NYAB Event - "Performa 09: Drifts & Traps" Performance Program

"Performa 09: Drifts & Traps" Performance Program

The Bronx Museum of the Arts

This event has ended.

Coinciding with the centennial of the Futurist Movement Manifesto, 2009 also marks the centennial of the Grand Concourse, the Bronx main thoroughfare that organized the borough around its vertical axis. This program will underscore major progressive forces at play around that year through a panel with Marjorie Perloff, Richard Sieburth and Charles Bernstein followed by a performance by Kabir Carter, whose work with sounds and radio stems from that tradition. A special intervention by Writing Live, will respond in site to Kabir Carter’s sound performance.

PROGRAM

1:00pm—PRE-PERFORMANCE PANEL: MARJORIE PERLOFF, RICHARD SIEBURTH AND CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Marjorie Perloff, author of The Futurist Moment among other seminal books, will speak about Russian futurist poet Velemir Khlebnikov focusing on his writings on radio of the future, radio walls, and Zaum poetry. Literary scholar and translator Richard Sieburth will discuss Ezra Pound’s relationship with F.T. Marinetti and that culminated with the inclusion of Marinetti in one of Pound’s Cantos. Poet Charles Bernstein, whose experiments with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E were influenced by futurism, will respond to Perloff’s and Sieburth’s presentation through a series of readings.

2:30PM—DRIFTS AND TRAPS: KABIR CARTER

Drifts and Trap is an attempt to construct an audible body within the confines of the Bronx Museum using layers of radiophony and traffic sounds gathered from the vicinity of the Grand Concourse. Throughout the day, communications signals and vehicular sounds will be heard as they approach and recede. When fused with electronic processing, they will begin to merge, fold, slip, and circulate. Both transducer driven and transmission derived sounds will fill the exhibition area and create a space between the exterior world of the Grand Concourse and the internal dimensions of the Bronx Museum. The form of the work is open, incomplete, and chaotic, driven by improvisatory decisions made by people moving along the Grand Concourse and communicating in radiophonic space, as well as those made by the artist and produced by live electronics.

11:00am to 5:30pm—WRITING LIVE

What is the future of experimental critical writing and how is it being informed by its past? How might the practices of different generations and different art forms be brought into contact? Writing Live—Rebecca Armstrong, Rachel Lois Clapham, Tyler Coburn, Patricia Milder, Mary Paterson, Ryan Tracy, Kenny Ulloa and Peter Walsh—will respond to Carter’s performance with a practice based workshop exploring the relationship between writing and performance, and the legacy of Futurism that Carter’s work both commemorates and re-enacts.

Writing Live is a trans-Atlantic contemporary critical writing program developed by Performa, Open Dialogues and the Space Between Words. Writing Live is supported by the Arts Council of England.