PERFORMANCY FORUM is a platform for interdisciplinary performance art and social projects, organized since 2009 by PPL (Esther Neff, often in collaboration with a temporary committee/collective). Project proposals are always welcome.
PERFORMANCY FORUM avoids branding, opening in multiplicit ways and appearing via points of presence, attentional focus and embodied gathering, diffractive intersection, and intentional construction of intra-social situation and ideation.
PERFORMANCY FORUM began as a project of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) while the collective was in residence at Surreal Estate, a 50-person arts and activism co-operative in Bushwick (members of Surreal Estate were deported, tear gassed, and evicted in 2011, the collective and the co-operative space forcibly disbanded as part of backlash against Occupy and fear of intersectional coalition-formation amongst residents of Bushwick). In 2012, PPL inherited the site at 104 Meserole Street from Spread Art and operated as a lab site (“Institution is a Verb”) through 2018.
Maintaining an anti-capitalist and critical ethos (*co-operation sans homogenization*), PERFORMANCY FORUM has since become a relational, self-reflexive project, collaborating with artists, spaces, sites, curatorial collectives, and many others to produce exhibitions, shows, workshops, conferences, actions, events, and performative critical gatherings. Initiatives and events have emerged in relationship with SUPERFRONT (Public Summer at Industry City), the Poop Project (BOB the Pavilion at Columbia University), MDW Art Fair, Performer Stammtisch and Association for Performance Art Berlin (APAB), Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival/Foundation (BIPAF), ITINERANT (Hector Canonge), Petrichor Performance Collective, and many independent curators, organizers, artists, and groups from all over the world. 2012-2018, PF’s primary activities included the monthly incarnation of the platform as a performance art exhibition at Panoply Performance Laboratory in Bushwick, Brooklyn (space now closed).
The intentions of PERFORMANCY FORUM are to:
1.) Forge IN-PERSON relationships (including collaborations) across spheres and micro-communities, magnetized around performance and live arts materializing nurturant, relational, respectful, diffractive, and critical culture.
2.) Perform collective research, critical analysis, and discussion of performance arts, including drawing of parallels between current performance and social practices and socio-political conditions, and locating and discursively practicing performance arts-organizing within historic, economic, socio-political, and aesthetic contexts.
3.) Provide situations & sites (space + somatic + cognitive) for a.) complex and theoretical thought as/on performance and intentionalized performativity b.) political and cultural organization amongst artists, and for experimentation with modes, methods, and mediums in conjunction with concrete situation of works and processes c.) “live art” projects which cannot be defined within theater, dance, music, or other institutionally-distinguished disciplines, focusing through forms and modes of live action on states of being and time, affect, presence, identity, and transpersonal socialities/cultur(e)alities.
4.) Involve publics of ‘artists’ and ‘non-artists’ alike in constructive, collective, and critical analysis and debate of cultural operation and diverse/multi-scalar/multiplicit/anti-normative self-determinations and identifications.
ALL EVENTS AND SITUATIONS ARE PUBLIC WITH AUDIENCES WELCOME TO COME AND GO AT ANY TIME
ALL EVENTS AND SITUATIONS ARE SUGGESTED DONATION FOR THE PUBLIC, WITH ANY/ALL DONATIONS GOING TO THE ARTISTS
FACEBOOK GROUP
INSTAGRAM: @PERFORMANCYFORUM
+++PAST+++
2017 Transition framing document HERE
Thank you to the Brooklyn Arts Council for their 2018 support!
Thank you to the Brooklyn Arts Council for their 2016 support!
PERFORMANCY FORUM programming is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC)
¡¡2015 was the 5th year of PERFORMANCY FORUM. This was marked by the 2015 QUINQUENNIAL at PPL Space and Grace Exhibition Space, October 8-26: http://panoplylab.org/quinquennial/. PERFORMANCY FORUM QUINQUENNIAL was also featured in Hyperallergic’s “Best of 2015: Our Top 10 Brooklyn Art Shows”