Festival of Ideas For A New City
Rhythm and Repetition:
Reconfiguring Performance Practice Across Genres
May 7, 4pm
A Conversation with Reggie Watts and Heather Kravas as part of Festival of Ideas for a New City.
Working in dance and technologically-enabled comedic performance, Reggie Watts and Heather Kravas are hailed as multidisciplinary innovators in their respective spheres. RadioPlay, Watts’s current collaboration with Tommy Smith, remixes historical radio dramas of yesteryear to produce a contemporary sonic hybrid. Kravas’s The Green Surround emulates traditional balletic forms in an endeavor to transform them, offering a critical commentary on the language of classicism. Rhythm and Repetition: Reconfiguring Performance Practice Across Genres brings together Watts and Kravas to discuss the intersections in their most recent work, and their respective methods for envisioning new models of practice. Moderated by Jenn Joy.
Jenn Joy teaches seminars in critical theory and writing at Rhode Island School of Design and is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. She edited Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory and the Global with André Lepecki (Seagull Press, 2009) and has recently published essays on Danspace Project blog for Platform 2010, Movement Research Performance Journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Dance Theatre Journal and Women and Performance. She founded and directed jennjoygallery in San Francisco from 1997-2000.
Publishing Networked Performance:
Live Art Almanac Vol. 2 NYC Launch
May 8, 5pm
A panel discussion and conversation as part of Festival of Ideas for a New City Published as a collaboration between Live Art Development Agency, Live Art UK, Performance Space 122 (NYC), and Performance Space (Sydney, Australia), The Live Art Almanac Vol. 2 represents a critical sampling of texts on performance in the 21st-century. Its contributors comprise the luminary scholars, professionals, and artists in the field from Guillermo Gomez-Pena to Rabih Mroue.
In this discussion celebrating its launch, PS122 Artistic Director Vallejo Gantner and aesthetic anthropologist, Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, PhD, will be joined on Skype by representatives from the Live Art Development Agency, London and Performance Space Sydney. Their transcontinental conversation will explore publishing as a strategy for engendering dialogue between an internationally networked community of performance practitioners.
The Festival of Ideas for the New City, May 4-8, 2011, is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations, from universities to arts institutions and community groups, working together to affect change. A first for New York, the Festival will harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore the ideas destined to shape it. It will take place in multiple venues Downtown and is organized around three central programs: a three-day slate of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over eighty independent projects and public events. The Festival will serve as a platform for artists, writers, architects, engineers, designers, urban farmers, planners, and thought leaders to exchange ideas, propose solutions, and invite the public to participate. For more information, visit festivalofideasnyc.com.
Rhythm and Repetition
Saturday May 7, 2011 4pm
Publishing Networked Performance
Sunday May 8, 2011 5pm