Join us for a two-day experimental event Presented by Epicenter NYC, The Clemente and Department of Transportation (DOT), our current Micro-Residents!
When: July 9–10, 2024 ALL DAY (see full schedule HERE)
Where: The Performing Garage, 33 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013
Featuring: Andros Zins-Browne, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Aneta Stojnić, Canal Street Research Association, Daniel Pravit Fethke, Clarinda Mac Low, Ka Baird, Katie Freeman, Neel Murgai, Nitin Mukul, Oliver Herring, Payal Parekh, Prem Krishnamurthy, Sam Rauch, Suyin So, and others
Epicenter NYC, a local media and community organization, and Department of Transformation are thrilled to present Ways of Showing Up, a two day series of immersive art, workshops, and performances (+ karaoke!) on July 9th and 10th at the legendary Performing Garage in Soho. Centering the artistic process as a form of care for the self and others, the event gathers together artists, therapists, musicians, choreographers, and community practitioners. They will each share tools for collective learning and collaboration that participants can carry away with them. Ways of Showing Up offers new visions for the intersection of art, well-being, and community.
Day 1: Slow Your Roll
Tuesday, July 9, 11am–10pm
Organized by Epicenter NYC co-founder and visual artist Nitin Mukul, the first day of Ways of Showing Up: Slow Your Roll facilitates an immersive slow art viewing experience in conjunction with a series of experimental musical performances. The work encourages participants to momentarily disconnect from the spectacles of today’s digital media in order to connect with a more meditative and contemplative pace. Mukul’s Durational Paintings are a series that engage with particular micro-atmospheric conditions at the site of their production. These improvisational artworks begin by layering paint in sheets of ice, freezing each layer so it accumulates color and texture. The frozen form is placed outside on an easel and allowed to to melt according to natural weather conditions while it is filmed. The resulting pieces are records of slow transformation, offering a meditative glimpse into elapsing geologic time. Mukul’s intention is to create a space of collective healing, in which viewers can find space to build empathy with more-than-human forces. This slow, responsive work functions both as an empirical reflection of the site on which it is made—recording light, temperatures, time of day, location, and our climate-at-large—while also positing new paradigms for how abstract painting might function as a durational, borderless experience.
The installation will be open to the public throughout the day, with three accompanying evening performances.
11am–10pm Nitin Mukul: Durational Painting (immersive installation)
5:30–7pm Clarinda Mac Low: ElectroSpectrum LivinVisible: Surrender
Interdisciplinary artist Clarinda Mac Low will lead a digital seance to connect us to the unseen forces we worship every day. This investigation is part of a larger project about how we live with new technologies and how that affects us existentially. Clarinda started out working in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience.
7–8:30pm Neel Murgai: Harmonic Infinity Loops
Neel Murgai is a sitarist, overtone singer, percussionist, composer, teacher, and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a raga-inspired musician's collective. In Harmonic Infinity Loops, Neel creates a psychedelic ragascape aiming to slow down our temporal perception. Neel will improvise in tandem with the durational paintings and activate the space with asynchronous loops of droning overtone vocals and sitar raga fragments. Neel will end his session by leading the audience in a group overtone singing experience.
8:30–10pm Ka Baird: Soundtracks for the Bardos
Ka Baird is a performer, sound artist, musician and composer. They will incorporate material from their recent album with improvised ambient passages responding to Mukul’s visuals and the history and architecture of The Performing Garage. Ka is known for live performances which include extended voice and microphone techniques combined with electronics and psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds. They create a present tense sound with a vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension.
Day 2: All Together Now?
Wednesday, July 10, 9am–10:30pm
Organized by Prem Krishnamurthy and Sam Rauch of Department of Transformation, Ways of Showing Up: All Together Now? brings together creative practitioners including artists, musicians, teachers, writers, and therapists for a series of experimental workshops, performances, tours, meals, and talks which will collectively explore the questions: How can we design processes for engaging others through artistic action? What are the resources for creative care that exist within both our own close communities and everyday encounters? And what does it mean to participate fully in both life and art?
Full schedule:
9–10am Payal Parekh: Blessed Rest
Art advisor and yoga instructor Payal Parekh will lead a 60-minute divination-based session that includes stretching, meditation, contemplation, and discussion. She will introduce her new self-care card deck, Blessed Rest by Payal, which offers tools for self-reflection and self-care practices to manage stress. This affirmational deck was created during the pandemic as a means of providing individuals with support and a gentle reminder that rest is our collective birthright—when we rest, we heal.
10:30am–12pm Aneta Stojnić: First Encounters
Performance artist and psychoanalyst Aneta Stojnić will facilitate a session of experimental introductions grounded in her therapeutic practice. How do we get to know one another? Stojnić’s conversational methodology begins with sharing dreams, memories, and fears, as the basis of a storytelling exercise that engenders new relational connections.
12:30–1:30pm Katie Freeman: Storylines
Literary publicist Katie Freeman will facilitate a lunch hour reading group and discussion around participation and the written word, animated by the question of how people come together and connect through the arts
1:30–2:30pm Canal Street Research Association: Canal, Channel, Chanel
Established as the fictional office of poetic research unit Shanzhai Lyric, the Canal Street Research Association will lead a Canal Street walking tour delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship.
2:30–4pm Prem Krishnamurthy: Ways of Graphic Design-ing
Designer, curator, author, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy will teach an introductory design class and workshop titled Ways of Graphic Design-ing. Taking as its point of departure John Berger’s iconic art historical text Ways of Seeing, the collaborative creative exercises in this workshop function as a springboard to think about graphic design, image-making, and critical production in our day and age.
4–5:30pm Oliver Herring: TASK
Known for his use of experimental techniques as a means to better understand human nature, individual behavior, and interpersonal dynamics, artist Oliver Herring and his open-ended, participatory TASK parties invite people to interact with one another and their environment. The continuous conception and interpretation of tasks is both chaotic and purpose driven, fostering a complex, ever shifting environment of people who connect with one another through what and who is around them.
5:30–6:30pm Andros Zins-Browne: The Chaos Opera
Experimental choreographer Andros-Zins-Browne’s The Chaos Opera is a participatory workshop for voice. Exploring ways that we can sing together without singing the same, The Chaos Opera opens up the potentials of dissonance to inspire deep listening and cohesive cacophony. No vocal experience or expertise required!
6:30–7:30pm Prem Krishnamurthy: Department of Transformation
Prem Krishnamurthy will present a participatory-lecture performance unpacking the concept of participation in both artistic and everyday contexts. Audience participation encouraged 😉!
7:30–9pm Daniel Pravit Fethke: Untitled Wooster Street (Salads)
Interdisciplinary artist Daniel Pravit Fethke will lead a culinary performance at dinner time. This site-specific meal will focus on the food-as-catalyst for shared dialogue in an arts context, with group discussion a central feature of the gathering. Drawing inspiration from the food we eat, the recipes we pass down, and the places that remind us of home, Daniel places himself in the work as a facilitator of dialogue, as a provocateur asking critical questions, as a host creating space for people to come together, using food—in particular the act of cooking, gathering, and sharing meals—as an entry point into new discursive and public spheres.
9–10:30pm Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere: Another Protest Song: Karaoke
Interdisciplinary artists Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere invite participation in Another Protest Song: Karaoke, a series of karaoke events that look to the karaoke songbook as potential for political enunciation through song. First initiated in 2008, this ongoing project invites the public to choose and sing songs of protest, along with pop songs re-contextualized to support the singer’s engaged interests or dislikes. Collective participation often transpires.
Organizers & Partners
About Department of Transformation
Department of Transformation (DT) is an artist-organized group that prototypes new formats for togetherness and mutual learning. Through workshops, events, publications, and consulting (+ karaoke!), we support others in their own processes of change. We believe that by transforming the arts, we can transform ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Recent activities include Groundwork, a recent research residency at Canal Projects, which was featured in the Financial Times; a series of reading groups, experimental group therapy sessions, and long-format public events at institutions and festivals such as Fusebox 2023 and Centre Pompidou/Villa Albertine’s Night of Ideas Jersey City; a Spring 2023 Teaching Tour to art schools, museums, and non-profits across the US to share collaborative tools for listening, feedback, and conflict; as well as ongoing creative consulting to individuals and institutions.
More information: dept-of-transformation.org
About Epicenter NYC
Epicenter started as a newsletter to help underserved communities, especially those at the epicenter of the epicenter, navigate Covid through journalism, an artist program, small business coverage and on-the-ground resources. Today, it is an award-winning multiplatform community journalism organization that also includes podcast and video content, and features small businesses, culture and things to do, artists profiles and exhibits, and coverage on issues that impact people's everyday life. Epicenter connects, informs and engages people IRL and digitally through the power of culture and community.
More information: www.epicenter-nyc.com
About The Performing Garage
The Performing Garage is a 110-seat street-level historic black box theater, located at 33 Wooster Street in Soho. The Performing Garage has been The Wooster Group’s permanent home and performance venue since its beginning and all of their work has been developed there. It was bought in the early 1970s when Soho was still an empty warehouse district being reinhabited by artists. Before the formation of The Wooster Group, The Performance Group, under the direction of Richard Schechner, developed and produced work at the Garage. From 1975-1980 the two groups shared the space. Prior to The Performance Group founding The Performing Garage, 33 Wooster Street was a metal stamping/flatware factory.
Partnering institutions