Bunny Rogers, Ed Atkins, and Other Artists Are Making Their First-Ever Performances for the Next Performa Biennial

The forthcoming edition of
Performa, New York’s biennial performance art festival, is starting
to take shape.

Last week, the festival
announced the commissioned
projects that will make
up much of this year’s show, which is set to run from November
1–24. 

As in years past,
cross-disciplinary collaborations will stand out. Argentina-born,
Paris-based choreographer Cecilia Bengolea will stage a new
50-dancer performance with famed fashion muse Michèle Lamy, while
London-based artist Paul Maheke will join forces with artist and DJ
Melika Ngombe Kolongo for Sènsa, a performative piece at
the Abrons Arts Center, which co-commissioned the work.

Video and installation artist
Bunny Rogers will present her first live theatrical work at a local
public school. Revisiting
territory she explored in a trilogy of videos
about the Columbine High School massacre, the new project will take the form of a high
school talent show, touching on the way adolescent violence has
evolved from school-yard bullying to the emotional torment waged
online today. British artist Ed Atkins also has his first
theatrical work planned, though details are still being worked out,
a Performa representative tells artnet News.

Meanwhile, sculptor Nairy
Baghramian and choreographer Maria Hassabi will present a new
collaborative piece co-presented with The Kitchen in a Fifth Avenue
townhouse. Elsewhere, in a very different spirit, Honolulu-born
artist Paul Pfeiffer will present a live show with The Redcoats,
the University of Georgia’s famed marching band.

Yvonne Rainer, still a force at
age 84, will restage her landmark 1965 work for 10 people and 12
mattresses, which first debuted at the Judson Memorial Church and
featured Robert Rauschenberg and Robert
Morris. Recreated with
fellow choreographer Emily Coates from archival materials, the
piece will feature Nick Mauss and Liz Magic Laser.

Other projects include an
interdisciplinary performance by Korakrit Arunanondchai, an
experimental musical by Samson Young, and a spate of performances
by Swedish and Taiwanese artists as part of the festival’s
Pavilions Without Walls program. 

“We are thrilled to be working
with artists from more than a dozen different parts of the world,
and to be introduced to the cultural and political references that
make his or her individual work so essential and compelling to our
understanding of the times in which we live,” RoseLee Goldberg,
Performa’s founding director and chief curator, says in a
statement. “This is powerful and important work made even more so
being live, for it engages audiences directly, viscerally, with the
artists’ sensibilities and concerns.”

The post Bunny Rogers, Ed Atkins, and Other Artists Are
Making Their First-Ever Performances for the Next Performa
Biennial appeared first on artnet News.