Sasamoto will take her "2010" turn

Join Aki Sasamoto and Culture Push for an experiential workshop at 2010, the Whitney Biennial:

My Turn: Aki Sasamoto and Culture Push at Whitney Biennial

Friday, April 16 -- 7:30pm

Free with Museum admission, which is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays from 6-9 pm; there are no special tickets or reservations.

My Turn invites artists to create programs for the Whitney’s public that are an extension of and informed by their own artistic processes and methods. Taking their contributions to 2010 as a point of departure, six Biennial artists explore key aspects of their practice to create distinctive evenings of performance, discussion, demonstration, and engagement.

Arturo's Moving Castle...

...and Aki's sock-draw puppetization continue tonight at The Chocolate Factory and, though you might have a hard time getting a reservation due to the limited space for this show, you ought to try.

Domestic Partner consists of two simultaneous installation/performance works: Secrets of My Mother's Child by Aki Sasamoto and A New Theory of Biology by Arturo Vidich. The latter includes a sound/video program by Howard Huang, and the whole thing concludes with a music set (tonight: the band of Matt Bauder and Aram Shelton).

Show up in comfortable shoes; you'll mostly be moving around and dodging the oncoming performers and their unruly props. The look and atmosphere is more hip gallery opening than dance concert. And if you don't immediately warm to this roughly blended fantasia of personal and global, micro- and macro-obsessions, put it in the pickling barrel.

Tonight, 8pm at The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(718) 482-7069

Listen to my Body and Soul podcast interview with Sasamoto and Vidich here.

Learn more about these artists here.

Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich: Body and Soul podcast

Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich of Culture Push discuss Domestic Partner--their provocative new installation/simultaneous performance, hosted by The Chocolate Factory (Wednesday-Saturday, April 8-11, 8pm).

Learn more about Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Street
Long Island City, New York
Complete information, directions and ticketing

Movement Research

(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

Yvonne Meier's "Stolen"

Stolen opens in the dark with several regular blasts of super-amplified vocal noise from the commanding Sudanese soul singer Alsarah, a bracing sonic environment, and you sit there, helplessly counting the onrushing blasts, praying that the last you've heard will be the last indeed, not knowing, of course, that you've innocently wandered into a savage expanse of space and there's no escaping the plump, fertile, wacky and uncensorable mind of Yvonne Meier, the dancer-choreographer dressed in a t-shirt perhaps honoring one notoriously irritable, mayor-biting groundhog and accompanied by the always-game and valiant madman, dancer-in-extremis Arturo Vidich and the considerably calmer, more efficient Aki Sasamoto, all in a Kathy Kaufmann-illuminated terrain pelted from above by a load of insulting shoes.

Meier. Gotta love 'er.

Time cost is only 45 minutes. You can do this. Danspace Project tonight and tomorrow at 8:30pm.

Yes! Push that culture!

cml performance colleagues Arturo Vidich, Clarinda Mac Low and Aki Sasamoto announce Culture Push:

"CULTURE PUSH is a brand new organization, a group of artists and others who want to change the world. CULTURE PUSH acts as a gathering place for several projects with a common aim, and brings together several experienced artist-managers who produce work collectively and individually. It is a clearinghouse for ideas and methods and conversations, a state of mind that manifests in concrete events for an eclectic audience. The members of CULTURE PUSH create experiences. We walk the slippery line between disciplines, both within and outside art. We combine performance, visual art, and media of all kinds with social intervention, intensive research and political inquiry to make situations that enlighten, entertain and enliven our audiences. We seek to actively push against boundaries so that attitudes shift, assumptions are questioned, and minds and bodies are changed. We all share a desire to work through invitation rather than confrontation and shift the discourse and the direction of our culture through interaction, intimacy, humor and pathos."

Learn more about cml performance and CULTURE PUSH here.