Preambulant / New Museum's Idea City Festival
Various locations, Lower East Side, Saturday, May 4, 11am - 6pm
The NARS Foundation is delighted to announce its participation in the New Museum's Ideas City Festival on Saturday, May 4. Perambulant, a series of live performances and workshops, invites the public to engage in spontaneous and guided interactions throughout the day. Performances by artists Nancy Nowacek, Katya Grokhovsky, twin brothers Alan and Michael Fleming, and choreographer Corinna Brown and the Dean Street FOO Dance will be interspersed with cross-disciplinary movement workshops for children and adults.
The artists will lead workshops that encourage the audience to explore the functional capacity of the body as an untapped resource. The performance project “Insourcing” by Nowacek will tap into the unused muscle power of New Yorkers by engaging a chain of sidewalk-bound citizens in the relay of an object across the IDEAS CITY territory. Starting at the festival’s perimeter, the artist will begin transport of a large object too unwieldy for her to move alone by enlisting the aid of those around her. Hitchhiking rides with various New Yorkers as far as they can go, the object will become flotsam in the tide of pedestrians, making its way to the festival center over the course of the afternoon. Grokhovsky will investigate the often untapped and ignored potential of touch and connection with strangers in her live durational performance, “Slow Dance.”
Alan and Michael Fleming will present a series of architectural interventions using artists’ bodies. Incorporating different bodily forms into the architectural facades of the Lower East Side, the artist duo will act as living ornaments on the surface of the building’s exterior. Through these various interventionist actions they hope to re-examine the body as object, structure, or support. Brown’s work will explore a psychotherapeutic awareness of the body in urban spaces. Brown’s Dean Street FOO Dance will perform a Butoh-inspired version of the classic children’s book Madeline. Brown will then invite the public/audience to participate in “Sidewalk Butoh” where she will psychotherapeutically guide participants on a journey of transformation from human body to elements of nature to man-made materials, internally juxtaposing natural and artificial worlds in an internal dance.
