Precarious Luxuries: improvisation, performance, and planning for the unplanned
Thu, Oct 17, 2024
4:30 PM–6:00 PM
Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. This ASAP15 Keynote event is free and open to all. Registration required.
Join us for the first ASAP15 conference keynote event “Precarious Luxuries: improvisation, performance, and planning for the unplanned” with artists Nile Harris, Alex Tatarsky, and Anh Vo, and convened by Ethan Philbrick.
Three artists, one microphone, and a large room; the idea and practice of improvisation; making somethings out of nothings; finding ways out of no way; “yes and…”; “no but…”; everything for everyone.
For this ASAP15 keynote event, the artist and writer Ethan Philbrick gathers three artists who work in an expanded field of performance—Nile Harris, Alex Tatarsky, and Anh Vo— to improvise and discuss the stakes and strategies of their improvisational practices. Harris, Tatarsky, and Vo, while each working in different modes and in relation to different social exigencies, all turn to improvisational techniques as part of a broader commitment to the unknown and the unpredictable. While improvisation can sometimes be understood as the activity of a heroically volitional individual, Harris, Tatarsky, and Vo improvise so as to expose politically fraught dependencies and entanglements. For this event, each artist will improvise for ten minutes before coming together for a conversation about improvisation with Philbrick.
ARTIST BIOS
Nile Harris (he/him) is a performer and director of live works of art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing.
Alex Tatarsky (they/them) makes live performances in the unfortunate in-between zone of dance, theater, performance art, and comedy—drawing on traditions from vaudeville to futurist poetry. Their practice embraces the figure of the bouffon, a European clown type said to live in the swamps at the edge of the kingdom, who was not only allowed to mock the king’s power but rewarded for it. Tatarsky’s original solo pieces have been presented at a wide array of venues including La MaMa, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, Playwrights Horizons, and Abrons Arts Center, as well as comedy clubs, bars, basements, and trash heaps. As curatorial fellow at the Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics and politics of rot. Along with collaborator Ming Lin, they form one half of Shanzhai Lyric and its fictional office Canal Street Research Association. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt.
Anh Vo (they/them) is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in New York City, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, queer and feminist performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez’s unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evan’s speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Described by the New York Times as “risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous,” their choreographic work has received critical recognition for its research-driven and boundaries-pushing formal investigation. Some significant fellowships and grants include Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship, Dance/NYC Disability Dance Artistry Fellowship, USArtist International grant.
Ethan Philbrick (he/him) is a cellist, performance artist, and writer. He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and has taught performance theory and practice at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, New York University, Wesleyan College, Yale University, and The New School. He is currently performance curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project. In 2023, Philbrick published Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence with Fordham University Press. He is part of the musical-theatrical project DAYS and has presented solo and collaborative performances at The Kitchen, NYU Skirball, Wesleyan Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Grey Art Museum. His musical performances have been called “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “extremely strange” in The Nation and his writing has been characterized as “rich and fascinating” in e-flux.
This ASAP15 keynote event is presented in partnership with The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center’s PRELUDE Festival, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Related Conference
