Okwui Okpokwasili News

Performance Space New York partners with East Village-based queer funk dance party WET NOISE for a celebratory 12-Hour DANCE-A-THON (May 5, 12pm-12am), a fundraising event that couldn't be further from expectations of what a "fundraising event" entails. The DANCE-A-THON revels in filthy funk music, endless dancing, community building, and inclusivity across age, race, gender, sexuality, and class. DJs tag team in sets as a dynamic give-and-take, throughout the night; they include founding DJ Amber Martin along with Patrick Johnson, Ana Matronic (Scissor Sisters), Seth Kirby (Joshua Light Show), Thomas Campbell, and DatKat (O.E.A.).

May 13 marks the 25th year the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (HAAIA) will be presented to five risk-taking, mid-career artists - experimenters - who are challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines, and society. Founded and conceived by legendary musician, philanthropist and artist Herb Alpert, and his Grammy-winning vocalist wife, Lani Hall in conjunction with the California Institute of the Arts, the HAAIA has been awarded to 125 artists in the five disciplines of dance, film/video, music, theatre and visual arts. Each artist receives a $75,000 unrestricted prize and a one-week residency at CalArts which administers the prize on behalf of the Herb Alpert Foundation.

This Friday, March 15, OntheBoards.tv—the first online pay-per-view film series dedicated to bringing provocative performance art, dance, theater, and music to audiences around the world—is launching a 24-hour PBS-style telethon. I thought the telethon would be a great opportunity to shed light on this progressive platform and new model for audience engagement, and make your readers aware of this unique resource for anyone who's interested in the performing arts.

New York Live Arts 2019 Live Ideas Gala, co-chaired by Matthew Putman, Slobodan Randjelovi and Jon Stryker, and hosted by award-winning director and photographer and noted social activist Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri, pays tribute to Live Arts' annual Live Ideas Festival. The Gala will take place at the Caldwell Factory, 547 W 26th St, New York City on Monday, March 25th starting with a cocktail reception followed by a dinner catered by BITE and performances.

Sundance Institute will convene dozens of offscreen events, including inclusive and intersectional conversations on the next wave of storytelling, radical data transparency, the future of democracy at its intersection with the arts, behind-the-scenes panels on the art of filmmaking and musical performances that range from intimate to raucous at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival taking place in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Sundance, Utah, January 24 through February 3, 2019.

Lucy Jackson in association with Dutch Kills Theater Company will present the World Premiere of INTELLIGENCE by John Golden Playwriting Award winner Helen Banner. Directed by 2017 Lucille Lortel Award winner Jess Chayes (Home/Sick, Half Moon Bay), previews begin January 12 at Next Door at NYTW. Opening is slated for Today, January 17.

Lucy Jackson in association with Dutch Kills Theater Company will present the World Premiere of INTELLIGENCE by John Golden Playwriting Award winner Helen Banner. Directed by 2017 Lucille Lortel Award winner Jess Chayes (Home/Sick, Half Moon Bay), previews begin January 12 at Next Door at NYTW. Opening is slated for Thursday, January 17.

The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Institute Alliance Francaise (FIAF) are pleased to announce programming for the fourth annual TILT (March 2-31), a festival for kids, families, and adults showcasing lyrical and thought-provoking multidisciplinary international projects and new commissions from musicians, theater makers, visual artists, and philosophers. Co-curated for the first time by Laurent Clavel, Cultural Attache of the French Embassy, and FIAF Artistic Director Courtney Geraghty, this year's TILT engages leading French, Francophone, and American artists. Their works-many of which emphasize the theme of acceptance-nurture both imagination and social consciousness as they speak to the next generation of engaged citizens. Most of the events are free; for ticketed events, please visit www.tiltkidsfestival.org.

New York Live Arts, under the artistic leadership of world renowned choreographer, National Medal of Arts, MacArthur "Genius" Award and Kennedy Center Honors recipient Bill T. Jones and Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, announced Raja Feather Kelly as the 2019-20 Randjelovi/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA). The award is one of the most substantial awards for a choreographer in the United States and a significant vehicle for midcareer artists.

Lucy Jackson in association with Dutch Kills Theater Company will present the World Premiere of INTELLIGENCE by John Golden Playwriting Award winner Helen Banner. Directed by 2017 Lucille Lortel Award winner Jess Chayes (Home/Sick, Half Moon Bay), previews begin January 12 at Next Door at NYTW. Opening is slated for Thursday, January 17.

After having recently announced a reading series organized by Sarah Schulman and an Associate Artist program, Performance Space New York continues to explore new ways of shaping its organizational structure around the creative desires of artists with Octopus, a new artist-curated series of performances (December 2018-June 2019). Occurring simultaneously but independent from the Spring season's the No Series (January-May 2019) and Schulman's First Mondays: Reading of New Works in Progress (now-May 2019), Octopus gives select artists the autonomy to bring together performers on their radar, working in any number of disciplines, for evening-length programs.

Artistic Director Kwame Kwei-Armah today announces the Young Vic's 2019 season

May 13, 2019 marks the 25th year the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (HAAIA) will be presented to five risk-taking, mid-career artists who use their talent, vision, and labor to make something that matters within and potentially beyond their field.

Performance Space New York continues its Posthuman Series with DEAD THOROUGHBRED, a collaboration that includes at least keyon gaskin and sidony o'neal, October 26-27. DEAD THOROUGHBRED feels ambivalent about the posthuman future. Rather than the post-human, DEAD THOROUGHBRED feels the ante-human (ante = before in Latin), i.e. the dead and other non-human living and non-living forms, in an effort to complicate the idea that living human consciousness is the central or sole indicator of subjective relation. DEAD THOROUGHBRED acknowledges the inherent exclusion and limitations of posthuman theory. DEAD THOROUGHBRED's presentation in the Posthuman Series f**ks with the generativity of death and hopelessness as a critical antithesis to DEAD THOROUGHBRED's interest in posthuman ideas of enhanced living, futurity, and occult possibility.

The night remained forever young at this year's Bessies, what with live performances, videos, tearful and grinning thank you's, hugs and cheers for the new slew of winners, and a costume sashay thrown into wild mix of celebration that took place tonight, October 8, at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.  As a prelude to the goings-on inside, impromptu dance performances, including Simone Forti's "Huddle," took place outside.  Ayodele Casel and Shernita Anderson hosted the evening.

Performance Space New York kicks off its second themed season of performances and events-the Posthuman Series-with the world premiere of Annie Dorsen's The Slow Room (September 27-29). Dorsen has taken the idea of technological theater further than most artists.

Performance Space New York announces First Mondays: Readings of New Works in Progress, organized by author Sarah Schulman (Maggie Terry, 2018; Conflict is not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, 2016). On the first Monday of most months between October 2018 and May 2019, the series will present audiences with an opportunity to gather and hear in-progress works from writers leading the literary avant-garde. First Mondays exemplifies the artistic community-building power in Performance Space New York's appointment of five Associate Artists. Today, the organization announces Sarah Schulman, Emily Johnson, Gillian Walsh, Sarah Ortmeyer, and Angela Dimayuga as the Associate Artists who will actively contribute to programming and administrative decision making in the years to come-honoring Performance Space New York's roots as a space run by the very people experimenting within it.

Performance Space New York continues its second themed season of performances and events-the Posthuman Series-with the U.S. Premiere of choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen's 21 pornographies(October 3-5). The solo performance expands on Ingvartsen's body of work exploring an all-pervasive sexuality, here using physical action and narrative description to take audiences through pornographic history in associative tour de force that is equally stimulating, disturbing, cheerful, and sensuous. Ingvartsen also brings The Permeable Stage - Reimagining the Social, a new installment of her ongoing series of performative conferences, to Performance Space New York (October 7),engaging artists, thinkers, filmmakers, and activists in a dialogue drawing on various Posthuman ideas.

Performance Space New York kicks off its second themed season of performances and events-the Posthuman Series-with the world premiere of Annie Dorsen's The Slow Room (September 27-29). Dorsen has taken the idea of technological theater further than most artists.

Performance Space New York announces the Posthuman Series, its second themed season of performances and events, beginning Fall 2018. Following the conclusion of its East Village Series, which looked inward to contemplate the past, present and future of Performance Space New York and its immediate neighborhood, Executive Artistic Director Jenny Schlenzka now gathers artists who've taken an active approach to addressing nothing smaller than the morphing state of "humanity." Inspired by thinkers like Donna Haraway ("A Cyborg Manifesto") and Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman), the Posthuman Series continues the legacy of Performance Space New York to defy categorization and broaden the meaning of "performance," through works that simultaneously seek to question and expand the very definition of "human."