Announcing Performance Space 122’s Coil 2017 Festival
January 3-22, 2017
Performance Space 122’s Coil 2017 Festival explores the constant vitality of live performance in New York City through contemporary artists from diverse genres, cultures, and perspectives. Featuring work created locally, across the U.S., and around the world, we champion contemporary performance across interdisciplinary art, working with exciting new technologies and pushing form.
“Alongside our wonderful peer festivals, this period in time has become a critical moment to experience the work and ideas of a contemporary America; a questioning, complex, diverse, and rich America. Turn off the political news for a moment – this is the culture behind which we stand.” – Vallejo Gantner, PS122 Artistic Director
Boundary Defying Theater, Film, and Interactive Works:
Emmy award-winning experiential director Yehuda Duenyas’ CVRTAIN (Jan 3-15) is a virtual reality experience that draws on the tools of gaming and immersive theater to give you a highly- personalized standing ovation.
The UK’s Forced Entertainment present the US premiere of Real Magic (Jan 5-8), a hallucinatory journey through a part mind-reading, part cabaret, world of second-chances, individual agency and the desire for change.
Worktable (Jan 5-9) by Belgian-based Kate McIntosh / SPIN is a live installation that contemplates and completes acts of creation and destruction using everyday, domestic objects. Once inside, you decide how things come apart.
In the darkness of a cinema space, you sit blindfolded. A child seated behind you describes a film that only they will see in Britt Hatzius’ New York premiere of Blind Cinema (Jan 9-12).
Daniel Fish’s new, Untitled (Jan 11-22) offers us a radical departure from his previous text-driven work and seeks to find out what happens when the actors and text are gone and the talking stops.
Yara Travieso’s La Medea (Jan 20-22) is an interdisciplinary musical re-imagining of Euripides’ violent tragedy into a dance-theater performance and feature film á la Latin-disco-pop variety show, complete with a live in-studio audience participating as the Greek chorus.
Visceral Dance and Performance Works:
Australian choreographer Antony Hamilton and sound designer Alisdair Macindoepresent the US Premiere of MEETING (Jan 4-8), a rich encounter between man, machine, motion and sound as two performers share space with 64 robotic instruments.
Custodians of Beauty (Jan 5-8) by Bessie-award-winning choreographer Pavel Zuštiak / Palissimo examines beauty and its intrinsic relationship with art through minimalist movement, sensuous abstraction and potent stage imagery.
Engulfing one another with fully embodied presence, choreographers and performersMolly Lieber and Eleanor Smith move backward and forward through time and space in a dreamlike reimagining of personal histories in the world premiere ofBasketball (Jan 7-10).
Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster (Jan 11-14) is Australian Nicola Gunn’s story of a man, a woman, a duck and a moral dilemma in this disarming display of text, rhythmic soundscape and intense physical choreography.
A Study on Effort (Jan 12-14) is a collaboration between the incomparable dancerBobbi Jene Smith and acclaimed violinist Keir GoGwilt, consisting of 10 tasks that question physical, emotional and metaphoric efforts through a lens celebrating the connections between sound, body and duration.
Not to Miss Events and Parties:
Emily Johnson / Catalyst’s Umyuangvigkaq: a PS122 Long Table and Durational Sewing Bee (Jan 8) is part of a large-scale experiment in public engagement and communal backstitching, recognizing and celebrating contemporary indigenous culture.
Red + White Party 2017 at Ace Hotel New York (Jan 8) in a celebration of the January chaos that is NYC festival season, featuring work from visual artists Kristin McIver and Ian Strange with music by DJ Cam-Run (Bionic Boogie) to keep you dancing all night long.
Brooklyn-based, hydra-headed, trans-disciplinary, rough-and-ready performance series, CATCH takes PS122’s Coil Festival with their diamond jubilee, CATCH 75, a night of performance mayhem by the most exciting artists NYC has to offer (Jan 15).