Performance : Community Debrief

Jamie McMurry and kids at Perform Chinatown. Photo: Christy Roberts.

Yesterday, I organized a panel discussion on recent performance art events for KCHUNG Radio. The participants were John Burtle, Dino Dinco, Jennifer Doyle, Dawn Kasper, Jamie McMurry, Oscar Santos, and John Tain, comprising a mix of artists, event organizers, writers, and scholars, all with a special interest in performance art. It was a dream team of performance commentators and our discussion ranged across a spectrum of topics, including the recent Perform Chinatown and Confusion Is Sex #3 events, the challenge of organizing large-scale site-specific performance events, who the audience is, the distinction between theater and performance art, masking and anonymity, how money changes things, and individual performance experiences both near and far.

You can now listen to an archive of the lively 2-hour discussion at the KCHUNG website. (The opening tracks, which we totally forgot to ID, are performance works by Renée van Trier, made especially for KCHUNG Radio.) I’m happy to say we got lots of highly engaged audience participation via text, chatwing, and Facebook. It’s clear that there is a strong interest in the community for these shared “debriefings,” and I am currently at work on making this a regular thing, so stay tuned!