This semester, NYU Skirball’s spring season has asked us to think about what live performance means to us now, in the wake of our ongoing global pandemic(s) and the lingering effects on our ability to gather together, to make and share art – from revisiting the classics with the Classical Theatre of Harlem, to reinventing the canon with Philip Glass and Improbable. How have the last 3 years changed our collective understandings of what it means to make, see and study art and performance? How have our experiences with isolation and virtual connection affected our experiences of liveness and shared spaces? How do we mark and mourn our losses while trying to regain as much as we can of what was lost? What parts of our current return to “normalcy” would better be left in the past? & where do we want to go from here? 

You are invited to participate in an Open Space workshop, held by Phelim McDermott – as part of Improbable’s residence at NYU Skirball – to consider these questions with other members of NYU Skirball’s wider community.

The immediate effects of the indefinite “pause” on live performance in New York in March 2020 were obvious, but we’re still making sense of the broader effects of these precarious years. Paradoxically, arts professionals were not deemed “essential workers” in New York and yet we relied on art and culture as a lifeline through isolating months, and looked to artists to make sense of our collective grief and loss, our restlessness and rage, our longings for beauty, meaning, connection, intimacy, justice. This workshop is an opportunity to work through some of the unresolved questions of art as essential work, and the role of art in social life. Students’ courses of studies were disrupted; teachers tried to make sense of an altered reality; artists grappled with new mediums and economies; audiences found ways to connect across great distances; we all questioned what the future would look like. Now that we are living into that future, how do we start to answer some of these questions, and meaningfully address the radical restructurings of our fields? What role does the university play in these conversations, as both setting and catalyst? What has changed? What hasn’t changed? What can we change?

We invite you to come and spend the afternoon with us in the NYU Skirball lobby on Tuesday, April 4. Students and faculty from all over NYC, arts professionals, artists, community members, and audiences – all are welcome to join the conversation. Invite your friends, colleagues, collaborators, strangers, artists, neighbors, and let’s talk.