Join us for PRELUDE.11, the eighth annual PRELUDE festival dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance and visual art performance. This year’s festival will use the James Gallery as well as the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center to investigate the resonances between the “white cube” and the “black box.” Prelude will offer over 20 short performances, including performative lectures, theory-installations, and performances within performances. Themes such as “Repurposing,” taking preexisting works, events or texts as the basis for new performances, and “Text As Texture,” creating a musical or performative experience from the materiality of language will be explored in frank discussions among artists and their audiences.
This year’s PRELUDE is curated by Claire Bishop (PhD Program in Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY), Rob Marcato (Signature Theatre Company, NY) and Helen Shaw (Time Out New York). The festival is organized by Frank Hentschker, director of the Martin E.Segal Theatre Center.
Participants include Jackson Pollock Bar, Nina Beier, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Elevator Repair Service, Daniel Fish, Rob Fitterman, Miguel Guitierrez, Half Straddle, Will Holder, Jake Hooker, Sibyl Kempson, Young Jean Lee, Lumberob, Jay Scheib, and Temporary Distortion.
The modular environment of “Z” Blocks are lightweight reconfigurable blocks that can be used in multiple ways thanks to their smart geometry resembling the Latin letter Z. Designed by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss/Normal Architecture Office for the environment of Prelude, the blocks’ adaptive design make them simple to arrange into individual, social, and hybrid configurations of varying sizes and degrees of formality and intimacy. The blocks can stand alone as chairs or be combined together to form shelves, benches, tables, bars, walls, podiums, and stairs. The “Z” Blocks set the stage in the broadest sense as an immersive environment inside the James Gallery for performers and audience participants alike.
Cosponsored by the Prelude.11 Festival and Martin E. Segal Theater Center
