Text from press release:
"NATURE FETISH: A Public Opera is quantum animal, a rat-man-epistemology-music-performance art hybrid thriving across field and street and woods and desert, now unaware that he is being watched, now eating the scraps that have fallen down onto the tracks, now squeaking in extended techniques at the top of his lungs. NATURE FETISH is 80 minutes, 4 episodes theorizing "the nature of nature" as conceived by public Focus Workshop participants, authorized humans throughout time, and the artists making the opera. Episode 5 is a 'natural history museum, a zoo, a farm, a laboratory for natural scientists, an exhibition' of individual artists performing their own theories in the context of 6 clusters of nature fetishization."
NATURE FETISH was developed through public Focus Workshops during a residency at University Settlement. The final “opera” was performed on the street in front of and inside New York City’s first dedicated site for conceptual, body-based and fluxist performance art, Grace Exhibition Space, July 12-24, 2012.
IMAGES IN SLIDESHOW ARE OF THE OPERA BEING PERFORMED IN BERLIN AT KULE THEATER AND BLO ATELIER, AT UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT, CITY RELIQUARY, BRONX ARTS SPACE, AND GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE.
At Grace Exhibition Space, PPL also curated 20+ artists working in time-based performance across disciplines to deal directly with the “nature” of performance, operation of “nature” in performance, and conceptions of “nature” as such:
Thursday July 12:
The Call of Nature: bodily functions and fluids, embodiment, waste, want, meat, and human impact on natural environments. FEATURING: Elinor Thompson, Miles Pflanz, Dave Ruder, Matthew Silver, and Lorene Bouboushian.
Friday July 13:
NATURE FETISH opera project collaborating artists, poets, composers, and performers show solo works dealing with their own projections of “the nature of nature.” FEATURING: Cory Bracken, Ellen O'Meara, Michael Newton, Natasha Missick, Arla Berman, and Matthew Gantt
Saturday July 14:
SIMULTANEOUS: Nature Fetish Edition: Ivy Castellanos of IV Soldiers Gallery works with 4 performance artists simultaneously as an ecosystem or food chain or other emergent system. FEATURING: Felix Morelo, Miles Pflanz, Ryan Hawk, and Matthew Silver
Thursday July 19:
The Natural Spirit: field recordings, indeterminacy, fluxus, improvisation and the influence of performance art’s "nature" on music and dance. FEATURING: Jason Anastasoff, Lindsey Drury, and Kyli Klevan.
Friday July 20:
Rituals and Totems: cultural semiology, feminism, naturalism, post-humanism, and the problematics of performance and anthropology. FEATURING: Lillie D’Armon, Anya Liftig, and Quinn Dukes.
Saturday, July 21:
Video, Voice and the Nature of the Self: FEATURING: Alessandra Eramo (w/ David Grollman), Heather Warren Crow, Tuba/No Tuba and Joseph Keckler.