The New Performance Project
By Michael Helland

Danspace Project Food For Thought curated by Tere O’Connor, June 19, 2006 (New York)
Brooklyn Arts Exchange Space Grant Showcase, October 20-21, 2006 (Brooklyn)

The New Performance Project
Performed by One + Many

The New Performance Project questions the value of freedom in a repressive state and the role of creative media as instruments of personal and political propaganda. The movement choir serves as a bizarre quasi-anonymous communal body from which more individualized expressions emerge. The group structure intersects with the solo form in a composition that interplays ego and identity as elements of creative work and cultural iconography.

The investigative mission of The New Performance Project is to create a situation for performance that is relevant and permeable to a greater artistic community. Featuring a cast of 25 performers assembled through an open call for weekly ‘rehearsals’ in Prospect Park, this edition of The New Performance Project was presented in Food For Thought curated by Tere O’Connor, at Danspace Project, June 2006.

Video stills by Michael Helland

The New Performance Project
Special Guest: Arturo Vidich
Core: Renée Archibald, Jodi Bender, Stephanie Booth, Miriam Wolf
Auxiliary: Anna Carapetyan, Dorian Nuskind-Oder, Carly Pansulla, Jessie Winograd
Mistress: Amanda Stevenson

The New Performance Project exploits notions of militancy in dance culture and extrapolates the creative process as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. Beginning with a state of anonymity, the role of the individual is compacted against the will of the communal body. Meaning and identity are relavitized through the passive accumulation of seemingly random and quasi-horrific events, pointing towards the human agency to develop universal meaning – even where none is present – in an effort to develop coherence and understanding from the arbitrary.

This second edition of The New Performance Project was presented by Brooklyn Arts Exchange in the BAX Space Grant Showcase, October 2006.  It continues the investigative mission of The New Performance Project by working with alternative structures for participation as the foundation for its creative process, manifested here through a distillation of the original 25-member community-based cast into three structural units: Star, Core, and Auxiliary. The third and final development of The New Performance Project: The Dress Up Show will be presented at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, May 2007.

Photos by Steven Schreiber