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Event
Ying Liu: PLAYDATE
Saturday, April 6th at 2pm, multimedia artist and experimental hodgepodge-ist Ying Liu opens her 2019 residency with the premiere of PLAYDATE, a hyper-cellphone oriented performance combining theater and happenings, exploring themes of urban interconnectivity. The performance follows her neighborhood-wide theatrical workshop in Seattles Capitol Hill, YING OF THE HILL (presented by Northwest Film Forum), and the release of MAKE A FOUNTAIN, a book-length experimental report accompanying her three-episode play HANG OUT, that took place at Sara D. Roosevelt Park in Manhattans Chinatown.
PLAYDATE is an outdoor play in and about the Special Downtown Brooklyn District (DB) that documents a cast of roving players (documented by GoPro cameras) as they perform sequenced performative tasks which include dealing with local businesses, public facilities, and various contingencies. At 22 Boerum, the audience witnesses a projection of a screen mirroring the device of a lone cellphone performer that showcases the players activities through social media streams and GPS location tracking. Throughout, the cellphone performer runs their own personal and professional digital errands while intermittently checking in on the cast. Ying states: We live in a time where its possible to watch an entire feature film on a cellphone in broad daylight, looking down; she asks, how might this change how long-existing artistic forms, like soliloquies in theater, are presented today?
If life is propelled by some kind of drive and philosophy for survival, then my theater, a form that imitates life, has performers commit to a trajectory that is creatively conceived and sequenced. Featuring a cast of a dozen players found through personal connections, craigslist ads, street stands, and ISSUE's social media posts, the performers livestream to social media sporadically while engaging in and committing to their unique, sequenced actions throughout the neighborhood for about an hour and a half. They will set out from and return back to ISSUE. Attendees are encouraged to stay throughout the entire performance but should feel free to arrive and depart at any time.
As a whole Ying Lius residency explores the idea of "setting the audience free, physically," and probes what alternative viewing models could look like. Ying notes, In a traditional performance or cinema setting there's a structure that asks for audience investment and obligation (to see and hear), emotionally, empathetically and physically -- what she refers to as a FOUNTAIN model. In order to not get wet, the observer has a tendency to stay outside. As a viewer, I frequently find myself toggling between the splash and non-splash zones
PLAYDATE is developed as part of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Program 2018-19 (https://lmcc.net/) and ISSUEs 2019 Artist-In-Residence program.
Keith Connolly, CEO
Jack Skaggs, COO
Eli Coplan, CTO
Street Outreach: Troy Schipdam, Nicole Huang, Jesus Benavente and Peter Shapiro
Ying Liu is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist born and raised in a small island named Zhoushan in the East China Sea. Her evening-length, hybridized works often mix consumer technology such as VR, GoPro and GPS, and fuse mediums including theater, dance, video, and performance art with DIY props and an exuberant sense of play. The diverse, multi-generational casts of her projects range from professional ballet dancers, sociologists, house music DJs, psychotherapists, scientists and filmmakers sometimes all in the same performance. Highlighting the shifting, participatory nature of viewership, mediated in real time by everyday use of technology, her practice reveals how experimentation is most fruitful when it escapes predetermination. Poking at the traditional boundaries between performer and spectator, she stirs together contradictory forces of memory, spatiality, and the inherent friction of sociality. New Yorks Emily Harvey Foundation has presented her projects in numerous solo showings including performative screening (O Ppl Prefer) Techshting A(ny)way (2014), Dont Be Shy, Man! a hybrid show inspired by Stuart Shermans poetry (2014), and evening-length dance performance Now We Start from the Arm (2016). In summer 2017, she staged HANG OUT, a site-specific, three-episode play in Manhattan Chinatowns Sara D. Roosevelt Park. MAKE A FOUNTAIN, a 302-page catalog accompanying and documenting those performances, was released in April 2018. In August 2018, she led a 6-hour theatrical workshop, an extension of HANG OUT presented by the Northwest Film Forum, in and about Capitol Hill, Seattle, a changing neighborhood where the Forum is located. Recently, she was part of the two-person show Cooked Two Ways, with artist C. Spencer Yeh at gallery Chen's in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She is currently a resident artist at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council 2018-19 and at ISSUE Project Room 2019.
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LocationISSUE Project Room (View)
22 Boerum Place
Brooklyn, NY 11201
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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