Welcome from the Curatorial Team

Hello and welcome to PRELUDE.12, the ninth annual Prelude Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center!

Thank you so much for joining us. We hope we have furnished you with a feast of provoking, ravishing, bizarre, complicated and blithely entertaining work—enough to delight the most voracious performance-lover. As always, Prelude offers its banquet in appetizer portions: snippets, readings and works-in-progress, all tempting morsels that we think will pique your appetite for the seasons to come.

This year, as we looked for works by artists we think define (and rewrite the definition of) the New York scene, we were struck by an oxymoron. There was a strong presence of absence. Many of our most treasured creators, pressed by funding exigencies and a dependence on touring, must work far from home, leaving a hole at the center of any New York season. Emerging makers are creating in spite of an absence of space, time, money and a major premiere. There are other disappearances too, as theater and dance artists increasingly create work deliberately void of live components. These are not new circumstances or strategies, yet any true survey of the current experimental New York moment must make some mention of these intentional and unintentional lacunae.

Throughout the festival we will be investigating these absences and their residual/reactionary presences, how they are changing our notions of live performance, the practice thereof and the participation therein. We have asked a slew of artists to create and perform manifestos for 2012, so that we can hear how others fully affirm art’s presence in the modern wilderness. We will explore the influence of cinema on the avant-garde stage and the current uses of film and video within what we still call “live” practice. We will look at the links between participation, authenticity and imitation. We will try to understand the continuing role music plays in the art of live performance—the way it joyfully reaffirms ritual connections at some cellular level.

Performances are scheduled to alternate between the Graduate Center’s Elebash Recital Hall and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, but look for us elsewhere as well. Niegel Smith has created a walk just for Prelude—a spiritual journey through the streets around CUNY—and our partner, the Gershwin Hotel, will also host our two loudest offerings: Adam Feldman curates an Avant-Cabaret Spectacular on the night of October 3rd, while our performance-heavy closing night party will feature a DJ set from the singular Lumberob.

None of this will be complete, though, without your participation. We hope that you’ll engage with our Critical Partners writing on Culturebot (culturebot.org) and Contemporary Performance (contemporaryperformance.org), and that you’ll continue the analysis, in a slightly less academic vein, over beers at the Gershwin. Whichever your chosen venue, we hope you feel as we do that the programming can only ever be half the conversation; we rely on you to turn it into a dialogue.

— The Prelude Team,
Caleb Hammons, Frank Hentschker, and Helen Shaw

Prelude.12 at a Glance

OCT. 3

OCT. 4

OCT. 5

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