"My Performa journey began on November 4. Dick Cheney died that morning, and Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York that night. In between, I was fidgety, nervous, and excited for what the city might become. Still, I managed to sit patiently through some performance art like it was my job. The show I saw that evening was fittingly on-theme: War Songs, Diane Severin Nguyen's meditation on the role music played in shaping popular understanding of the American War in Vietnam."
"But risks they are. The artists risk trying something new in public. The viewers risk time and money: tickets start around $65 and climb past $200. And if you want to keep up with the full biennial, you're basically going out every night for a month-which I did not do. Because runs are short, usually three days, there's never much time for word of mouth to spread."
Performa began on November 4 amid notable city events and presented Diane Severin Nguyen's War Songs, a meditation on music's role in shaping popular understandings of the American War in Vietnam. Performa frequently supports artists' first large-scale performance forays through orchestrated, high-budget commissions that can become future institutional works. The model asks artists to take public risks and asks audiences to spend substantial time and money for short-run performances. Runs typically last about three days, limiting word-of-mouth, and many desirable shows sell out. Prior encounters with Nguyen's photography and video informed audience expectations, while strobe warnings remained inconsistent.
Read at ARTnews.com
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