Performance Space New York Presents A Marathon Reading Of Late Activist + Writer Urvashi Vaid's VIRTUAL EQUALITY

Performance Space New York presents a marathon reading of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, a vital document-rare in its detail-of the movements within late 20th century queer American activism by Urvashi Vaid.

The reading, organized by novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman, continues a tradition of Marathon Readings sharing important and influential work by women authors who have passed away, gathering participants to alternate in reading a book (for Virtual Equality, in excerpts selected by Schulman). Vaid's text, published in 1995, offers bounteous insight into under-examined recent histories, here celebrated within an organization that originated with queer artists conceiving performance at the nexus of experimentation, liberation, and protest.

Says Schulman, "This book is an incredible lesson in the history of the gay movement through the 1990s. I know a lot, but through it, I came across so much that I didn't know. Urvashi fills in many gaps in our collective knowledge-particularly about the Gay Liberation period and how queer and trans people of color mobilized during the AIDS epidemic-while asking crucial questions like, 'what's the difference between building an organization and building a movement?' We have so many vague allusions to our recent past, but we don't really know anything about it. This is truly a rare frontline view, written in the middle of a crisis, when so much critical AIDS activism was still happening."

Vaid was an influential figure in LGBT rights both at a grassroots and institutional level. "She was, almost certainly, the most prolific L.G.B.T.Q. organizer in history" (The New Yorker), and became the first woman of color at the helm of a national LGBT organization when she entered the position of Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, amidst the suffering, grief, and collective action of the late 80s/early 90s. The New York Times wrote of Vaid, who died last year at 63, "Long before the word 'intersectionality' entered common parlance, she was practicing it, insisting that freedom for gay men and lesbians required fighting for gender, racial and economic equality as well."

The marathon reading is part of First Mondays, the reading series organized by Schulman whose Monday-evening events (beyond the marathon readings) bring audiences in contact with works-in-progress from vanguard authors long before they hit the shelves, as well as resonant excerpts from previous writing. In this free series, audiences gather over free drinks as writers give intimate insight into what's on their mind and what's making its way onto their pages. The reading also occurs within Performance Space New York's Healing Series, a year-long reflection on the political potency of healing and the role performance plays in it, in the midst of what feels like a momentous shift in art-making to foreground modes and practices of care.

Over the last 40 years Performance Space has been propelling cultural, theoretical, and political discourse forward. Futurity and world-building connect the interdisciplinary works presented here-works that have dissolved the borders of performance art, dance, theater, music, visual art, poetry and prose, ritual, night life, food, film, and technology, shattering artistic and social norms alike.

Founded in 1980, Performance Space New York (formerly Performance Space 122) became a haven for many queer and radical voices shut out by a repressive, monocultural mainstream and conservative government whose neglect exacerbated the emerging AIDS epidemic's devastation. Carrying forward the multitudinous visions of these artists who wielded the political momentum of self-expression amidst the intensifying American culture wars, Performance Space is one of the birthplaces of contemporary performance as it is known today.

As the New York performing arts world has become increasingly institutionalized, and the shortcomings within our industry were further revealed during the ravages and transformations of 2020, our focus has been not just on presenting boundary-breaking work but on restructuring our own organization towards prioritizing equity and access. We seek to build deeper relationships with our artists and communities by creating new access points. Through community programs, annual town halls, guest-curated programs such as Octopus and First Mondays, we welcome the public to actively shape our future and help us hold ourselves accountable. Programs like the revived Open Movement and the new Open Room invite the community in and reclaim the institution as a rare indoor public space in the ever-more expensive East Village.

Our search for new models is an embrace of the unknown-and an acknowledgement of transformation as a process of continuous inquiry, imagination, response, and accountability. Mirroring the spirit of experimentation artists have brought to our spaces across four decades, we strive towards something which does not yet exist. We believe this focus on changing the conditions in which art is made is just as fundamental as the art itself, and only serves to make it more substantial.

02020, the year-long project during which a cohort of salaried artists were invited together with the staff and board to re-vision Performance Space, initiated this transformation, and itself rapidly reshaped to meet artists' and community members' needs amidst the early days of the pandemic and uprising for racial justice. 02020 was a new beginning for us, a sharp and needed turn back towards artists to help rethink the institution for the future.

Performance Space New York is situated in Lenapehoking, the land, waters, and air of the Lenape diaspora, a place which has always been, still is, and always will be a center of intersecting Indigenous movements. We acknowledge that our existence, operating on the island of Manahatta, is a consequence of violent histories of settler colonialism bound up with unchecked exclusions, genocide, and erasures of many Indigenous people -ongoing to this day.

This acknowledgement should not function as acceptance or closure, but as a call to commit to reconfigure our notions about ourselves through our work and working practice, here at Performance Space, as we take responsibility to dismantle the ongoing harm perpetuated by settler colonialism.

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