The Permeable Stage Performative Conference

Isabel Lewis; photo by Maria Baranova-Suzuki

Organized by Mette Ingvartsen
Performance Space New York, 2018

It was a bit jarring to walk into Performance Space New York on a Sunday afternoon and be cheerily welcomed by Mette Ingvartsen, given that less than 48 hours previously I had left the same space speechless and shattered by Ingvartsen herself. The Danish choreographer had performed her solo 21 pornographies, a brutal parade of references to sexualized violence from de Sade to Abu Ghraib. The work polarized my CMU cohort and sparked a heated discussion as we squeezed into a booth at Fish Bar to process what we had just seen. Now, we were back at PSNY and back in Ingvartsen’s hands for her conference The Permeable Stage—and in fact, her curation did provoke as much animated conversation as her performance.

Ingvartsen has organized a number of what she calls “performative conferences,” each bringing together artists, scholars, and thinkers across disciplines for a program of public performances, lectures, and conversations around a particular subject. The theme at PSNY was Reimagining the Social, focusing on how non-humans (plants, animals, algorithms, objects) exist alongside of us and how we might better incorporate them into our thinking about togetherness on the planet.

This topic is catnip to me, as is the format of going back to back from performance to lecture to interview to film. Engaging the brain, body, and senses in these different forms of engagement in rapid succession feels a bit like an intellectual spa treatment, the equivalent of following a stint in the sauna by plunging yourself into the cold pool. It not only highlights how performance itself serves as research, but makes scholarship into a communal activity. Artist Isabel Lewis got at the beauty of this synthesis in her Occasion, which combined elements of performance lecture, meditation, and lowkey house party. As she danced through the room offering her gathered guests sensory experiences from wafting scents to herbal ice pops, Lewis talked us through the seemingly opposite spaces of the academy and the nightclub, models of community which respectively value the brain and the body. What if we consider the garden, she proposed, as a less rigid model for being together, a place and a mode in which physical and intellectual knowledge are equally important, and all is connected by mutual care?

In addition to Lewis’s work, I was able to catch a head-spinningly dense but compelling lecture by Patricia T. Clough on computation and subjectivity, a donkey-starring short film by Romuald Karmakar, and two chatbots trained on the Chomsky/Foucault debate talking circles around each other in Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theater piece Hello Hi There. I made the choice to leave the day’s activities early to drive home to Pittsburgh, thus missing out on a talk by Che Gossett and a conversation with Carolee Schneemann—I regretted this choice almost immediately, even more so when Schneemann passed away less than six months later. I wish I had done the full day, yet even incomplete it was one of the most refreshing and stimulating formats I’ve experienced for being together in warm, embodied, intellectual and artistic community. More, more, more.