FATVillage Projects and FAR Gallery

THE NERVE: Performance Art Festival at The Projects|FATVillage

Curated by Leah Brown, Jen Clay, and Peter Symons

March 18 and 19, 2016 

7-10 pm both nights

THE NERVE: Performance Art Festival is two days of multi-disciplinary, boundary pushing, sometimes indefinable and often un-nerving original performances, created by 14 artists/artist groups who use performance as a means of visual and conceptual expression. The performances will be as varied as the artists who create them, and audiences can expect to see elements of installation, the creation of visual artifacts, performances that involve endurance, audience interaction, theatre, movement and sound.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

Linda Behar and Rahaleh Filsoofi will be performing, Whose Blood is Redder? Here, the artist team creates tiles of passages from biblical Iranian and Jewish texts using printing ink and their own drawn blood. This is a cumulative and ongoing, 2-day performance.

Raine Blunk will be performing UNLEARNING LIVE IN COLOR, an interactive, durational installation/performance based on externalizing neuroses-as-perception through color, utilizing drag, monologues, audience interaction and live music.

Jen Clay will be performing It’s All Really Real, a playful performance/video installation exploring fears and anxieties through stop motion animation, costumes and puppetry that are used to recreate tense scenes from TV and horror movies.

Nina Gregg presents her interactive sculpture, Breathing Box. The longer you interact with this object, the more your breathing becomes in sync with the object, engaging viewers in an unintentional collaboration, collectively bringing the object to life.

Joseph Herring and House Pencil Green present HurdyGurdyHotDog where absurdist theatre, carnivalesque puppetry and interactive installation explore the relationships between the inhabitants of a hot dog cart: a hot dog, a pickle and an ice cream cone.

Jason Lalor presents Black Body Radiation, a performance incorporating voice-controlled animation with politically charged rap.

Jenny Larsson and company perform On The Other Side of the Lake, where dance, repetition, and storytelling activate a series of water-filled buckets.

Beju Lejobart and Sherryl Muriente perform Synapse: Impulses and Reactions, a trio of short sketches where the artists personify neural synapses through an original score, digital projection, and reactionary dance along with oversized paintbrushes (Friday night only).

Christin Minnotte performs DISPOSABLE ETHIC, which takes place in a water and plastic filled tank, and references humanity’s struggle between our dependence on plastic, and the peril in which it has placed our habitat and us.

Jean Minuchin and Helen Reynolds perform Excerpts from Louis and Bill, utilizing puppetry and mask theatre to create a symbolic environment expressing the duality of human nature and societal roles (Saturday night only).

Karina Pais presents EXPOSURE, a durational performance revolving around the repetition of carving words on carrots that she then suspends for people to walk through. The carrots and their verbiage express notions of reward and expectation.

Rosemarie Romero presents Porn Nails, an interactive installation and performance project employing tropi-camp aesthetic and Latin kitsch that functions as a nail salon where clients are provided with colorful manicures and juicy conversation.

Galen Treuer a doctoral student of environmental science at UM and a performer, will be engaged in a durational, interactive performance where he attempts to write his dissertation while engaging visitors to converse about sea level rise in an intimate setting where snacks are provided and dancing is encouraged.

Lisa Marie Stephens will be performing Strength Test, where the artist attempts to split fifty pre-made solid cement bricks with a sledgehammer in a display of strength, perseverance and spectacle.

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