Performance studies launches new initiative, renowned performance artist gives inaugural lecture
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a consortium of international institutions, artists, scholars, and activists dedicated to exploring the relationship between expressive behavior (broadly construed as "performance") and social and political life in the Americas. The Institute is directed by Diana Taylor, an NYU Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish & Portuguese (author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas). Jill Lane, an Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and a graduate of NYU’s PhD program in Performance Studies, (author of Blackface Cuba, 1845-1895) serves as the Associate Director of the Institute.
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After a decade of growth and innovation, the Institute has launched a brand new initiative called HemiNY, which is funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.
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The basic premise of the new initiative is that New York City is a space of transformation in which expressive practices from throughout the Americas come into contact and combine into new artistic forms. The constant encounters and collisions of African-, Native-, Asian-, Latino- and European- American cultures that define the City, combined with the multiple political and counter-cultural movements that have flourished on its streets, are a key source of the artistic innovation that has long characterized New York City. Experimental theater and performance, hip hop and salsa are powerful examples of the hemispheric fusions that the City’s neighborhoods have incubated. Drawing on this vitality, the program encourages young performers to mix styles and traditions, to take interdisciplinary leaps, and to develop their own voice across performance genres.
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Hemi NY’s inaugural event will be a lecture by internationally renowned performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. The event is free and open to the public. Gómez-Peña will present a lecture in which he will examine the role of artists working against the backdrop of war, censorship, cultural paranoia and spiritual despair. In his lecture, Gómez-Peña will ask: What are the new roles that artists undertake? Where are the new borders between the accepted and the forbidden? Is art still a pertinent form of inquiry and contestation? This lecture will be presented in collaboration with El Museo del Barrio. For more information, e-mail hemi.newyork@nyu.edu
An Evening of Spoken Word Roulette and Critical Theory with Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Tuesday, April 22, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
New York University. Jurow Hall, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East
