Image Credit: Courtesy of John Kelly

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. – What might happen if a performing arts center temporarily reimagined itself as an art museum? This fall, the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts presents The House Is Open, an inquisitive and playful pop-up installation and performance event that attempts to answer this question, examining the complex interplay between contemporary art and performance.

Performance has recently entered, and occasionally transformed, visual arts institutions, but performing arts centers have been comparatively unaffected by the art world’s embrace of live performance. From November 20 to 23, The House Is Open inverts the performer-in-a-museum paradigm by transforming the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts into a temporary art museum. Viewers are invited to experience the Center in a completely new way, discovering installations and performances in parts of the building not normally open to the public, and experiencing as many pieces as they wish over the weekend with a single admission pass. The house will truly be open.

Presented by Live Arts Bard (LAB), the Fisher Center’s residency and commissioning program, in collaboration with Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), The House Is Open features work by artists leading the development of hybrid practices that transcend conventional categories of theater, dance, performance, visual art, installation, music, and film. The exhibition includes:

Jack Ferver/Marc Swanson | Chambre (World Premiere / LAB Commission)

Choreographer, writer, and performer Jack Ferver and visual artist Marc Swanson MFA ’04 collaborate on a hybrid performance and art installation inspired by Jean Genet’s iconic play Les Bonnes (The Maids). Chambre is a sometimes farcical, sometimes savage, contemporary exploration of otherness, gender, celebrity, and the class divide.

Installation on view in LUMA Theater
during exhibition hours

Performances: Thursday, November 20 at 8 pm; Friday, November 21 at 4 pm; Saturday, November 22 at 7 pm; and Sunday, November 23 at 7:30 pm 

Ralph Lemon | Scaffold Room (New York Premiere / LAB Co-commission)

Acclaimed choreographer and curator Ralph Lemon melds performance, visual art, music, and text in his new work Scaffold Room, an inquisitive hybrid “lecture-performance-musical” that refracts ideas and images of black female personae in American pop and contemporary art culture.

Installation on view in Sosnoff Theater Backstage during exhibition hours

Performances: Friday, November 21 at 6 pm; Saturday, November 22 at 1:30 pm and 9 pm; and Sunday, November 23 at 5:30 pm

Jennifer Monson/iLAND | Live Dancing Archive

Jennifer Monson’s newest work is a visceral exploration of the dancing body as a physical archive of experience and place. Compiled from more than
a decade of dance-based environmental research, Live Dancing Archive draws from video documentation of Monson’s past performances in addition to improvised scores.

Installation on view on Sosnoff Theater Stage during exhibition hours

Performances: Friday, November 21 at 8 pm; Saturday, November 22 at 3:30 pm; and Sunday, November 23 at 3:30 pm 

John Kelly | Escape Artist Redux

While rehearsing a theater show based on the life of the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio, a stressed-out performer has a catastrophic trapeze accident. Stranded on a gurney in a hospital room with a broken neck, he escapes and finds refuge in the images that flood his mind—the sinners and saints, the prostitutes and gods—that populate Caravaggio’s paintings.

Installation on view in Resnick Studio during exhibition hours

Performances: Thursday, November 20 at 6 pm; Friday, November 21 at 10 pm; Saturday, November 22 at 5:30 pm; and Sunday, November 23 at 2 pm

Tad Beck | Double Document

Tad Beck's visual art works are exercises in reading the body in athletic, choreographic, and erotic contexts, often displacing movements and gestures from one of these arenas to another.  Double Document hybridizes the traditions of portraiture and performance documentation in a series of photographs that collapse multiple photographic and performative moments into a single image. The series includes images of Rashaun Mitchell, Vicky Schick, Silas Riener, K. J. Holmes, Miguel Gutierez, Neal Beasley, Michelle Boulé, Kyle Abraham, and Diane Maden, among others.

Installation on view in the LUMA Theater Lobby from October 15 until mid-January

Nature Theater of Oklahoma | Empire!

In a characteristically impossible-seeming project, Nature Theater of Oklahoma creates a video animation inspired by Andy Warhol’s 1964 silent, black-and-white film Empire. All eight hours of Warhol’s static shot of the Empire State Building will be recreated as an animation through a public project in which anyone can submit hand-drawn, index card-size images of the Empire State Building, which become the basis of the animation. The portion of the project completed to date will be on view, and viewers may contribute their own drawings.

Installation on view in the LUMA Theater pop-up café during exhibition hours

The House Is Open is organized by Gideon Lester, director of theater programs; Bob Bursey, senior producer; and Caleb Hammons, associate producer.

The House Is Open is the featured project of the third season of Live Arts Bard (LAB), the multidisciplinary commissioning and residency program of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. A laboratory for professional artists in theater, dance, and performance to test ideas and develop new projects, LAB invites a number of artists and ensembles to be in residence on Bard’s campus. Begun in 2012, past LAB resident artists include: Annie Dorsen, Miguel Gutierez, John Kelly, Joanna Kotze, Jack Ferver, Neil Gaiman, Aaron Landsman, Sarah Michelson, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Amanda Palmer, Geoff Sobelle, Nilaja Sun, and Robert Woodruff, among others.

EXHIBITION AND BOOKING DETAILS

Exhibition hours are:

Thursday, November 20 from 5–10 pm (FREE PREVIEW)

Friday, November 21 from 2–10 pm

Saturday, November 22 from noon – 10 pm

Sunday, November 23 from noon – 10 pm

Weekend Admission Passes: $30, $10 with any student ID (suitable for ages 18 and up)

Admission passes are valid for the duration of the exhibition and include admission to all performances, with reservations required for specific performance times.

Roundtrip bus service is available from New York City on Saturday, November 22 for $20. For details please see: http://fishercenter.bard.edu/visit/transportation/

Admission passes, reservations for specific performance times, and bus reservations may be made at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College is located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, situated on the east bank of the Hudson River in the beautiful Hudson Valley, about 90 miles north of New York City. Amtrak service is available from New York Penn Station to Rhinecliff, about 9 miles south of Annandale. Total travel time by train or car from New York City is less than two hours.

RELATED EVENTS

Colloquium: The House Is Open

Join Gideon Lester (director of theater programs, Fisher Center), Paul O’Neill (director of the graduate program, Bard CCS), and Lia Gangitano (founder, Participant Inc.; faculty member, CCS) in conversation with the artists featured in The House Is Open.

Wednesday, November 19 from 6:30-8 pm at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.

Free and open the to the public.

Artist Talk: Tad Beck with Bill Arning

Join The House Is Open artist Tad Beck and Bill Arning (director of the Contemporary Art Museum Houston) as they discuss Tad’s body of work and it’s relationship to performance, particularly in his Double Document series.


Saturday, November 22 from
12-1 p.m. in the LUMA Theater Lobby. Available to all weekend pass holders.

SCHEDULE BY DAY

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Artist Colloquium at 6:30 pm at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies

Thursday, November 20, 2014 (FREE PREVIEW)

Exhibition open and installations on view from 5–10 pm

John Kelly | Escape Artist Redux performance at 6 pm

Jack Ferver/Marc Swanson | Chambre performance at 8 pm

Friday, November 21, 2014

Exhibition open and installations on view from 2–10 pm

Jack Ferver/Marc Swanson | Chambre performance at 4 pm

Ralph Lemon | Scaffold Room performance at 6 pm

Jennifer Monson/iLAND | Live Dancing Archive performance at 8 pm

John Kelly | Escape Artist Redux performance at 10 pm

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Exhibition open and installations on view from noon – 10 pm

Ralph Lemon | Scaffold Room performance at 1:30 and 9 pm

Jennifer Monson/iLAND | Live Dancing Archive performance at 3:30 pm

John Kelly | Escape Artist Redux performance at 5:30 pm

Jack Ferver/Marc Swanson | Chambre performance at 7 pm

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Exhibition open and installations on view from noon – 10 pm

John Kelly | Escape Artist Redux performance at 2 pm

Jennifer Monson/iLAND | Live Dancing Archive performance at 3:30 pm

Ralph Lemon | Scaffold Room performance at 5:30 pm

Jack Ferver/Marc Swanson | Chambre performance at 7:30 pm

The exhibition and all performances take place at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, located at 60 Manor Avenue, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504. For travel directions, please see: http://fishercenter.bard.edu/visit/directions/

ABOUT THE RICHARD B. FISHER CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, designed by Frank Gehry, illustrates the College’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. The Center’s adventurous programs and world-class facilities provide an outstanding environment in which to create, perform, learn, and experience.

The mission of the Fisher Center is to bring leading artists to the Hudson Valley to engage with the public and the College; produce and present adventurous and in-depth programs, including new, rare, and undiscovered works; support the development of new work by artists at all stages of their careers; and provide a home for Bard student and faculty work in the performing arts.

FUNDING 

Live Arts Bard programs are made possible by the generous support of the members of the LAB Creative Council. Ralph Lemon and Jack Ferver received LAB Choreographic Fellowships, made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The presentation of Scaffold Room is made possible in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The House Is Open received support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Scaffold Room is coproduced by Cross Performance, Inc., and MAPP International Productions.

The Fisher Center’s Fall 2014 season is made possible in part through the generous support of the Board of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College and the Friends of the Fisher Center, as well as grants from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. 

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October 23, 2014