How would you act in a Social Democracy? As we free fall into fascism, let’s imagine alternative moves. In this collectively produced performance, the assembled performers take socialism as a “fake it ’til you make it” proposition. Courtesy the Artists forms a working group out of theater, video and music makers to produce a contemporary, in-process variety show that includes the audience in a conversation about what we hate about today, and what we it to be like tomorrow. Using open source video technology in combination with office software, Popular Revolt addresses an increasingly distracted public with the riotous, rebellious power of liveness. Popular Revolt re-invests revolutionary urgency into historic models of Marxist theater to dismantle Neoliberalism, the global economic force shaping our every day. Popular Revolt combines “He Said Yes / He Said No,” (1930), a Lehrstück, or “learning play,” with online sensitivity training programs and the interactive interfaces of dating simulators to explore questions of consent within the spectacle of the contemporary now.
Directed by Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl
Featuring:
Malik Gaines
Miguel Gutierrez
Latasha N. Nevada Diggs
Ryan McNamara
Seung-Min Lee
Alison Kizu-Blair
Courtesy the Artists is a shifting collective based in New York, organized and directed by Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade, who started the project when moving from LA to New York in 2012. Prior projects include The Meeting at MoMA Ps1, which explored the music of Black Panther Party president Elaine Brown; 24-Hr Ballad, a day-long performance of the song “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” included in Performa 13; Songs of the Civil War, commissioned for the exhibition “When the Stars Begin to Fall” at the Studio Museum in Harlem; The Shoot, a live film shoot about the pepper spray incident at UC Davis, commissioned for the exhibition “The Rehearsal,” at the Kitchen NYC; and Choir Practice, an amateur sing-along of the songs of Sweet Honey in the Rock at Recess. This project also builds on Segade and Gaines’s work, with Jade Gordon, in the art collective My Barbarian, and their leftist theater project Post-Living Ante-Action, which was the subject of the group’s 2016 solo show at the New Museum.
Courtesy the Artists Links:
Choir Practice
Trad.
Choir Practice
The Shoot
My Barbarian, PoLAAT
Co-sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies.
