“A performance artist of underground legend.”
– Guy Trebay, New York Times
Lord Whimsy authors “a rallying cry for the return of the dandy.” – Liesl Schillinger, New York Times
“Fishnet stockings and feather boas aren’t usually the subject of a lecture but today students are taken back to the turn of the twentieth century and topless showgirls .” – Judith Kampfner, NPR
This verbal varieté strategizes the explicitly semiotic spectacle in a multimedia showcase of live art representing an encounter between the academic lecture hall, the poet’s theater, and the vaudeville house. Its players cut across the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, pedagogy, cabaret, poetics, and performance in an investigation of linguistic mechanisms of spectacular identity formation. Linguistic illusionists expose the parlor trick of transparent speech, conjuring floating signifiers that levitate forty-four feet above the floor. Costumes sewn from three million majuscules burst at the semes. The auditorium oscillates between reading room and performatorium. The linguistic turn transmogrifies into a shimmy.
Semiospectacle is curated by Mashinka Firunts and will feature performances by Vaginal Davis, Lord Whimsy, Dr. Lucky, Jeremy J F Thompson, Paolo Javier, Daniel Scott Snelson, and Shonni Enelow. Musical accompaniment by Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators, intertitular tap by The Minsky Sisters, and one-minute curatorial micro-lectures by Mashinka Firunts. The evening commences with Steno Pool, an interactive performance, and Codexkammer: a functional lending library installed in Performance Space 122.
Reception to follow.
www.semiospectacle.com
Monday March 22, 2009
8PM
ADDED 10PM SHOW
FREE – Reservations Required
Co-Sponsors:
