening surrounds the Indigenous Karrabing Film Collective's The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (October 11), a film set within a toxic land and seascape and carrying its protagonist toward possible pasts and futures. In an evening of immersive dance and film, Galle invites us to decompose into collaboration and non-linear dimensions (November 29). Anto Astudillo curates a multidisciplinary evening gathering trans, epupillán (two-spirit) and queer perspectives that exude from organic matter and level hierarchies between the worlds of humans and microorganisms (December 6). Angel Dimayuga creates a living room environment convening film works by artists considering global Asian diasporic experiences, immersed in a sensory soundscape by Miho Hatori (November 15). In quori theodor's Open Room installation Gnaw (October 13–June 30), vacuum packed fermented foods make nourishing offerings in an otherworldly, grotesque environment of curdling gender and Americana.

 

In these works, we see how ubiquitous, unseen forces are forever at play. We see how considering their queer, wild forms (and resistance to form) can shake calcified Western understandings of our world that put humanity at odds with nature and science at odds with spirituality; encage gender and sexuality; and flatten time itself. The series is an invitation to navigate untamed oceanic currents, temporal entanglements, and microbial swarms that mirror the very essence of queer life: interconnected, generative, and rooted in the intricate dance between chaos and structure.

 

Pati Hertling says, “I am excited about our Fall 2023 season, in which we are taking the time to sit with our communities and artists in heightened consideration of hidden, form-defying worlds. In a moment of exciting transition for our organization, we look towards these gatherings and performance activations to let our next chapter emerge from conversations with the past, present, and future of queer and ancestral wisdom and the teachings of nature. We seek to learn from invisible worlds: to slow our fast-paced lives, expand our perspectives, and open us to the omnipresent yet unseen forces all around us.”

 

Two beloved Performance Space programs that continue to expand the organization's reach to new artists and audiences alike return this season. The John Giorno Octopus Series, for which artists and guest curators bring those within their creative communities in for evening-long engagements, this season will feature events with J Wortham (October 19), LL Proyectos (November 2), and Stev (December 7); and First Mondays, the Sarah Schulman-organized reading series offering the rare chance for readers to hear vanguard writers' works-in-progress will include evenings with Bushra Rehman, Alejandro Varela, and Daisy Hernández (October 2), Jeff McMahon, Laurie Stone, and Karen Finley (November 6), and Steven Thrasher, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Penny Arcade (December 4). Open Movement (Sundays, October 1–December 17), organized by Monica Mirabile and now in its third season providing free workshops—and time and space for anybody to move however they like—expands in Fall 2023 to include a third component: WIP Feedback Front, a performance event showcasing artists' works-in-progress.

 

Screening of The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland by Karrabing Film Collective

Organized by Anicka Yi

 

October 11 | 7pm

 

Anicka Yi presents The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, a film by the Indigenous Karrabing Film Collective—an award-winning group of Aboriginal filmmakers and artists who use their aesthetic practices as a means of self-organization and social analysis. The Mermaids' hallucinatory vision of a capitalism-blighted world follows Aiden, a young Indigenous man taken away from his family as a baby to be part of an experiment to save the white race, in an environment where Europeans can no longer survive outdoors in the poisoned land and seascape of their own creation. When he is released into the world of his family, he confronts two possible futures and pasts.

 

Yi, who makes work at the intersection of politics and macrobiotics and questions the increasingly hazy taxonomic distinctions between human, animal, plant, and machine, first encountered the film at the Hawai'i Triennial 2022: Pacific Century. She was struck by the speculative story of survival in times of massive upheaval. The overarching framework of the Triennial simultaneously led her to new considerations of Pacific coastal migration—from ancient coastal travel along the “kelp highway” to our contemporary age of Pacific prominence. The artist presents the “experimental and ecstatic” (The New York Times) film introduced to her at a generative moment in her practice.

 

The screening is followed by a conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli, a Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is a member of the Karrabing Film Collective and has worked with the Aboriginal community of Belyuen since 1984.

 

 

quori theodor

Gnaw

 

Installation

Opening Reception: October 13, 2023 | 6 - 8pm

October 13, 2023 - June 30, 2024

Sun, Tues - Thurs | 12 - 6pm

 

 

In an otherworldly diner, food's edibility nears its limit, as the sweetness of girlhood ripens to rot. A space of inversion, exaggeration, and fermentation, quori theodor's curdling vision for Performance Space New York's Open Room, Gnaw, opens onto a floor that's a countertop, on which the ingredients of sustenance and gender languish into mess. Spoiling food entangles with soiled lace.

 

quori co-founded queer food project Spiral Theory Test Kitchen, which “engages food as a psychosexual object,” with Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Precious Okoyomon and here extends elements of their collaborative practice into their solo work. quori prods the classic diner space—and the familiarity of its overdetermined, gendered Americana—towards its uncanny edges. Gnaw plays off diners' anachronistic relationship to time (the 1950s seen through the lens of the 1970s, the 90s, and the early 2000s): their perpetual reworking of an aesthetic is mirrored in the installation's breakdown of moldy institutional and social structures.

 

Stepping off the elevator, visitors first encounter a vending machine stocked with toothsome, vacuum sealed experiments, which they can purchase with communal dollars. Transforming comestibles line the walls in a ferment library, compiled with contributions from collaborators and friends in the artist's community. This ordered chaotic space literalizes the idea of “throw it on the wall and see what sticks,” celebrating a fecund muddle of elements and ideas. Pairing the antiseptic and the filthy, quori's installation evokes personal, societal, and gastronomic collapse—and all the potential it holds.

 

Just as microbial enzymes and time catalyze fermentation, this souring environment pushes gender toward decay, and offers a grotesque invitation to commune and consider the social order of the kitchen, and the social performances surrounding eating.

 

 

Screening of beDevil by Tracey Moffatt

Organized by Knowledge of Wounds

 

October 17 | 7pm

Screening

 

Knowledge of Wounds—the collaborative curatorial practice of S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation)—organizes a screening of celebrated artist Tracey Moffatt's 1993 horror film beDevil, the first feature made by an Aboriginal Australian woman.

 

Inspired by ghost stories Moffatt heard as a child, the unsung genre classic inhabited by liminal beings itself exists at the stylistic precipice of narrative and art film, seriousness and camp. In three uncanny vignettes, set across wetlands and plains, beDevil unveils an everyday presence of the supernatural.

 

Relating the film to the season's framework of “Invisible Cultures,” S.J Norman notes how the film's approach to horror “reflects Indigenous relations to the unseen world”: a quotidian engagement with the more-than-human that treats threshold beings not as mythological artifacts, but as relatives. Says Norman, “They appear in beDevil through a seepage that's constant, and that lens distinguishes it from the typical narrative arc of Western horror.”

 

Simultaneously, unseen realms here exert pressure on daily life in ways that speak to the uncanniness of colonialism. In the film's first chapter, Mr. Chuck, an Aboriginal boy interacts with the ghost of an American G.I. drowned in the mangrove-tangled wetlands of Bribie Island. As Norman puts it, “Moffatt evokes the uncanniness of being part of a narrative space and a cultural space that has all of these other forces pressing down on it.”

 

mayfield brooks Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall

 

Wail Room

Installation

October 26 - 28 | 4pm

 

Wail•Fall

Activation

October 26 - 28 | 7pm

 

With their latest work, mayfield brooks continues their “rich and poetic exploration of grief” (The New York Times) through the phenomenon of the whale fall—the giant mammal's decomposition after it dies, falls to the ocean floor, and feeds thousands of sea creatures in its wake. Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall invites the public to wail, release, and find relief in a world where grieving is often shunned.

From 4-6pm the public is welcomed into a Wail Room—a space for the voice and body to grieve and decompose like organic matter in a whale fall. Starting at 7pm, brooks activates the Wail Room in acknowledgment of the labor of grief, coalescing human and nonhuman visions of loss and regeneration.

Accompanied by electronic cellist Dorothy Carlos and performer Camilo Restrepo, brooks creates an embodied sonic world that invites a prolonged deterioration of colonized spatial and temporal logic, and resists the performativity and spectacle of composition—and the ways we're expected to grieve.

The artist attributes their interest in “decomposing dance” to their background in urban farming and firsthand experience with compost's generative properties. This interest merged, for brooks, with the idea of whale fall in 2020, as illness and Black death collected into an ocean of grief and isolation.

Sharing the first work in the series, the 2021 film Whale Fall, they told The New York Times, “I want to find ways to be in an awareness of how Black death is a quotidian thing. It's happening all the time, but, also, what does it mean when the bodies pile up? Do we get to decompose this trauma? Do we get to grieve it without it being a spectacle?...Maybe the whales are teaching us something about holding the toxicity and the pollution of the human problem of waste and climate change. When something is rotten to the core, how do we get inside of it and then try and work toward a whale fall?”

Like all of brooks' work, this stems from their interdisciplinary dance methodology Improvising While Black (IWB), which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. For Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall, brooks studied whales off the Pacific coast of Colombia, bringing questions—of how to dive into air, how to move like water, how to move with a spine that keeps you horizontal—into the human form, considering these ideas alongside the ocean's physical imprint within Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Haitian dance.

As Wail•Fall•Whale•Fall honors Black and queer siblings and ancestors who've died throughout vast and continuous histories of oppressive violence, alongside whale kin poisoned, injured, and killed by human and capitalist destruction, it asks: can a new interconnected and symbiotic cellular ecology emerge through the act of grieving? Can we echolocate our way back to each other at the bottom of the ocean?

Angel Dimayuga

Living Room Concept

 

November 15 | 7pm

Performance, Screening, “Food Delivery”

 

“Part of the joy of cooking is that we each bring to the kitchen our own imagination and sense of play,” wrote Angel Dimayuga (they/she) in their acclaimed cookbook Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora (co-authored with Ligaya Mishan), “I don't claim to speak for Filipinos or Filipino Americans, I can only offer my story.” Continuing their devotion to food and the community it builds as containers for imagination and futurity, as well as evocations of intersecting personal and colonially unsettled cultural histories, Dimayuga turns from the kitchen to the living room. The latest in Dimayuga's long history of engagement with Performance Space, their living room concept is a site of storytelling and exchange: bringing together depictions of the search for a grounded self and belonging within third culture experiences from the global Asian diaspora.

 

Replete with ambient lighting, rugs, pillows, and lived-in furniture, Dimayuga's “living room” unfolds various stories told in multiple mediums—food, conversation, shared YouTube clips or film—in community. As is any living room, this is a space of multi-sensory immersion: Miho Hatori provides a sensory soundscape; Dimayuga's food arrives for guests via “delivery service,” and can be enjoyed on any surface of the living room. As though passing around a phone or laptop, Dimayuga shares video clips and short films with her guests via projector.

 

Featured film works include Maggie Lee's Mommy, 2015, a documentary about the passing of the artist's mother, in which “pain and humor live side by side” in “expressive diaristic montages” (Vice); Stephanie Comilang's sci-fi documentary Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise), 2016, in which an omniscient drone spirit follows Filipina overseas workers in Hong Kong in their Sunday social gatherings; and Andrew Thomas Huang's Kiss of the Rabbit God, 2019. (Known for his visionary music video collaborations with Björk and FKA twigs, the short film is a more personal work—as Huang told Nowness, a story that aims to enrich a “collective imagination of what queer Asian male love, sex and intimacy could aspire to be.”)

 

Galle

Cineclub Amora, La Mensajera y Amaru's Tongue: Daughter

 

Keith Haring Theatre

Nov 29 | 7pm

 

Performance, Screening

 

CineClub Amora invites us to lovingly decompose ourselves in a transfeminist evening of oral tradition, Andean-Amazonian ritual, performative lecture with immigrant translanguage justice, and a dance warm-up facilitated by hostess and messenger Galle. These performances will be complemented by a screening of Amaru's tongue: Daughter, a film of matrilineal and trans-species tribute by the acclaimed Aymara artist Chuquimamani Condori aka Elysia Crampton Chuquimia.

 

Galle creates an immersive experience, transforming Cineclub Amora in the womb of Cosmic Mother Earth, where the screen is a portal/black hole to other non-linear dimensions, where collaboration is already happening between artists involved, and where interaction with the audience is stimulated by storytelling, dance, and somatic score.

 

Black Quantum Futurism

Tales from the Memory Vortex

 

December 2 | 2023

Performance, Reading

 

Black Quantum Futurism derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. At Performance Space, BQF, the multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa (Rockers!; Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) stages a two-hour immersive performance event, Tales from the Memory Vortex. .

 

Featuring a curated selection of guest poets, musicians, and scholars, this multidisciplinary gathering centers on themes of Black anthropological discoveries, Black temporalities, quantum physics, and the intricate tapestry of African and Black Diasporic time and memory rituals. In readings of thought-provoking essays, evocative poems, and performative lectures, Tales from the Memory Vortex employs a retrocausal framework, spiraling backward through time and space to examine our origins and trajectories.

 

Anto Astudillo

Generative/Unproductive

 

December 6 | 7pm

Performance, Screening

 

Generative/Unproductive is not oxymoronic: generative implies an openness that allows for the creation of endless variations of knowns or unknowns—rather than the outcome-focused goals pushed by productivity. In this encounter of moving image, poetry and live performance, Anto Astudillo invites a diverse group of artists of trans, non-binary, epupillán (two-spirit) and queer experience, to collaborate and be part of a multidisciplinary conversation, anticipated as “unproductive”: generating a gender fluidity-advocating ephemeral experience that opposes property and capital ideals by offering a healing and intimate relationship with territory.

 

Generative/Unproductive brings living organisms (microorganisms and human beings) and varied media together to engage in expanded and contracted “cognitive interactions,” as described by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Each artist constructs variable landscapes where bodies interrelate across disciplines, proposing genderless and gender-variant perspectives that exude from organic matter.

 

With live performances and video interventions by The Glad Scientist, Catrileo + Carrión Community, Theo J Rose, Riven Ratanavanh, Pau Aran Gimeno, stefa marin alarcon, Erica Schreiner, Grace Byron, Samay Arcentales Cajas, Anto Astudillo and more.

 

Please note that the artist line-up of this event may change*

 

First Mondays: Readings of New Works in Progress

 

Organized by Sarah Schulman

 

Founded in 2018 and now a beloved Performance Space tradition, reading series First Mondays offers a rare occasion to hear what writers are thinking about long before their ideas hit the shelves. Organized by novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman, the free series returns this season with three events with vanguard writers.

 

Featuring bold young authors whose acclaimed recent works place them at the heart of American literature today (October 2); multidisciplinary writers with long histories in New York (November 6); and iconoclasts whose boundary-breaking work offers electric insights about contemporary life (December 4); this season continues First Mondays' legacy of bringing communities of readers and writers together in celebration of germinating work in myriad genres and forms, alongside resonant excerpts from previous writing. Over free drinks, readers can gather to hear the future of literature. 

 

The New Center of American Writing

With Bushra Rehman, Alejandro Varela, Daisy Hernández

October 2

 

Three young writers who have made major impressions on the literary world come together for an evening of readings of new, unpublished works-in-progress. Alejandro Varela's debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, with Publishers Weekly deeming it an “incandescent bildungsroman.” Winner of the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Award, Daisy Hernández's second book The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease “weaves together family memoir and investigative journalism” to raise “damning questions about which infectious diseases get attention and whom we believe to be deserving of care” (NPR). The New York Times called Bushra Rehman's second book, Roses, In The Mouth of the Lion, a “stunningly beautiful coming-of-age novel”; it likewise earned praise in The New Yorker and The L.A. Times. These three young writers, per Schulman, are “the new center of American literature.”

 

New Work from Old Friends

With Jeff McMahon, Laurie Stone, Karen Finley

November 6

 

Karen Finley, Jeff McMahon, and Laurie Stone, all vital figures in the trajectory of New York experimental performance, helped shape the cultural landscape as Performance Space New York (then P.S. 122) itself was coming into being. Legendary performance artist Finley and “talking dancer” McMahon join critic, journalist, memoir and fiction writer Stone in an evening of new work, new insights, and evolving perspectives from remarkable artists who are deeply embedded in the fabric of what New York performance is today.

 

Innovators

With Steven Thrasher, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Penny Arcade

December 4

(Masks Mandatory)

 

This event gathers three iconoclastic artists who bring eclectic forms and influences into their incisive work. Steven Thrasher's The Viral Underclass is a ground-breaking work connecting AIDS, COVID, and other viruses to class and race positions, with clarity and illumination. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is an acclaimed experimental writer, whose most recent book The Freezer Door, was recognized by PEN America as a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. More than just an icon, Penny Arcade is a voice of intelligence, heart, reality, fun, and glamor whose performance work carries numerous avant garde traditions and histories.

John Giorno Octopus Series

Guest-Curated Program

Organizers:

 J Wortham

October 19 | 7pm

 LL Proyectos

November 2 | 7pm

Stev

December 7 | 7pm

Using the octopus’s decentralized nervous system as an inspiration for Performance Space New York’s curatorial practice, the John Giorno Octopus Series—renamed in 2022 after the groundbreaking poet and Downtown legend—invites artists and guest curators to organize an evening-length program with several artists working in any number of disciplines. The series continues Performance Space’s legacy of artist-centric programming and creating space for risk taking.

Fall 2023 events include an evening organized by New York Times staff writer, Still Processing podcast co-host, co-editor of the Black Futures anthology, sound healer, reiki practitioner, and herbalist J Wortham (October 19); Honduran contemporary art platform LL Proyectos (November 2); and digital and video artist Stev (December 7).  

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