Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 7:30pm
Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be
Curated by Sharon Hayes and Brooke O’Harra
“It took me a long time to make up my mind to commit my memories to paper. My memories aren’t my exclusive property. They are life. I’m convinced that we are all fashioned by one another, and when you start telling the story of your life, you’re telling the story of others. Even the options we decide on throughout our existence are always caused by someone else; a chance encounter, or perhaps because you’d like to be esteemed by certain people. Not many, in fact. I’m well aware that the thing I call my conscience is, in reality, what some half-dozen people consider me to be. Not necessarily those I see often--and people who have no idea they are my conscience. But I know they’re watching me!”
- Simone Signoret, Chapter 1, Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be
Staged at different venues throughout the city, this 11-part series focuses on dance, theater and performance works and proposes speculative artistic lineages by putting artists who have been working for 30-plus years into dialogue with those who have been working for two years. Additionally bringing works that are theatrically-based into a dialogue with those that specifically challenge the conventions of theater, we argue for more looking by more people and a resistance to ensconced disciplinary burdens such as: “I don’t go to theater” or “I hate art.”
Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be at Light Industry presents performance documents and documentation of performance, with an interest in how the medium moves, distributes and communicates in and through documentation.
Works to be screened in full or in excerpted form include: the Wooster Group's Brace Up!, Jeff Weiss' performance of Gertrude Stein's As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story, Joan Jonas' Left Side Right Side, the Five Lesbian Brothers' Brave Smiles, John Jesurun's Chang in a Void Moon, Emily Roysdon's Social Movement, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy's BACKSANDEDLUTZKINOY, Faye Driscoll's Loneliness and a work by Andrea Geyer.
---
Over the past ten years, Sharon Hayes has been engaged in an art practice that moves between multiple mediums–video, performance, installation–in an ongoing artistic investigation into the relations of history, politics and speech to the process of individual and collective subject formation. To this aim, she employs conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism.
Hayes’ installation, video and performance work has been shown at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Parlour Projects, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, Dance Theater Workshop, Dixon Place, HERE, Performance Space 122, the Joseph Papp Public Theater and the WOW Cafe and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Track 16, Gallery 2102 and The Project in Los Angeles. In addition she has shown in galleries, exhibition or performance spaces in Bogotá, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vienna and Zagreb as well as in California, Florida, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont, and in 45 lesbian living rooms across the United States.
Hayes was a 1999 MacDowell Colony Fellow. She also received a 1999 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She was a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, 1999-2000 and received an MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA’s Department of Art in 2003. Hayes is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin.
Brooke O'Harra is one of the co-founder of The Theatre of a Two-headed Calf. Brooke is a New York City based director. In addition to directing all Two-headed Calf productions, Brooke works as a free-lance director with an interest in new and experimental texts. Recent Two-headed Calf productions include Chikamatsu's Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (a Japanese Drama from 1705 scored for live Punk Rock -- presented in 5 Episodes - NYC premier at HERE Arts Center Oct 2007), Raphael Spreglberg's Panic (P.S. 122, Nov 2006) G.B. Shaw's Major Barbara (La Mama E.T.C. Annex, Jan 2006), Lisa D'Amour's The Cataract (Perishable Theatre 2005), Fielding's The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (La Mama E.T.C., 2004), and Witkiewiczs's The Mother and Tumor Brainiowizc (La Mama E.T.C., 2003 and 2002). Currently Brooke and Two-headed Calf are developing a Macbeth for Soho Rep. Brooke directed for Ruth Margraff and is developing Maria/Stuart with playwright Jason Grote at the Soho Rep writers and directors lab. She is the recipient of the NEA/TCG Develping Directors Grant, a Harp Artist in Residence, and a Drama League Directing fellow. She teaches acting at NYU TSOA's Experimental Theatre Wing. Brooke has studied and made theatre in Japan, Czech Republic, Poland, Indonesia, and Ghana.
Tickets - $7 suggested donation, available at door.
Photo by Rich Wandel, courtesy of The National Archive of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History.