What Can You Expect at This Year’s Performa? A Haunted High School Talent Show, a Six-Hour Clay Dance, and More

One hundred years ago, the
legendary art school the Bauhaus was founded in part on the idea of
the Gesamtkunstwerk—that is, works of art that synthesize
different disciplines into one holistic vision. A similar ambition
underscores the mission of Performa, New York’s 16-year-old
biennial. The event is technically dedicated to performance art,
but it embraces a broad definition of the term: any number of art
forms, from painting to poetry, are brought into the fold for each
edition.

It makes sense, then, that the
curators of this year’s program, the eighth edition, chose to 
honor the German school’s centenary. (The Bauhaus was the first art
school to consider performance and theater under the umbrella of
visual art.) 

Performa
19, on view in a variety
of New York venues from November 1 through November 24, will
feature a number of Bauhausian nods. The most referential of them
is bound to be Untitled, The Black
Act, a movement
piece by visual artist and classically trained dancer Kia LaBeija,
who is taking on performance art for the first time. Taking cues
from the third act Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus masterpiece
Triadic Ballet
(1922)—often referred to as the
“black act”—LaBeija will direct five dancers to move as an
extension of her own body.  

Also referencing history is
Yvonne Rainer, who has reimagined her own
landmark 1965 dance piece, Parts of Some
Sextets, which
features 10 performers interacting with 12 mattresses through
everyday movements. Meanwhile, Romania-born, Sweden-based artist
Éva Mag will stage a work deeply indebted to Rainer and other
pioneering performance artists. In the legendary downtown theater
space the Gym, Mag will enact a
durational performance in which she and 10 others will erect, and
interact with, ad-hoc clay sculptures for as long as six hours at a
time.

“One looks for a sense of
wonder—art that’s accessible but still speaks to you in a different
way,” RoseLee Goldberg, Performa’s founder, said in an
interview with
Artnet News earlier this
month. 

“To be an artist is to be in a
state of freedom, which is really quite extraordinary. In these
times we’re living through, it’s more obvious than ever. No one’s
going to be satisfied working separately from the world—I think
we’re all very engaged in the politics we’re living through every
day. That means you’re asking a lot of an artist: to present an
idea that is visually extraordinary, that moves us, and that takes
an ethical position.”

Indeed, the wonder quotient will
be high in Together, a piece by New York- and Bangkok-based artist
Korakrit Arunanondchai. Working with fellow artists boychild,
Bonaventure, Alex Gvojic, and Aaron David Ross, Arunanondchai will
create a surreal alternate reality that mixes painting, video,
sculpture, installation, and performance following a series of
high-profile outings at the Venice Biennale and the Whitney
Biennial. 

Among the biennial’s less
conventional venues is a high school overtaken by artist Bunny
Rogers, who has repeatedly turned to these fraught spaces for her
installations and video pieces (she made a trilogy based on the
1999 Columbine High School massacre). In Sanctuary, held at Essex Street Academy, audience
members will have the chance to walk in and out of the school’s
empty rooms before ending up in an auditorium, where the rehearsals
for a macabre talent show play out on stage. 

Other highlights from Performa
19 include Paul Pfeiffer’s University of
Georgia Redcoat Band Live, which will transplant 50 members of the
eponymous southern school’s marching band to the Apollo Theater in
Harlem; Ed Atkins’s A Catch Upon the
Mirror, which will
find the British artist best known for creating digital avatars
dramatically reciting a poem by Gilbert Sorrentino; and an
animated ballet
by artist and composer Samson Young
that retells the Chinese myth of The Eight Immortals.

See the full list of
programs—and purchase tickets for them—here.

Performa 19 will be on view
at various locations in New York from November 1 through November
24, 2019.

The post What Can You Expect at This Year’s Performa? A
Haunted High School Talent Show, a Six-Hour Clay Dance, and
More appeared first on artnet News.