Interview: How PS122 Is Going Global
by Alexis ClementsPage 2 of 6
What does that mean for you, when you say that there's mobility built in? It means that projects that we see [in Europe, Asia, and Latin America] are co-produced by five different presenters. They do residencies to develop the work, then they're presented by each co-producer.
There's also a sense for me that the work being made here is divorced from the context of the rest of the world. The work is made by reference to other New York artists not by reference to what is happening in Brussels right now or Buenos Aires or Shanghai.
What about this obsession lately within the field around the idea of community—the idea that theater is local or the idea of entrenching within a certain community in order to derive some kind of story or performance piece from that experience. I feel like, especially within the New York community, there's a lot of dialogue around those ideas.
It's something that we make mistakes about a lot, because the conversations that I have about my work, I have with my peers, not with their audiences or even my own audiences. So there's a danger that we're talking about the work in the context of our peer group, not in the context of our immediate audience. The other thing that I think is mistaken about a lot of that conversation about community is that it assumes that the only people affected by the theater-making process and performance creation are the people who see it. In fact, companies like Rimini Protokoll and even Forced Entertainment and others that I can't think of right off the top of my head—they've actually engaged with the idea of community in the construction of their work without ever dumbing it down to make it for a social benefit. They make work that is rigorous and full of integrity.
Getting back to your motivation for creating PS122 Global, what are the other reasons you wanted to pursue this?
It's also about providing opportunities for people. I mean, there's so much work, especially in dance, that's done for four nights and then it goes away and it's never seen again. Now sometimes that should happen. And sometimes it just needs to be seen.
Also, by virtue of not being from here, and from having been in Europe before this, I have an addiction to aircraft travel and have a pretty good international network, so one of my missions has been to attempt to be a tireless advocate for work to happen and to extend the support that we give, not just to a show, but to an artist's career. Because I think by doing that we generate better work, and if we generate better work, we develop our audience and we increase the resources that are available for the work, which means that the work is better, it's a lovely good snowballing effect.
Related Locations
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Performance Space 122 (P.S. 122)
- 150 First Ave., at 9th St (map)
- East Village
- 212-228-4249
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