Nov 5—9Performa Hub
Join Performa's mailing list to stay up to date on the latest news and upcoming events.
Performa Studio is conceived as a public, process-based program, placing emphasis on the creative research, experimentation, and learning, that occurs during the artistic process within a studio environment, to consider what it means to think with both mind and body.
ALL PERFORMA STUDIO EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Artists and choreographers Moriah Evans and Isabel Lewis have devised a program of open rehearsals, classes, participatory group work, and talks, uniting choreography, movement, somatic practices, sound, music, and discussion in a specially designed space by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro—housing an exploratory program that fosters collaboration with both participants and audiences, creating a community space for events of all kinds.
Each artist’s program considers what dance and movement can mean as a social, collaborative, political act, to consider the formation of individual movement and collective movement. Throughout the Performa Studio program, Evans and Lewis will address a series of fundamental questions: What does it mean to move as an individual and what does it mean to move as a group? What is the relationship between individual and collective consciousness? What differentiates vigorous collective movements from chaos? And what roles can structured choreographic movement, and seemingly chaotic, unstructured movement, play in creating societal change?
FREE EVENT WITH NO REGISTRATION, WE SUGGEST YOU ARRIVE PROMPTLY
Join Performa for a night of spirited debate on . . . performance! Watch as a cast of performance-world luminaries parry and spar over recent trends and curatorial methods. Listen as they advocate for opposing performance spaces. Snap or hiss as they bicker about who did it first—and who did it better. Will their vigorous arguments and histrionic gestures convince you? Or will they unsettle you, leaving you with the underlying question: Does performance even matter?
Organized by Claire Bishop & Nikki Columbus
Claire Bishop is an art critic and Presidential Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012, winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism), a book of conversations with the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Cisneros, 2020), Merce Cunningham’s Events: Key Concepts (Koenig, 2024), and Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso, 2024, shortlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award). She is a a Contributing Editor of Artforum, a Guggenheim Fellow (2024), and her essays and books have been translated into twenty languages.
Nikki Columbus writes on culture and politics. Most recently, she has written about the shifting dynamics in the US and German art worlds after October 7 for Texte Zur Kunst and the Nation; and the evolving interpretations of a public performance in downtown Cairo, for a forthcoming catalogue on the late Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. In what feels like a previous life, she was executive editor of Parkett, a curator at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and an associate editor at Artforum (but not all at once).