{ PERFORMANCE WORK }

____click ye HERE for PPL Projects___

_____BELOW ARE SELECTED SOLO AND COLLABORATIVE (PPL, NO WAVE PERFORMANCE TASK FORCE, WITH BRIAN MCCORKLE AND/OR VALERIE KUEHNE, ETC) PERFORMANCES____

Sirens of Alvin. A performance Monday, April 8th titled [I regard this activity] as part of a performance series curated by Ryan Krause in conjunction with a visual exhibition entitled I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now curated by Marysia Gacek at 109 Gallery based on the piece by Alvin Lucier, with some reference to Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. In performance, PPL represent the recursivity of references, I am carrying small light-sensitive and otherwise spatially responsive homemade analog electronics around Williamsburg, feeding video via skype into the gallery while Brian McCorkle plays sonically with the space, the video sound, wires up. We end by rubbing a massive red orb made out of crayon around the neighborhood, then smashing it in front of the space.

I am disparate/desperate to please you at Grace Exhibition Space as part of Performance Heart.A black banner separates me from the audience, I offer individuals yes or no questions like…would it please you if I did a dance? on cards magnetically attached to a pole with a hand taped to the end of it. I perform as per their choices.

Victory Performance created for IV Soldiers’ exhibition VICTORY. I have a 12X18 painting with a laminated hole in the middle of it dividing the gallery in 2. Behind the hanging paper is a car headlight, and me with a red pole and red hand attached to it. I vocalize and split the laminate to put the red hand through, then my own hand, then my whole body. I pull the painting down, wad it into my body, wrap it in white lace, and pitch it into the snow outside.

Zygoat: Experiment with Narrative #2
 Ivy Castellanos and I perform for 24hrs, from 6pm Friday through 6pm Saturday at Glasshouse Gallery in Williamsburg. We begin with 3,291 crayons and end with an installation and many sculptures in cast wax, armature, paraffin, wood. Bacon, box cutters, clay models, hot plate, a 1hr soundtrack.

Experiment with Narrative #1
@Culture Fix, Brian McCorkle, Valerie Kuehne, Matthew Gantt, and Ellen O’Meara use the music from our opera-in-progress Any Size Mirror is a Dictator to inform sampler, flute, cello, piano whilst I speak narratives triggered by 9 audience volunteers opening paper baggies and using the objects inside to make actions.

Untitled cage action
durational performance at the Gowanus Ballroom. With Lorene Bouboushian, Valerie Kuehne, and Brian McCorkle as PPL. Performers take turns in a 3X4 cage, they write notes in aphasic nonsense language to the passers-by, vanilla tea candles, cigarettes, large white fabric discs, $5 price tag, Brian plays the accordion, we all sing and attempt to develop a new language amongst us.

Abstraction is Magnetics, Bitches
Performed with Brian McCorkle on January 24th, 2013 at IV Soldiers Gallery. We begin standing by a fluorescent bug zapper, dark in the gallery. We stick magnets to the walls at certain heights, exit. The audience lets us in when we knock on the doors. We  animate two 8′ heavy rubber tubes, making communicative sounds through them, then squares of magnets over our mouths and foreheads, we stick ourselves to it.

Lamona
solo performance. Yellow modeling clay, questions about murder, large white wooden spoons, a single audience member is taken up in an elevator to see a little house burning on the roof. IV Soldiers Gallery, January 17, 2013

EmbodyExplosion
The second exhibition of the new No Wave Performance Task Force. At Fitness Center for Arts and Tactics, performed by Ivy Castellanos, Christen Clifford, Lindsey Drury, and Esther Neff. The No Wave Performance Task Force enables performative social sculpture, practicing Feminist construction rather than reacting solely to existing constructions of patriarchy, gender, sexuality, and “Other” vs. “Us” dichotomies. Watermelons, casting body parts in chocolate, wax, plaster, wine, flash paper, pine boughs, knives, dresses, Beatrice the white rat.

You’re a Big Boy Now OR Rauschenberg ist Tödlich: A Diner  A 12-hour durational performance by PPL (Esther Neff, Brian McCorkle, Valerie Kuehne). We perform a menu of actions, music, and other short-order items as they are requested by customers at our diner/opera, the severed head of Rauschenberg with a mouth full of vienna sausages, the fire alarm, hamburgers, hand-drawn menus. @ Fitness Center for Arts and Tactics, December 10, 2012. (image right)

Transformation 3-part collaborative performance series with Ivy Castellanos, Lindsey Drury, and Elinor Thompson at IV Soldiers Gallery. 1: Improvisational Construction 2: Actions, Conditions 3: Agency, Relations

Graniteware
Series of solo performances using a 4′ diameter white graniteware bowl with a cut-out bottom. Red plastic balls and white graniteware colander, audience games, tape. (image, at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery) 

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Untitled (Pittsburgh, Lafayette, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Cincinnati, Cleveland) site-specific performances across the northern midwest with Valerie Kuehne, Brian McCorkle, Esther Neff, donuts, string, household implements, analog electronics, cello, objects found on the journey.

The Ostriches
Brian McCorkle and I perform at Grace Exhibition Space on Election Night, 2012. We make a path of froot loops and then wear tall vomiting-ostrich heads and attempt to peck up the loops on our beaks and pop gold balloons

Any Size Mirror is a Dictator (exercises and sketches) A series of performances under this name. Constructed within/dictated by the performance situations and contexts we find ourselves making work within, including spatial, socio-economic, disciplinary, geographic, historic, etc considerations. Hamburgers, rolling checkerboard table, catapult, remote-control car, tiny brains, text, noise, big boy.  A video of the very first “ASMIAD” performance can be found here. Bits n pieces + frameworks have been performed at The Delancey, IV Soldiers Gallery, Muchmore’s, and in public. Currently, the project is developing into a FULL OPERA, in collaboration between Brian McCorkle, Esther Neff, and Lindsey Drury.

PPL Help the Water (2012)
2 men (Brian and Michael Newton) and 2 women (Esther and Jessica Bathurst) wearing nothing but black socks and necklaces of marshmallows and red cord attempt to “help” the stagnant water of the Gowanus Canal for 4 hours, carrying bucketfuls of water “downstream” and performing cleansing rituals involving meat, fire, oil containers, chain, paraffin, etc.

NATURE FETISH: A Public Opera  (2011-2012)
a long-form social and experimental opera project involving 5 public Focus Workshops, 88 rehearsals, and 8 performances of different excerpts, sequences, frameworks, and 9 performances of the full opera.

Happy Birthday Dear Monolith (2012) Brian and Esther make a model of the monolith. (pictured, above)

Spread Art (2012 during Bushwick Open Studios) Brian and Esther discover that a metallic blue cord can stretch perfectly from the tree across the street through the window and into the back kitchen of Spread Art.

BABY BABY BABY A wee-hours (6:45am) performance collaboration with Anya Liftig, Seredipity Gallery, Berlin. (pictured below left)

Photons Be Free  (2012) Cabbages and saxophone, Esther and Brian with Bonnie Kane and Arla Berman.

Birdhouse Home Craft Project for Father and Daughters
(2012) Contact mics in paraffin and a catcher’s helmet, violence and baseball, violin, text on fatalism. (birdhouse pictured, right)

Calmly Engaged
(2011) Brian and Esther are connected by 400 feet of surgical-grade plastic tubing.  An interactive durational performance. (pictured, below left)

 Synthesis 13 (2011) Brian and Esther power a shruti box with grapefruit.

Conference of Works: Operations and Participations (2011) Vaudeville Park and Grace Exhibition Space host two weekends of performance art and social arts practices performances, lectures, roundtables, and other considered situations. Organized by Esther Neff.

Oniono (2011) a solo performance at Grace Exhibition Space in which a large onion pea-shoots, beats, mutilates, and drills holes through smaller onions. (pictured below)

Institute_Institut (2011) The final piece in the Transformational Grammar of the Institutional Glorybowl trilogy, a long-form performance art opera built from situations and the emotional and psychological indices of institutions on the project participants. (pictured above at the cell)

Conference of Works: MODE, METHOD, MEDIUM (2011) Organized at University of the Streets. Pictured at left is a roundtable on discipline and collaboration (pictured right).

TIME: A Complete Explanation in 3 Parts (2011) a collaboration between new music ensemble thingNY and PPL. An opera was constructed and performed.

Scrollbowl  (2011) sound and video

The Last Dreams of Helene Weigel or How to Get Rid of the Feminism Once And For All (201o) an opera (pictured at right are performers Kate Garfield, Loren Barnese, Jessica Bathurst, Andrea Suarez, Matthew Gonzalez)

How to Answer to the Problems (2010) a video and performance

Workforce/Forced Work (2010) The second piece in the Transformational Grammar of the Institutional Glorybowl trilogy, constructed through public Focus Workshops across from the New York Stock Exchange (14 Wall Street). (pictured, left, Matthew Stephen Smith)

On the Cranial Nerves of Barbarians (2009) an opera, our first real one.

Qualia, a short piece
(2009) BAX

The Silviculture Museum (2009) installation, software, video, performance. A collaboration on enculturation organized by Esther Neff, involving Chiasui Chen, Herbie Go, Sean Stewert, Brian McCorkle, + Shawna Ferrato (pictured right)

The Institute for Local Discovery proudly presents: Bavaria Rundgang
(2008) A collaboration on the Theresienweise with Dina Keller. Other versions (Fallstudies and 7 Deadliy Sins: PRIDE) were performed elsewhere, including The Public Theater in NYC.

Schooled and Unschooled (2008) The first piece in the Transformational Grammar of the Institutional Glorybowl trilogy, documentary music-theatre, performed at the old Dixon Place on the Bowery and uptown at the West End Theater.

CALL CONNECT COLLECT (2007) A project with Dina Keller, Chiasui Chen, Georgiana Avram, Anika Solvieg, and the Internationalists Director’s Collective.

Cultur(e)ality Part 1: Loud is the Oral Diary of the Western World
A fight choreography, BAX and the Battle Ranch, 2007