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BAM Next Wave Art Reading Room
September 6, 2016-January 29, 2017
BAM Fisher, Sharp Lower Lobby
321 Ashland Place
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Wendy’s Subway is pleased to partner with BAM this fall for Next Wave Art, offering audiences the chance to read, write, and engage with selections from our extensive collection of historical and contemporary print publications. The Reading Room will include works on theater, dance, performance theory, and contemporary poetics and showcase titles curated by Next Wave artists performing in the BAM Fisher building, rotated monthly.
Every month, the Reading Room will also host workshops led by contemporary performers and writers, as well as readings by New York City-based practitioners. Scroll down for a full list of programs and descriptions, as well as links to sign up.
Wendy’s Subway Reading Room is open every day (excluding holidays) from noon to 5pm, September 6 through December 23, with extended hours before and after evening performances in the Fishman Space. Readers are encouraged to spend time with the non-circulating collection, and consult with librarians about the publications. A limited-edition catalogue of the library’s holdings will be available in the Reading Room and on the Wendy’s Subway website.
The flexible, modular space of the Reading Room is designed by Tyler Polich and Hannah Wilentz, and has previously been installed at White Columns (New York); NADA New York (in collaboration with Aeromoto, Mexico City); Brown University for the group exhibition “From Line to Constellation” (Providence, RI); and the Carnegie Mellon University School of the Arts for the Open Engagement “Place and Revolution” conference (Pittsburgh, PA).
Design by Tyler Polich and Hannah Wilentz
Production by Jeff DeGolier
Neon Design by Hailey Loman
Neon Production by Lite Brite Neon
Printing by Gerardo Madera
Lighting by Like Minded Objects
Special thanks to Harris Bauer, Alec Mapes-Frances, Emily Reilly, and Elizaveta Schneyderman -
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Touching Into Text
Workshop led by Marissa Perel
Friday, September 16th, 2-4pm
Capacity: 12 participants.
Register here
This workshop will combine somatic awareness with reading to create an embodied approach to understanding language. A short selection of texts will be presented for reading and discussion. Through exercises that draw from various somatic practices, and experiments made up by the instructor and participants, the workshop will play with ways of feeling language; bringing words and their meanings into an intimate experiential sphere. There is room for contemplation, for finding an individual pathway for movement and speech, and for giving space to the often daunting mind-body split. It’s possible that we will get emotional about language, that we will love or not love how some texts feel, and that we will invent radical interpretations of what we read. We will investigate who we are as bodies that are simultaneously reading and being read by others. The desired outcome of this workshop is that participants find possibilities for integrating language and movement in their artistic processes.Marissa Perel is an artist and writer based in New York. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), where she is making solo and collaborative performance on subjects including choreography and disability, crip time and queerness, power and access, and pain and desire. Her work has been shown internationally, recently including the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Konstfack, Sweden; FringeArts, Philadelphia; Medium Gallery, Slovakia; Roulette and the Chocolate Factory Theater, New York. Her chapbook, Angry Ocean 1-10, is published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. She was the editor of Critical Correspondence, the online journal of Movement Research (2012-2013), and the founder of the column, Gimme Shelter: Performance Now for Art21 Magazine.
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Readings by Dia Felix, Ricardo Maldonado, and Dorothea Lasky
Tuesday, September 20th, 7pm
Writer and filmmaker Dia Felix is author of the Lambda-nominated experimental novel "Nochita," published on City Lights/Sister Spit in 2014. Areas of interest include romance, celebrity, obsession, decadence, and modernity. She's screened films and read at very many places including Segue, Radar Reading Series, The New Museum, Storm King, and Albertine Books. She's published recently with Ping Pong, a journal of the Henry Miller Library, The Feminist Wire, Aster(ix), and Poetry Project Newsletter. She curates a pan-genre literary performance series, GUTS, at Dixon Place and founded and heads the maybe-fictional enterprise Personality Press. She's from California and lives in East Harlem, New York.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of four books of poetry, most recently ROME (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2014), as well as Thunderbird, Black Life, AWE, all out from Wave Books. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013) and several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, co-directs Columbia Artist/Teachers, and lives in New York City.
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato's Collateral and a recipient of fellowships in poetry from Queer/Arts/Mentorship and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. -
Readings & performances by Svetlana Kitto & Amelia Bande, Charity Coleman & Morgan Bassichis, and Wo Chan & Rob Rusli.
Tuesday, October 4th, 7pm
Amelia Bande is a writer, performer and teacher. Her plays Chueca and Partir y Renunciar were staged in Chile. She is part of the Gel Film Series, writing the scripts for the group´s experimental animations and film installations. She co-founded Publishing Puppies, an independent press for visual work, poetry and fiction. Her work has recently been shown at Dixon Place, Artists Space, The Poetry Project, MIX NYC, NewBridge Project, Adult Contemporary Reading Series, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NGBK, and Flutgraben Kunstfabrik Berlin. She lives in Brooklyn.
Wo Chan is a poet & performance artist. They have received honors from Poets House, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Asian American Writers Workshop, and has been published in VYM Magazine, The Margins, No Tokens, and elsewhere. Wo is a standing member of the Brooklyn based performance collective Switch N' Play, and has performed at venues including Dixon Place, Brooklyn Pride & the Architectural Digest Expo.
Charity Coleman lives in Brooklyn and Rome and is the author of Julyiary (O’clock Press, 2015). Other writing(s) can be found in BOMB Magazine, Prelude, Fanzine, Dolce Stil Criollo, Theme Can, and elsewhere.
Morgan Bassichis is a writer and performer whose live comedic stories have been described as "out there" (by Morgan's mother) and "super intense" (by Morgan). Past performances have included the Jewish Museum, Poetry Project, Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA PS1 as part of the 2015 Greater New York exhibition. Morgan's essays on queer politics and prison abolition have appeared in the Radical History Review, Captive Genders, and other edited volumes.
Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian. She was raised in Hollywood and now lives in New York, where she co-curates Adult Contemporary, a reading and performance series. Her fiction and nonfiction have been featured in Salon, VICE, Art21, Columbia Journal and the book Occupy. This winter she was Danspace Project’s Writer-in-Residence for Platform 2016: A Body in Places. She is at work on a novel called Purvs, which means "swamp" in Latvian, and is the name of the country's first gay club.
Rob Rusli is an artist, musician and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. His score for the feature documentary Good Game won Best Original Score at the IndieCapitol Film Festival in 2015. Recently, Rob has composed music for Casey Tang's Untitled (Rivers) video installation at the Queens Museum as well as sound design for Wo Chan's WHITE FLAG/WHITE FACE at Dixon Place's Hot! Festival. He is currently writing music for a Trinidadian magical realism love story feature film. As a filmmaker, he has directed and edited multiple music videos and short films, and is currently shooting and editing a documentary on virtuoso drummer Justin Brown for Justin's first solo album NYEUSI. In his free time, he produces and performs rap music and performance art.
This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. -
Political Therapy Workshop, Led by Liz Magic Laser and Valerie Bell
Friday, November 4th, 2:30-4pm
Capacity: 20 participants
To register, click here.
In this workshop we will use group therapy methods to elicit the connections between our personal experiences and political beliefs. Artist Liz Magic Laser and Certified Professional Life Coach Valerie Bell will draw on psycho-therapeutic and meditation techniques to guide participants through a series of activities to facilitate the expression and release of frustrations associated with the presidential campaigns and forthcoming election.
Please wear loose clothing and bring a yoga or exercise mat if you have one.
Liz Magic Laser is a video and performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her videos and performances intervene in semi-public spaces such as bank vestibules, movie theaters and newsrooms, and have involved collaborations with actors, surgeons, political strategists and motorcycle gang members. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Mercer Union, Toronto (2015); Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2015); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2015); Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2013) the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013); DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas (2013); and Mälmo Konsthall, Mälmo, Sweden (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at Lisson Gallery, London (2013); the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2012); the Performa 11 Biennial, New York (2011); the Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2011); and MoMA PS 1, New York (2010). Laser is the recipient of grants from Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation (2013), the Southern Exposure Off-Site Graue Award (2013), New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2012) and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (2010). Laser’s first survey show took place at Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany, in March, 2016.
Valerie Bell is a Certified Professional Life Coach, teacher, and actor based in NYC and upstate NY. She has performed on stage and TV in New York and New England. Valerie holds degrees in Theater and Philosophy and The Arts from Bennington College and the New School for Social Research, and certifications from the Integrated Feeling Therapy Center and the Open Center's Coaching for Transformation Program. She is a member of the International Coach Federation and has been working for over 10 years with clients privately and through the Integrated Feeling Therapy Center. Valerie continues her 30+ years teaching English for the City University of New York, illuminating prejudice and inspiring perseverance in her classes. -
Belladonna* and Lambda Literary Present Readings by t'ai freedom ford, Keelay Gipson, and Theodore Kerr
Curated by Diana Cage, Saretta Morgan, and William Johnson
Tuesday, November 22nd, 7pm
Belladonna* Collaborative and Lambda Literary present: t'ai freedom ford, Keelay Gipson, & Theodore Kerr will read at Wendy's Subway Reading Room at BAM Fisher on Nov 22nd at 7pm.
New chaplets from each reader will also be available at this event.
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. She received her MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Ivy, The Brooklyn Review, Bronx Biannual and Kweli. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, No, Dear, The African American Review, Vinyl, Muzzle, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2012 and 2013, she completed two multi-city tours as a part of a queer women of color literary salon, The Revival. In 2014, she was the winner of The Feminist Wire’s inaugural poetry contest judged by Evie Shocklee. She is a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow and the Poetry Project’s 2016 Emerge-Surface-Be Poetry fellow. Winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, her first poetry collection, how to get over is forthcoming Spring 2017 from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at www.shesaidword.com
Keelay Gipson is a multi-disciplinary artist including work as an activist, teaching artist, director and award-winning playwright. He was recently awarded the New Dramatist Van Lier Fellowship (2016-2018) and has been working as a Public Artist in Residence for the City of New York's Department of Cultural Affairs and Administration of Children's Services. His play, What I Tell You in the Dark, was a Premiere Stages Playwriting Festival Finalist. His work as a playwright has been seen at the Wild Project, Poetic Theater Productions, HERE Arts Center, 133rd Street Arts Center, The Theater at Alvin Ailey, Tom Noonan's Paradise Factory, Pace University, Planet Connections Theater Festivity, The University of Houston, The National Black Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights' Theater, Classical Theater of Harlem, and New York Theatre Workshop. He has been a playwriting fellow with The Amoralists Theater Company's 'Wright Club, a Lambda Literary Emerging Voices Playwriting Fellow, and a Rising Circle Theater Collective INKTank Semi-Finalist. As Co-Artistic Director of The Oneness Project he means to explore questions focusing on social injustice through various performance based mediums.
Canadian born Theodore (ted) Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer and organizer whose work focuses on HIV/AIDS and community. He was the programs manager at Visual AIDS. He received his MA from Union Theological Seminary where he researched Christian Ethics and HIV. He is a founding member of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? collective. His writing has appeared in POZ, The Advocate, WSQ, Lambda Literary, Drain, IndieWire, and Cineaste.
The Belladonna* mission is to promote the work of feminist writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable and dangerous with language.
Lambda Literary believes Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer literature is fundamental to the preservation of our culture, and that LGBTQ lives are affirmed when our stories are written, published and read. -
Documenting and Archiving Performance
A Panel Discussion featuring Corina Copp, Mashinka Firunts, Anya Liftig, Esther Neff, Danny Snelson, and Matvei Yankelevich led by Emergency INDEX co-editor Katie Gaydos
Saturday, December 3rd, 2-4pmUsing Emergency INDEX—an annual volume documenting performance works from the previous year—as a jumping off point to think about the ways in which performance is modified by documentation, Wendy’s Subway and Ugly Duckling Presse are pleased to present a public panel discussion regarding contemporary issues in documenting and archiving performance works. Panelists include Corina Copp, Mashinka Firunts & Danny Snelson (Present Tense Pamphlets), Anya Liftig, Esther Neff (Panoply Performance Laboratory), and Matvei Yankelevich (Ugly Duckling Presse).
After the discussion, INDEX editors will be available to answer specific questions about the submission process for INDEX and offer one-on-one editorial feedback.
About Emergency INDEX:Acknowledged as, at best, a conflicted endeavor, and at worst, a betrayal of the very essence of performance, documentation has been problematized while performances have proliferated. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of performances have come and gone, witnessed only by the people in the room, or on the street. And though we can argue about the advantages of such a condition, it does make a rather unique situation: performance has become a field whose practices are largely invisible to itself. To respond to this situation, we began with a simple idea: to create an annual periodical (Emergency INDEX) allowing the people who made performances in that year to document their work in print.
The pages of Emergency INDEX are open to all who work with performance. In each annual volume, contributors document works made in the previous year. By including performances regardless of their country of origin, genre, aims, or popularity, INDEX reveals the breathtaking variety of practices used in performance work today. Each volume features a comprehensive index of key terms used by contributors in describing and discussing their own work. Begun in 2011, INDEX is a lens for seeing the field of contemporary performance from the ground up. -
Readings and Performances by Constance DeJong and David Greenspan
Tuesday, December 13th, 7pm
Constance DeJong is an American artist, writer and performer, producing fiction texts and language/image based work for performance and theater, audio and video installations. She has permanent audio installations in Beacon, NY, London and Seattle. DeJong has twice collaborated with Tony Oursler on live performances; was a collaborator on Super Vision, A Builders Association production (2005); librettist for the opera, Satyagraha, composer Philip Glass. Her current work includes NightWriters a performance and book project with Triple Canopy and Radios, a series of digitally rei-engineered vintage radios that play ten tracks performed by DeJong, Jim Fletcher and others. Her first book, Modern Love, will be re-issued in spring 2017 by Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse.
David Greenspan has performed solo renditions of Barry Conners’ 1925 comedy The Patsy (Transport Group), Gertrude Stein’s lecture Plays (The Foundry Theatre), a program of Stein lectures and a playlet Composition...Masterpieces...Identity (Target Margin Theater) and his solo plays Jonas (Transport Group), The Myopia (The Foundry Theatre) and The Argument (Target Margin Theater). He has acted in his plays Dead Mother (NYSF/Public Theater), She Stoops to Comedy (Playwrights Horizons), Go Back to Where You Are (Playwrights Horizons) and I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees (Abrons Arts Center). Additional acting credits include premieres by David Adjmi, Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Terrence McNally, Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman – and his association with the work of director David Herskovits at Target Margin Theater. He enjoys close collaborative relationships with directors Leigh Silverman and Jack Cummings III and is the recipient of Guggenheim, Lortel and Fox fellowships, Alpert and Lambda Literary awards and five OBIES.
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