Warren Fry
Be Blank Consort
By Warren FryFor the first ten minutes of their reading, the Be Blank Consort sat in a circle near the stage hashing out the details of their performance, while casting glances over their shoulders at the audience as it trickled in.
Thoth Herma: The Life and Land of Nular-In
By Warren FryWilliam Blake’s aesthetic of idiosyncratic world-making, espoused in his declaration that “[he] must create a System or be enslaved by another Man’s” seems a fitting ethos for Thoth, who’s spent his life creating the world Festad, which boasts a mythic history, world geography, Festadian language, and the Herma, an epic in the form of a three-act solo opera.
Joseph DeLappe Gandhi’s March to Dandi
By Warren FryIs Second Life merely an iconic simulation of commerce, privatization, and exclusivity or could it work as an engine for building social awareness? Attempts to awaken users to the concerns of real life by way of strife-free virtual worlds may seem counterintuitive at best.
Asplundher Syndicate A Nelson Loses Three Heads... Apparently
By Warren FryOn Friday the 20th I was descending into the 72nd and Broadway subway station when my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a man shouting broken words from the platform below.
The Brainstormers
By Warren Fry"Museums Cave In To Radical Feminists” read the sign on poster board in hot pink letters, hoisted by a Brainstormer on the corner of West 24th St. and 10th Ave.
DisEchoNance
By Warren FryIn the 49 years since La Monte Young, John Cage and others first investigated chance, duration, and atonality in Yoko Ono’s Chamber St. Loft, experimental music has broadened and defined its boarders, trickled into discrete genres, and almost entirely left private residences for spotlit galleries and trendy venues.
Larry Miller Homage to Nam June Paik
By Warren FryThe night started out with Flux Radio + TV. Five small televisions and one radio were wheeled out on a cart and turned on; images and sounds of the day’s news blared for ten minutes. Then came Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns for cello and keyboard.
We Are The Seahorses
By Warren Fry“Lactose Intolerance Acceptance Revolution!” We Are The Seahorses front man Darren chanted while pumping a glittered fist towards the basement crowd at Courtlandt-land, part of Three Day Weekend, a festival of basement shows that took place across New Brunswick, NJ, April 25 -27.
Trouble and the B-Keepers You Are Here: A Maze
By Warren FryAt Chashama’s 44th Street gallery, the collaborative team Trouble and the B-Keepers (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris) invited over fifty performance groups, noise musicians and DJ’s to perform throughout the month of May.
Alice Kemp Madame Du Planchette de la Cloche
By Warren FryDespite my reservations about the venue, politics, and professionalism of the team who organized the Transmodern Festival in Baltimore, Maryland, there was one work included in their menagerie of interventionist® chic that avoided the prescriptive clichés of interactive performance.
Michael Peters & Erik Carlson
By Warren FryThe Bowery Poetry Club was transformed into the chapter house of an abandoned flying saucer on July 20th with a performance by Michael Peters and Erik Carlson, the magi-like annunciators of Peters’ Vaast Bin. The venue’s stage was covered in spaghetti-like ringlets of wires and Christmas lights, with Carlson crouched in front of an inlet of sound pedals and audio devices.
Colectivo Chocolatera
By Warren FryAfter arriving an hour early to an event at the Grace Exhibition Space in Bushwick, which features performance work, I found myself chopping vegetables in the kitchen. It was another Performance + Dinner! Thursday, and the Dominican artists of the Colectivo Chocolatera were preparing Sancocho, a traditional festival dish; this, however was no intervention or audience participation piece—these folks needed help with the salad.
Petit Retrospective of ARAI Shin-ichi Works from 1999-2009
By Warren FryBeing in a room with Arai Shin-Ichi is something like being in a room with a coyote; misunderstanding is a given, but reciprocal inquisitiveness guarantees a good time.
Project for a New Neoist Academy
By Warren Fry“Excuse me,” asked a young graduate student, “what is it you’re protesting exactly?” The person in the pink bunny suit gave no reply and continued pacing in front of an esteemed blue-chip Chelsea gallery, stopping on occasion only to adjust its sandwich board, which read ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
1st Annual Hoo-Rah Marginal Arts Festival Parade
By Warren FryRalph Eaton flapped the elongated, noodle-like sleeves of his patchwork, neon-yellow suit as he marched in a loose column of bicyclists, performers, and costumed revelers. A young girl with a popcorn bucket on her head pointed at him and shouted, “Look, it’s that weird piece of art.”
Realicide
By Warren Fry“Face melting” does not do Realicide justice. It’s more akin to skull melting and face imploding. The visceral quality of their primordial screams was buoyed and punctuated by the distressed noise and tornado thuds issuing from an expertly flitted mixer: the umbra of the curled fist.
Jamie McMurry
By Warren FryJamie McMurry, whose performances have been praised for their evocations of the latent violence beneath that vast swath of American youth culture mired between the disenfranchised rural and hyper-self-conscious urban, otherwise known as suburbia, brought his 15-minute work titled Archive last month to the Cardiff School of Art and Design’s Trace: Installaction Art Space as part of its performance series The Cat Show.
Tom Russotti Aesthletics: Straightjacket Softball
By Warren FryAs clouds gathered in the evening sky over McCarren Park in Williamsburg, the United Sugar Refiners Health and Temperance Society’s last at bat versus the Hipsters of the North Side Fitness Center proved one for the (as yet non-existent) Straightjacket Softball record books.
Frankenstein (Mortal Toys): a miniature spectacle
By Warren FryVictor Frankenstein, his sister Elizabeth and brother William played hide-and-seek in the woods outside Geneva, their laughter and giggling voiced by two performers seated in plain view on either side of a small proscenium stage.
