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Sep 19

Northern Spy: Elder Ones with Peter Evans, Levy Lorenzo (Not Ready!)

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Not Ready! Live! Come and celebrate! Amirtha Kidambi Elder Ones have signed to Northern Spy Records! Come out to Knockdown Center’s lovely Ready Room to meet the band and catch a special performance. Levy Lorenzo and Peter Evans will perform as a duo. NSPY friends/family will be playing records.

“The aggressive and sublime first album by the band Elder Ones, Holy Science, is a kind of gauge for how strong and flexible the scene of young musicians in New York’s improvised and experimental music world can be. At the center of it are drones and phonemes.” – Ben Ratliff, “10 Fall Pop and Jazz Albums You Shouldn’t Miss” The New York Times

 

Amirtha Kidambi Elder Ones

Peter Evans / Levy Lorenzo

Sep 17

WATCHING ME / WATCHING YOU

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WATCHING ME / WATCHING YOU is a performance exploring the subtly of oppression within everyday gestures. An ongoing collaboration between Joshua Kent, Matthew Nicholas and Courtney Mackedanz, the performance is crafted in the shadow of accessible pornography and mediated digital flesh. Employing devised and quotational choreography, audiences watch three bodies move within a sparse environment, speaking texts written by strangers and performing dances acquired from television and the Internet. WATCHING ME / WATCHING YOU investigates the spectatorship of live performance and the utility of the gaze within forces of domination, asking audiences to investigate their own culpability within dynamics of presentation.

Sep 15

BBZ x MAMI

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UK club night BBZ teams up with the curatorial team behind MAMI for an end of summer exhibition/turn up that centralizes works of queer + non binary women of color.
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Sep 14

Closing Screening (Cold Open Verse)

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For the final evening of Cold Open Verse, films by Fiona Banner, Moyra Davey, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Gerardo Madera, a rare screening event presented by Blonde Art Books and Poet Transmit.

Screening at 8pm:
– Fiona Banner, ‘Mistah Kurtz – He Not Dead’, 2014 and ‘Phantom’, 2015 – two films produced for the publication, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. A work by Fiona Banner. Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin.
– Moyra Davey, ‘My Saints’, 2014. “Burn the Diaries” published by Dancing Foxes.
– Jibade-Khalil Huffman, ‘Working Title’ for the book “James Brown is Dead” published by Future Plan and Program, 2011
– Gerardo Madera, ‘Untitled Printer for Xavier Antin (test video)’, 2014, book and video by Gerardo Madera. “Printed at Home” published by Common Satisfactory Standard.

Sep 14

Live taping (Cold Open Verse)

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Poet Transmit engages in the connections between poetry, transmission, and performance. The project was launched by artist/ curator Victoria Keddie and writer/artist Cat Tyc as a way to explore textual practice and modes of transmission and expose the potential of poetic projection and how it exists in expanded fields of time.

The works of artists, Constance DeJong, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ian Hatcher on three tableau “sets” will be activated in tonight’s real-time broadcast event. Each artist highlights a unique aspect of production within their respective sets. Ian Hatcher exploits the structural errors of broadcast with time latency. DeJong creates an interactive instrument for dissemination with her accessible radio foley works. La Fraga delves into the nostalgia of the tv sitcom teenage bedroom.

An adjacent room will be playing back an hour long reel of artist made trailers for forthcoming publications or book-related events to articulate Cold Open Verse examination of the construct of the ‘trailer’, reconfigured by artists, poets, and publishers interested in an expanded form of communicating their work.

Documented events will be broadcast on E.S.P. TV’s cable access program on MNN, as well as with Wave Farm Radio (operated in Acra, NY as well as online).

Doors: 7PM
Performances: 8PM
After-party with DJ Drift Raft in the Ready Room


dj
BIOS:

Sophia Le Fraga is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of Other Titles by Sophia Le Fraga (If a Leaf Falls 2016); literallydead (Spork 2015); I RL, YOU RL (minuteBOOKS 2013, Troll Thread 2014) and I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET (KTBAFC 2012). Her anti-play trilogy of iOS adaptations comprises “W8ING,” “TH3 B4LD 50PR4N0” and “UND3RGR0UND L0V3R5” (Gauss PDF 2014, 2015). Other Titles (Büro Broken Dimanche; Berlin, Germany) was her second solo show. She’s recently been included in Greater New York (MoMA PS1; New York), PERFORMA (New York), and Eugen Gomringer & (Bielefelder Kunstverein; Bielefeld, Germany). Le Fraga is the poetry editor of Imperial Matters, a curator for the experimental reading series Segue and a member of Collective Task. She teaches poetry at BHQFU, New York’s freest art school.

Constance DeJong is an American artist, writer and performer, who produces fiction texts and language/image based work for performance and theater, audio and video installations. She has permanent audio installations in Beacon, NY, London and Seattle. DeJong has twice collaborated with Tony Oursler on live performances; was a collaborator on “Super Vision,” A Builders Association production (2005); librettist for the opera, “Satyagraha,“composer Philip Glass. In 2016/2017, DeJong will be presenting a retrospective of her performances at NYC venues where she’s performed over the years, including NightWriters, a new performance and artist’s book. Her first book, Modern Love, will be re-issued in spring 2017 by Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse.

Ian Hatcher is a text/sound/performance artist and programmer whose work explores cognition in context of digital systems. He is the author of a print book, Prosthesis (Poor Claudia 2016), two chapbooks, Private (Inpatient 2016) and The All-New (Anomalous 2015), and numerous screen-based texts, including the NEA-supported app/book Abra (with Amaranth Borsuk and Kate Durbin). His code-inflected vocal performances have been presented widely in North America and Europe. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

Sep 13

Spilling Over

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NYPAC, the New York Performance Artists Collective, is pleased to present Spilling Over, an evening of curated performances at the Knockdown Center on October 15th, 2016. Organized around an expanded notion of theater, the program features works by Caitlin Baucom, Cammisa Buerhaus, and Isaac Pool that employ theatricality outside of its institutionalized boundaries.

Cammisa Buerhaus will premiere Private Lives, a hallucinatory filmic exploration into the hyper-real world of Bill and Hillary Clinton, their mythic proportions and amorphous, shape shifting tendencies in three parts. The film moves from the political legacy of William Jefferson Clinton into the private correspondences of Hillary Rodham Clinton, supported by an all star cast, including Monica Lewinsky, Jon Benet Ramsey, Debbie Harry, and Justin Trudeau. Presented through the refractory lens of popular entertainment television programs like E True Hollywood Story and Entertainment Tonight, PRIVATE LIVES gives us lives – not lived – but putrefied.

Isaac Pool’s one-act object dramas, DSM-V and Untitled (Carry Out stage), place characters, processes, and objects in relationships that produce unsettling tension and humorous attachment. In Untitled (Carry Out stage) a group of strangers meet on a train platform in a choreography led by groceries, snack foods, and a Tupperware container full of soup, and in DSM-V one woman is caught in the wistful rapture of coupon clipping in a nice breeze.

Caitlin Baucom’s Citizen I was originally commissioned by the Städtische Museen Zittau and performed within its dungeon basement. The opera addresses itself to the 18th century utopianist Christian Gottlieb Priber. With its manic choreography and ethereal vocals, it produces a shattered, compelling critique of what ideological aspirations might be feasible now.

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Caitlin Baucom is a Brooklyn based performer and composer, invested in parsing fear bodily and making a mess. Her interdisciplinary work has shown extensively in the US and internationally, including recently at Naherholung Sternchen (Berlin), Dimanche Rouge (Paris), Stockholm Fringe Fest (Stockholm), Galerie KUB (Leipzig), and Städtische Museen (Zittau, Germany); at Dfbrl8r, High Concept Laboratories, Mana Contemporary, Southside Hub of Production and Nightingale Cinema in Chicago; and LUMEN Festival, HERE Arts, ABC No Rio, Otion Front Studio, 315 Gallery, Dixon Place, Powrplnt, JACK, Knockdown Center, and SIGNAL Gallery in NYC. Her work and writing is published in Emergency INDEX: Volume 3, Bad at Sports, and Incident Magazine, and she was the winter 2013 fellow of the ACC Galerie (Weimar, Germany) on the theme ‘Criminality in Art.’ As a performer for the Museum of Modern Art and New Museum (NYC) she has interpreted and performed the work of Lygia Clark, James Lee Byars, and Yoko Ono, among others.

Cammisa Buerhaus is a sound artist and actress based in NYC. She uses image and sound to synthesize critiques of politics and gender. Buerhaus has recently screened her new film Performance By Appointment in Stockholm, premiered compositions at The Whitney Museum of American Art for Felix Bernstein’s opera Bieber Bathos Elegy, and currently tours as a lead actress with the theatre company The NYC Players, presenting The Evening in Lisbon, Brussels, Bologna, Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, and Athens. Other collaborative projects include the improv duo 大凶風呂 and a reprisal of Hillary Clinton for Cecilia Corrigan’s film Motherland. Her work has been reviewed in The Wire, Artforum, and Texte Zur Kunst.

Isaac Pool is an artist and poet from Detroit living in New York. Recent performances include “Beet Joy,” with Jessica Posner as maybe at the Judson Memorial Church, and “40 Volume,” at the Brick Theatre. Recent exhibitions include “Good Piece of Food,” with Crystal Palmer, Grey Light Projects, Brussels, and “Thanks to Apple, Amazon, and the Mall,” Klaus Von Nichtssagend, New York. A first full length book of poems in print, “Light Stain,” is available from What Pipeline, Detroit, and an eBook, “Alien She,” is available from Klaus eBooks. Pool holds a BFA in Electronic Art from Wayne State University and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design.

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