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My Barbarian, illustration from “The Audience is Always Right,” Pastelegram print annual no. 5 (2015): 58. Courtesy the artists
Exhibition
My Barbarian. The Audience is Always Right
28 Sep 2016 – 8 Jan 2017
Regular hours
- Wednesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 11:00 – 21:00
- Friday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
Address
- 235 Bowery
- New York
New York - NY 10002
- United States
Travel Information
- From the East Side of Manhattan Take the downtown 6 train to Spring Street. Exit the station and walk one block north on Lafayette Street to Prince Street. Turn right and proceed until Prince Street ends four blocks later at Bowery. From the West Side of Manhattan Take the downtown N or R train to Prince Street. Exit the station and proceed east on Prince Street for six blocks to Bowery. You may also take the downtown D or F train to Broadway/ Lafayette. Walk three blocks east to Bowery and turn right two blocks to Prince Street. From Brooklyn Take the Manhattan-bound F train to 2nd Avenue. Exit at Houston Street and walk one block west to Bowery. Turn left, and proceed two blocks south to Prince Street. From Queens Take the Manhattan-bound F train to 2nd Avenue. Exit at Houston Street and walk one block west to Bowery. Turn left, and proceed two blocks south to Prince Street.
Working at the intersection of theater, visual arts, and critical practice, the collective My Barbarian uses performance to theatricalize past and present problems and imagine ways of being together.
About
The group’s New Museum exhibition and residency, “The Audience is Always Right,” are organized as part of the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s R&D Season: DEMOCRACY.
The residency will include a series of workshops, performances, and public programs that will culminate the eight-year international tour of My Barbarian’s project the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT). The performances and workshops will bring together performers and artists from different backgrounds and cultural sites—including choreographers, actors, musicians, and visual artists from Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas—to collectively consider current political situations near and far. The title of the exhibition and related residency takes on a critical and ironic undertone in this dangerous moment when politics are more hyperbolic and spectacle-driven than ever before: “The Audience is Always Right.” Except, of course, when they are wrong.
Composed of five techniques—Estrangement, Indistinction, Suspension of Beliefs, Mandate to Participate, and Inspirational Critique—the PoLAAT responds to historic theatrical models that attempted to create social change, including Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s antiteater, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre. The project addresses these and other methods, often buried or overlooked, of critical and revolutionary theater from the 1960s and later, while situating its own enactment in (and against) the seemingly antirevolutionary contemporary moment. The PoLAAT occupies a space between memory and rehearsal, joke and laugh, and commentary and critique. It is the theater that happens after an experience but before action is taken. It is a rehearsal.
After developing the PoLAAT during a residency at the New Museum in 2008, My Barbarian initiated a series of PoLAAT performances in international contexts at various host venues, including Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Egypt, and Galeria Civica in Trento, Italy, which are both now defunct. In each iteration, groups of local participants were brought together for a workshop period that often involved the translation and transformation of the PoLAAT’s five guiding principles through exercises, songs, and choreography, followed by a public performance for a local audience. For “The Audience is Always Right,” My Barbarian will bring the PoLAAT back to the New Museum, reuniting a select group of former participants from previous incarnations of the project for a new series of performances and workshops. The exhibition will illustrate the eight-year history of the PoLAAT in an installation that will document its various performances and many participants—professional and amateur alike—by means of an archive of ephemera and props, a sixty-minute single-channel video, and a large-scale mural that nods to strategies utilized by the visionary Chicano art collective Asco. This installation will both document and serve as a backdrop for the demonstrations and participatory lectures during the PoLAAT workshops held throughout the run of the exhibition.
