Projects tagged "Performance"

Healing through sound and community art
Practitioner:
Guadalupe Maravilla
Date:
Feb 25 2025
Glowing softly in the West Texas desert night, artist Guadalupe Maravilla’s Mariposa Relámpago, was once an ordinary school bus but is now a richly decorated, mobile site for remembrance and healing. Like much of the artist’s work, this piece commemorates and confronts the artist’s journey to the United States as an unaccompanied, undocumented minor fleeing civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s.
Waiting for Godot
Practitioner:
Paul Chan
Date:
Dec 2 2007
“IN an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.” When the actor Wendell Pierce spoke these words in performances of “Waiting for Godot” here last month, he really was in the middle of nothingness, or what looked a lot like it.
Las hijas de Violencia
Practitioner:
Las hijas de Violencia
Date:
Jan 1 2016
Born as a side project Las hijas de Violencia approaches the subject of street harassment and gender based violence through performance art, punk and video that is addressing socially legitimized male violence. "As actresses and as women we feel directly affected and consider it urgent to address the real cause of the problem: its ideological nature.
Daughter of a Temple
Practitioner:
ganavya doraiswamy
Date:
Mar 16 2024
“I sing because I genuinely think that if I don’t, I will die...The only thing that gives me relief is this.” - ganavya doraiswamy
Polylogues
Practitioner:
Xandra Clark
Date:
Nov 1 2018
Journalist and playwright Xandra Clark began creating Polylogues, a one woman show exploring non-monogamy, in 2017. The show is created from interviews Clark conducts around the world with people of different ages, genders, and races about their relationship with non-monogamy or polyamory (hence the name of the performance Polylogues).
Bicycles as a vehicle for protest in Guatemala
Practitioner:
Guatemalean girls
Date:
Feb 13 2021
Non-profit organizations and a multitude of Guatemalan girls protested together demanding justice and security from the government. Guatemala's insecurity and cases of girls' disappearances have increased over the years. The protest started outside the Government Ministery (Ministerio de Gobernación) early in the morning, where protestors gathered riding their bikes.
25 Years Ago, Rage Against the Machine Whipped Their Dicks Out in Protest
Practitioner:
Rage Against the Machine
Date:
Jul 18 1993
When Rage Against the Machine arrived in Philadelphia to play their 15-minute set as part of Lollapalooza ’93, the Los Angeles band knew they had a problem. Zack de la Rocha, the band’s incendiary frontman who was as outspoken on the mic as he was loud in his cadence, had no voice. A month of playing shows on a tour to support their self-titled debut album released the previous November had taken its toll on the frontman’s vocal cords.
Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia’s The Couple in the Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey
Practitioner:
Coco Fusco and MoMA
Date:
Jan 1 1993
The Couple in the Cage documents the travelling performance of Guillermo Gómez -Peña and Coco Fusco, in which they exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the fiction, and thought the artists were real “savages”.
Inmates Perform Valmiki Pratibha
Practitioner:
Calcutta Presidency Jail, Alokananda Roy
Date:
Jul 7 2007
Alokananda Roy walked into Calcutta's Presidency Jail on International Women's Day, 2007. The Indian classical dancer had been invited to watch female inmates perform, but it was the men who caught her eye. "They shook me," she says. "Their body language — it was as though they had no future, nothing to look forward to."
</3 Less than Three and Up Srei: Art and the Cambodian Worker Struggle
Practitioner:
Kat Eng
Date:
Jan 17 2014
On a freezing Friday in January, Khmer-American artist Kat Eng sits in front of retail giant H&M’s Time Square store working on a manual sewing machine. For eight hours, Eng stitches together U.S. dollar bills while wearing a surgical mask and bloodstained shirt. Her performance “</3 Less Than Three” protests the way fast fashion and consumer culture creates oppressive conditions for Khmer workers.
Odyssey Works
Practitioner:
Odyssey Works
Date:
Sep 10 2012
IT all looked so normal: a dozen diners chatting over coffee and hash browns at an outdoor cafe near the waterfront here on an August morning. The cook flipped eggs, a dog sniffed for scraps, and the young woman in the black sweater suspected nothing of the spies and confederates sprinkled throughout. They’d been studying her life for four months and were finally preparing to pull it through the looking glass they’d constructed.
ASCO Collective
Practitioner:
ASCO Collective
Date:
Apr 17 1970
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Los Angeles-based multi-media arts collective Asco (from the Spanish word for nausea) created performances, street theater and conceptual art that satirized the emerging styles of Chicano art and pushed the boundaries of what it might encompass.
This Ain't a Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-Membering
Practitioner:
Taja Lindley
Date:
Apr 30 2016
"This Ain't a Eulogy" is both a staged performance and a durational, outdoor, public performance that reclaims and takes public space. The artist statement is as follows:
Fragility and Endurance: Yann Marussich's 'BAIN BRISÉ' and the Art of Vulnerability
Practitioner:
Yann Marussich
Date:
Apr 24 2010
Yann Marussich is a Swiss performance artist who does avant-garde and shocking work, going further into the relationships of the human body with the environment. His work explores such themes as endurance, vulnerability, and the intersection of physicality with philosophy.
Vaginal Knitting
Practitioner:
Casey Jenkins
Date:
Nov 27 2013
"Vaginal Knitting" Is the New Thing in Activist Performance Art by Adam Weinstein
Zou Yaqi, a Chinese woman who spent 21 days living in Beijing for free by taking advantage of inherent classism issues in China
Practitioner:
Zou Yaqi
Date:
May 1 2021
BEIJING — Like many art students, Zou Yaqi often worried she’d be unable to afford to live in Beijing after graduation. So, earlier this year, she decided to set herself a daunting challenge: Survive in the city for three weeks without spending a single yuan. It turned out to be a piece of cake. 
You Need to Calm Down
Practitioner:
Taylor Swift
Date:
Jun 17 2019
Everything You Need to Know About The Equality Act & Taylor Swift's Petition to Pass It In her latest song and music video for “You Need To Calm Down,” Taylor Swift is celebrating Pride the best way she knows how — by telling homophobic bigots to pipe down. Both in the video and in the song’s lyrics, the singer establishes herself as a clear ally to the community, singing “Shade never made anybody less gay.”
Chatty cockroach
Practitioner:
Myrto Sarma and Dimitra Trousa
Date:
Jun 15 2019
This is the image confronting Greeks from an Athenian drain . "Hello, I live in the sewers of Athens," says the cockroach. "Yes, me too," says an Athenian walking past, apparently unfazed by the idea of an insect talking to him from a drain.
FOKAL
Practitioner:
UNESCO, the French Institute, Fondation Culture Création, and Africamérica
Date:
Apr 1 1995
ARTS/CULTURE FOKAL is the hub in Haiti where locals and international visitors from all walks of life -- artists, writers, citizens, activists-- come together to discuss the most pressing nation- and community-building issues, enjoy cutting edge artistic expressions, and share their ideas.
36.5 / A DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE WITH THE SEA: New York Estuary
Practitioner:
Sarah Cameron Sunde
Date:
Sep 14 2022
A site-specific, community-engaged process: Sarah and NYC collaborators gathered at the water’s edge every month from September 2020 (when the work was initially scheduled to take place but was postponed due to the pandemic) until September 2022, to build Kin To The Cove, a site-specific community-powered environmental public art process that connects local residents to the Cove and Water that surrounds NYC.
Cheat Neutral
Practitioner:
Christian Hunt, Alex Randall
Date:
Nov 19 2009
Cheat Neutral satirizes the carbon offset model by offering people the opportunity to pay someone else not to cheat on their partner in order to neutralize their own infidelity. Cheatneutral allows you to pay £2.50 to carry on cheating while funding “monogamy-boosting offset projects”.
Ghosts of Union Square - The Contested City
Practitioner:
Not An Alternative
Date:
Oct 1 2011
"This project took aim at a public relations campaign produced by The Union Square Partnership, a local Business Improvement District (BID) attempting to privatize the north end of NYC’s Union Square park and install a high-end celebrity chef restaurant. They hosted historical walking tours of the park for decision-makers, as a means of getting buy-in for their development initiative.
Eric Bouvet’s Chechnya On Stage
Practitioner:
Theatre company Map
Date:
Mar 15 2013
"On Friday, March 15, 2013, for the launch of the 20th edition of the Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents, the theatre company Map performed Jusqu’au bout, a play directed by David Ropars based on a text by the photojournalist Eric Bouvet. It was a great success! The monologue was given a magnificent interpretation by the actor Jean-Pierre Morice.
Sex Worker’s Opera
Practitioner:
Experimental Experience Theater
Date:
May 28 2014
The Sex Workers' Opera is a multidisciplinary show featuring stories of sex workers from 17 countries and produced since 2013. It is written and performed by sex workers and their friends.
Pantomime for Climate CHange
Practitioner:
The Red Rebels
Date:
Apr 4 2023
Replete with an unmistakable look, intense silence, and mime-like moves, the Red Rebels are, quite intentionally, riveting. In the words of artist and activist Doug Francisco, founder of the Red Rebels Brigade: "We divert, distract, delight, and inspire the people who watch us."

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