#performa 13

  Playing Performa 13

# 05 – Multicultural day off

  Playing Performa 13 honors the multiple days off different religions apply to the calendar during this season. Even today, taking work precarious and time never enough, people need to relax and join friends and family as the supposed common sense dictates. Free time is a desert for that logic that takes work time as a kind of sacrifice. But, dear ones, free time is only free if you take it as a feeling-thinking, as a being in the world’s state of mind also when working (I guess).

While Performa actually already finished, we’ll come back next year in order to accomplish our devoted mission of reporting to you in a different time what happened at the Biennial.

Be alert, be smart, be awake, and don’t forget what friendship is all about. We’ll keep in touch.

Concrete sounds and voice by Ricardo Seiça Salgado; saxophone improvisations by the amazing Joaquim Almeida.

Thank you to the dearest friend and stunning saxophonist Joaquim Almeida for the exclusive improvisations made for this show and to Performa 13 organization for their kind support.

Jennifer Wen Ma developed Paradise Interrupted, a contemporary Kunqu opera, as a three-part artist residency at the Performa Institute. Over the course of the first four days, Jennifer Wen Ma created a large-scale three-dimensional paper garden stage set with art students and the general public.  Wen Ma and her collaborators then conducted a public two-day workshop of the work in process. The program concluded with an evening event, featuring a preview performance by opera singer Qian Yi set within the wall garden created during the week-long residency, and a panel discussion with the core creative team, which explored the voice in Chinese and Western performance, illuminated the ways the female protagonist is a signifier of emotional and spiritual quests in the opera, and delves into their collaborative creative process.   

  Ryan McNamara's MEƎM: A STORY BALLET ABOUT THE INTERNET is a choreographic exploration of the online world as a space of engagement, and of the digital architecture that conditions current anxieties over influence and transmission. Exploring our sense of what we do when we copy, steal, appropriate, create, repeat, plagiarize, mine, or tweet, the performance engages several coexisting conceptions of the Internet: as utopic commons of unfettered communication; as sinister military infrastructure; as unchecked, stupid clutter approaching an unfathomable critical density; and as motor for a 24/7 infotainment culture. A fully immersive “experience” that questions the very possibility of a singular “experience” today, the dance will play with rapid, abrupt changes in pace, music, and choreographic style – such as pantomime, pop, abstraction – to articulate the extreme form of proximity that different subjectivities and modes of spectacle now have to one another.

  In his videos, Vishal Jugdeo utilizes repetition, restaging and doubling as narrative devices, exploring how these might lead to slippages in translation and meaning. For Performa Jugdeo will create an event in which the live and the recorded will unfold simultaneously within a constructed theatrical set and viewing environment. The work will center around a series of projected cinematic fragments, filmed within the lush Caribbean landscape and urban spaces of British Guyana, as well as in the artist's home in Los Angeles, through a series of vignettes performed by the artist and his boyfriend. As the two locations become overlaid with one another, the principle characters engage in an abstract, fragmented discussion on topics of movement, travel, motion, and orientation, which are delivered in a hyperbolic and melodramatic soap opera style. The theatrical environment features mechanized props, sound and light, which disrupts the action on the screen, adding a sense of absurdity and fervor to the narrative, whilst also creating occasional moments of highly choreographed, synchronous clarity, stillness and humor.

Hands Off, Molly Lowe’s absurd and otherworldly performance, is populated by an ensemble of characters whose bodies are comprised of fingers alone. Extrapolating from our current moment, Lowe imagines a future in which humans have devolved into base creatures—fingers with no hands, and digits that only know how to grab, push, and destroy. Dressed in full-bodied costumes, Lowe’s "finger-beasts" are trapped in a set that is part obstacle course, part carousel, and which isolates each character from the others; try as they might to establish contact. Lowe's intricate costumes and sets reveal her restless characters' inner states as they search for contact and true bodily sensations, as they strive to tear down the walls that separate them, and to escape isolation.  

  RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director and Curator, Performa

By Susannah Rosenfield

Playing Performa 13

# 04 – A Pause for Queen Mother speech at Performa Biba

  Queen Mother Dr. Delois Blakely is a sweet heart veteran activist and former nun, who praised the youth and the virtues of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

In 1969, she founded New Future Foundation Inc, a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural not-for-profit organization whose mission is to facilitate international and domestic economic social development, community outreach, education, and health.

Queen Mother has been Occupying 477w 142nd street (Harlem) for over 30 years fighting for justice against known, indicted predatory lenders and mortgage fraud. Queen Mother sees the problems with the absent boiler of her building as part of a campaign by the tenants’ board to force out current tenants in order to charge higher rents to wealthier ones who are moving into the neighborhood, which is a rapidly gentrifying part of Harlem. Former Occupy Wall Street, and independent occupiers have since joined her.

  Thank you to Queen Mother Dr. Delois Blakely to let us broadcast her speech and to Performa 13 organization for the kind support.

  Playing Performa 13, by Ricardo Seiça Salgado, is a stress.fm / baldio production.

Playing Performa 13

# 03 – After Liberty turned up statue Queen Mother of the homeless

(Althamer’s Performa Biba)

  Paweł Althamer is a Polish artist based in Warsaw, whose plastic humanoid sculptures were a highlight of this year’s Venice Biennial. He works primarily in sculpture, video, performance actions, and installation. He often works collaboratively, involving other artists, communities and indeed his audience in his work. Althamer’s work is socially engaged, interactive, political and visually striking. He usually has an interest in citizenship, collaboration, and marginalizisation.

In his first large-scale public work for New York City, Paweł Althamer in collaboration with artists Noah Fischer, Roman Stańczak, Rafal Zwirek, Bruno and Szymon Althamer (a Polish chef), and Aaron Burr Society, proposed PERFORMA BIBA, a Performa Commission and part of the Polish Pavilion Without Walls.

In order to avoid ideological terms, because they carry with them traumas and huge pre-concepts, let’s say we have here a lesson of collective participation for civic action. Democracy is not a synonym of capitalism at all!

  Thanks to Pawel Althamer, his team, and to Jim Constanzo. Thanks for Jacob Cohen to let us hear him playing the cello, and Performa organization for the kind support.

  Playing Performa 13, by Ricardo Seiça Salgado, is a stress.fm / baldio production.