Every two years the nonprofit Performa Biennial commissions a global mix of established and up-and-coming visual artists to mount live spectacles all over New York City. Performa plans to announce this week that the eight premieres in this fall’s edition, Nov. 1-23, will include a musical written by the French artist Camille Henrot, whose oversize bronze children’s toys are on display through April 12 in Chelsea at Hauser & Wirth, in addition to a theatrical interpretation of a 1923 meeting between two trailblazing figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke and Claude McKay, as imagined by the Los Angeles artist and writer Aria Dean.
Henrot’s musical will feature anthropomorphic animals and nod to commedia dell’arte; Dean’s performance will use a virtual reconstruction of Tiergarten Park in Berlin.
In addition to performing, the New York City-based video artist Diane Severin Nguyen is planning to cut an album with a new band, and Ayoung Kim, coming in from Seoul, will use close-quarters martial arts choreography to examine female relationships. The Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury will combine sculpture, movement and sound in a series of tableaux vivants, and Tau Lewis, the Brooklyn-based artist, will draw inspiration from well-loved music for her first live performance.
Representing Lithuania for this year’s “pavilion without walls” will be the artist and musician Lina Lapelyte, who staged “Sun & Sea,” a performance-opera about climate change on an artificial beach at the Venice Biennale in 2019. In New York she’ll have a group of middle and high school students doing animal imitations. Performa also plans to announce that the Lithuanian duo Pakui Hardware, known for exploring the intersection of technology and the human body, will stage an artificial intelligence-led “therapy session structured as a Classical Greek drama.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/arts/design/performa-biennial-announces-new-commissions-henrot.html
