Herman Johnson

The Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-nominated Best Play by Lynn Nottage comes alive in a moving and urgently relevant new production

Performance Space New York presents Gillian Walsh's Fame Notions, a meditation on the American dancer. As part of the No Series-comprised of works that locate power and creativity in refusal- Fame Notions refuses the externalized spectacle of dance; it hovers well beyond performative time, within dancers' interior experiences of alienation derived from a life circling the desires of the contemporary dance economy. Walsh-a Performance Space New York Associate Artist-has a love-hate relationship with the medium of dance that results, as she describes, in pieces that often work 'underneath expectations of theatrical affect, leaning into an infinite and dense emptiness'; they are 'abstract, anti-didactic, and anti-narrative.' Behind the seemingly hermetic surface of Walsh's repetitive dances, however, lies a sincere attempt to carve out a new role for dance as an artistic medium to experiment with non-capitalist temporalities and create new spaces for collective experiences. Fame Notions asks everyone in the room-including the audience-to slow down considerably.

Performance Space New York concludes its No Series with two performances by Ligia Lewis: minor matter (May 21-22)and Water Will (in Melody) (May 28-29), the latter two installments in her BLUE RED WHITE trilogy interrogating and complicating certain types of embodiment in relationship to the frame of the theater-and particularly the black box-space. The trilogy began with Sorrow Swag in blue and continued with minor matter in red; its conclusion, the U.S. premiere performance Water Will (in Melody), is a melodrama in black and white. Through her use of color, embodiment, and dramaturgical unruliness, Lewis twists ingrained symbols of the body and the theater with playful abandon. Resisting the tyranny of transparency and representationalism, she hopes to carve out a space for opacity and the state of not knowing.