2018-19 Events

WHEN: Sunday, October 28, 2018

Choral Marx is a singing adaptation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto for the Communist Party composed by Ethan Philbrick. It is a piece for mixed chorus—mixed not just in terms of gendered voice parts but also in terms of training and ability—made up of vocalists from both the contemporary music scene and socialist organizing communities, accompanied by the composer on cello. Choral Marx re-sounds Marx and Engels’s 1848 critique of capitalism in 2018 and explores the resonance of the Manifesto today.

WHEN: Friday, October 19, 2018

Ricardo Montez (M.A. '01, Ph.D. '07) joins a panel held in conjunction with the exhibition Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. This one-day symposium will explore queer performance and its relation to New York City’s public spaces in the 1970s and 1980s. Topics range from the street as a contested site of performance art to the urban framework of New York as performing on and for queer communities.

WHEN: Monday, October 29, 2018

Presenting material from the new book After the Party, Chambers-Letson (M.A. '04, Ph.D. '09) presents a eulogy and a manifesto that stakes out the life-sustaining and worldmaking powers of minoritarian performance.

WHEN: Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Celebrate the publication of Shane Vogel’s Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze at this showcase of the performances that shape the book. The first cultural history of the calypso craze, Stolen Time offers a new framework for understanding the cycles of repetition and difference that shape race, entertainment, and mass culture during the Jim Crow era and charts new forms of diasporic exchange between the US and the Caribbean. 

WHEN: November 18 - December 16, 2018

This workshop is an attempt in resistance, healing and, experimentation for those who are aggressively affected by the current Iran-US political climate and financial war. In each session, we will focus on a practical training method from experimental theatre and performance. By opening our bodies to new explorations inspired by experimental theatre and performance, we will open a space for inter-cultural bonding and healing rituals in exile. The workshop is called "Creation through the path of discovery" which is inspired by the methodology of an Iranian contemporary director and playwright called Jalal Tehrani.

WHEN: Monday, October 15, 2018

Graduate of NYU Performance Studies Mady Schutzman (Ph.D. '94) returns to discuss her recent book Radical Doubt: the Joker System, after Boal. Schutzman proposes an approach to community building based on joke logic, strange loops, trickster tactics, irony, and even chaos. The approach derives from the dynamics of the Joker System – a mode of collectively devising “plays” through the merger of journalistic rigor and performative ambiguity. Devoted to discovering non-polarizing and non-identity-driven modes of resistance, Schutzman moves far beyond the stage, finding analogous “systems” in fields of ethics, anthropology, mathematics, language studies, and speculative science.