Causing More Trouble Out There: Mark Russell on P.S. 122

2007 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 46-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Kurkjian
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Experimental Performance ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
East Village ◽  
Artistic Director

For 21 years, Mark Russell served as the Artistic Director of Performance Space 122 , the New York institution hailed as the mecca of downtown experimental art. Russell looks back on the nascent years of P.S. 122 , discussing his desire to “serve” the experimental performance community, often navigating the “ecology” on the artists' behalf and helping to further their careers. Artists' profiles, images by photographer Dona Ann McAdams, and Russell's short reflection on both the new direction of P.S. 122 and his own life give a multidimensional look at this East Village landmark and the impresario who put it on the artistic map of New York City.

Black Song, Dance, and Theater in pre-World War I New York City

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Development Stage ◽  
World War ◽  
Performance Space

Between 1896 and 1915, Black professional entertainers transformed New York City’s most established culture industries—musical theater and popular song publishing—and helped create two new ones: social dancing and music recording. While Black culture workers’ full impact on popular entertainment and Black modernism would not be felt until after World War I, the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age were decades in the making. Stage performers Williams and Walker and their musical director Will Marion Cook introduced full-scale Black musical theater to Broadway between 1902 and 1909; songwriters-turned-performers Cole and Johnson expanded the style and substance of ragtime songs along Tin Pan Alley; James Reese Europe created a labor union for Black musicians that got hundreds of players out of Black nightclubs into high-paying White elites’ homes, eventually bringing a 200-person all-Black symphony orchestra to Carnegie Hall for the first concert of its kind at the august performance space. James Europe’s Clef Club Inc. also caught the ears of Manhattan’s leading social dancers, the White Irene and Vernon Castle, in ways that helped disseminate Europe’s ragtime dance bands across America and, by 1913, became the first Black band to record phonographs, setting important precedents for the hit jazz and blues records of the postwar era. While James Europe would go on to win renown as the musical director of the Harlem Hell Fighters—the most-decorated infantry unit to fight in World War I—his prewar community of professional entertainers had already successfully entered into New York City’s burgeoning, and increasingly national, commercial culture markets. By studying some of the key figures in this story it becomes possible to get a fuller sense of the true cultural ferment that marked this era of Black musical development. Stage performers Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson, behind-the-scenes songwriters Will Marion Cook and James Weldon Johnson, and musicians such as James Reese Europe’s artistic and entrepreneurial interventions made African Americans central players in creating the Manhattan musical marketplace and helped make New York City the capital of U.S. performance and entertainment.

Developing “Big Ears”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Greenland
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Silent Majority ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Live Music ◽  
Private And Public

This chapter examines how jazz fans, especially the most active concertgoers (the regulars), respond to a musical performance. It first considers how fans become part of jazz communities and how they contribute to the New York City jazz scene. It then shows how nonperforming musicians fill the performance space, suggesting that these offstage participants, who are also “performing” jazz, constitute the unseen scene, the silent and not-so-silent majority that forms an integral part of communal music-making. It also explains what happens when fans are in the house: how their musical tastes develop, how they view performers and performances, and how their private and public listening practices inform their understandings of and appreciation for jazz and jazz performances. The chapter concludes that when jazz audiences with “big ears” attend to and interact with live music and musicians, it creates a sympathetic environment where jazz can come alive.

“It Did Not Sound Like a Professor's Speech”: George Pierce Baker and the Market for Academic Rhetoric

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-246
Author(s):  
Mark Hodin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
York City ◽  
First Year ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Artistic Director

In November 1910, New Theatre artistic director Winthrop Ames asked his former teacher, Harvard English professor George Pierce Baker, to speak at a reception honoring the theatre's financial backers. The occasion was the start of the New Theatre's second season, and Ames was hoping to raise morale after a disappointing first year. Endowed primarily by millionaires in New York City, the New Theatre was supposed to offer a venue for staging plays free of the usual commercial pressures of Broadway productions. The contradiction at the heart of such an enterprise was manifest, particularly in the New Theatre's architecture and opulent interior design, which continually marked the “noncommercial” house as a monument to the economic power of those wealthy enough to provide for its massive and gaudy construction. Audiences complained that the two-thousand-seat auditorium had lousy acoustics; critics deemed the productions undistinguished and condemned the twenty-three Founders Boxes that ringed the orchestra as vulgar and ostentatious. Maybe an English professor, Ames thought, would have something helpful to say on the matter.

Rediasporization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Richards-Greaves
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Friday Evening ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Survival ◽  
Traditional Performance ◽  
Bride Price

This book examines how African-Guyanese in New York City participate in the Come to My Kwe-Kwe ritual to facilitate rediasporization, that is, the creation of a newer diaspora from an existing one. Since the fall of 2005, African-Guyanese in New York City have celebrated Come to My Kwe-Kwe (more recently called Kwe-Kwe Night) on the Friday evening before Labor Day. Come to My Kwe-Kwe is a reenactment of a uniquely African-Guyanese pre-wedding ritual called kweh-kweh, and sometimes referred to as karkalay, mayan, kweh-keh, and pele. A typical traditional (wedding-based) kweh-kweh has approximately ten ritual segments, which include the pouring of libation to welcome or appease the ancestors; a procession from the groom’s residence to the bride’s residence or central kweh-kweh venue; the hiding of the bride; and the negotiation of bride price. Each ritual segment is executed with music and dance, which allow for commentary on conjugal matters, such as sex, domestication, submissiveness, and hard work. Come to My Kwe-Kwe replicates the overarching segments of the traditional kweh-kweh, but a couple (male and female) from the audience acts as the bride and groom, and props simulate the boundaries of the traditional performance space, such as the gate and the bride’s home. This book draws on more than a decade of ethnographic research data and demonstrates how Come to My Kwe-Kwe allows African-Guyanese-Americans to negotiate complex, overlapping identities in their new homeland, by combining elements from the past and present and reinterpreting them to facilitate rediasporization and ensure group survival.

A Day in the Life of a Prison Theatre Program

2003 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Moller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
High Security ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Artistic Director

The artistic director of Rehabilitation through the Arts recounts making Voices from Within with and for inmates of Sing Sing, a high-security prison north of New York City. The play, a collaboration developed in a workshop with playwright Barbara Quintero, portrays the strategies prisoners consciously or unconsciously use to survive the experience of incarceration.

“Beat de Drum and de Spirit Gon Get Up”

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
Gillian Richards-Greaves
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Percussive Instruments

This chapter examines how the repertoire, form, content, and performance styles of traditional kweh-kweh songs and dances are performed and innovated at Come to My Kwe-Kwe to entertain, instruct, and educate the African-Guyanese diaspora in New York City. Accompanied by “found” instruments, synthesizers, djembes, and an assortment of percussive instruments, attendees sing traditional kweh-kweh songs, Guyanese folk songs, and musical genres from around the world. They sing using coded language, double-entendre, and unmasked (raw) speech to edify the community and facilitate inclusion. As attendees sing and dance in the ganda (performance space), they address diverse matrimonial topics, particularly sex. In fact, the volunteer bride and groom are expected to wine (gyrate) to demonstrate sexual prowess, or risk ridicule from the larger community. Some African-Guyanese-Americans disapprove of the musical innovations at Come to My Kwe-Kwe, but others view the changes as crucial to the survival of the ritual and the African-Guyanese community.

Gert, Valeska (1892–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Elswit
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Experimental Performance ◽  
Spoken Text ◽  
The Grotesque

Valeska Gert was a dancer, actress, and cabaret artist best known for her radical solo performances during the Weimar Republic. She attracted attention for her physical stage choices and presence (both of which were often discussed in terms of the grotesque) and for her commitment to making work that staged contemporary issues without mystifying them, as she claimed many of her contemporaries did. She also acted in many plays and films by well-known modernist directors. During the Nazi years, Gert left Germany and, among other activities, ran the Beggar Bar in New York City, one of the more successful exile cabarets and the second of the seven venues she opened during her career. After her return to Germany in 1949, her work changed substantially, both stylistically and in terms of medium, as her aggressive performance style softened and she relied increasingly on spoken text. In the decades after her death, she became an icon of rebellious and experimental performance for younger artists across Europe.

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