Performance Space 122 to Present the 2018 Coil Festival
(© Zan Wimberley)
Performance Space 122 will return to its newly remodeled home in the East Village, under the leadership of new executive artistic director Jenny Schlenzka, after nearly six years presenting new works in partnership with venues across New York City. The institution will welcome the public with its 2018 Coil Festival (January 10-February 4, 2018). P.S. 122 will then offer a series of performances focused on the East Village itself (including the venue's own iconic history), reanchoring the organization in the former public school building.
The 13th annual Coil Festival will include works from Heather Kravas, David Thomson, Dean Moss, Dane Terry, Angela Goh, and Atlanta Eke. Seattle-based choreographer Heather Kravas returns to the festival with visions of beauty, a dance that evokes questions about collectivity (January 10-13). Australian dancer-artist Atlanta Eke's Body of Work (January 10 and 11) poses the question, "What is contemporary?" Dane Terry returns to P.S. 122 with Jupiter's Lifeless Moons, a performance that intermixes storytelling, music, and theater, with Terry recounting surreal and foreboding stories from a bizarre zoo-working stint in Cleveland (January 12-17). Sydney-based dancer-performance artist Angela Goh performs Desert Body Creep, which, per the artist, "feasts on the corpse of a post-post everything world" (January 16 and 17).
Dean Moss and his company Gametophyte Inc.'s interdisciplinary Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant-based performance, Petra, follows, transforming the themes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s subversive 1972 melodrama into a wry critique of America’s diversity discourse (January 23-27). The festival concludes with the world premiere of David Thomson's he his own mythical beast, which uses a variety of literary and cinematic influences, as well as a character modeled after Sarah Baartman, to examine race within a postmodern society (January 31-February 4).
