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Michael Portnoy
My work can be shoved into 2 basic categories: "strangergames" and “the other one.” "Strangergames," or "Relational Stalinism," (that’s Relational Aesthetics with a shifty iron fist, instead of a Thai spring roll), is the use of various performative scores and constraints in participatory sculptures, environments, and events. Informed by my background in theater and dance, and my weaning on the ideas of Fluxus, the Happenings, and Oulipo, these are chaotic play sites or suspended zones which enable strangers to immediately engage each other imaginatively, absurdly and improvisationally in a common pursuit. Strangergames have taken the form of: choreographed salons, the dissemination of a new set of rules for behavior in public spaces on a Warsaw city block, a "restaurant" where one bit a 10 course meal which popped out of the walls, a pataphysical research installation where interns and participants devised ways to complicate the production of lemonwater, "abstract gambling" tables and environments with ambiguous and continuously changing rules, drawing on gambling's roots in ritual and divination. These engagements use estranged language and movement, comedy and the unpredictable to needle the boundaries of social dynamics in search of an experimental intimacy. “The other one” is that other type of work I do which has something to do with constantly pulling the rug out from under things. When a lecture about jokes is a 17 member dance piece, scored to hyper-romantic orchestral music, and the jokes are really prose poems, or horror stories, or timing itself. When a sculpture is a proposal for a performance, but the performance sounds like a set-up which turns into a morality tale. When the shaman shows you his bald spot, the hole in his logic, but your soul still vibrates, blushes. When something is always something else, or isn’t even there. A voluptuous uncertainty? A humor-sublime?
Website: http://www.strangergames.com
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