Brooklyn

New Ideas Need Old Buildings: Adaptive Reuse and the Performing Arts at WSD2013

old-bldgs_PBH-lobby1Tues 10 Sept 16.30 – 18.00

The Willow Theatre

The appropriation of old buildings for the arts has produced some of the most inspiring and dynamic spaces for live performance in the world.  From Bochum to Brooklyn, old buildings have proven that they make ideal spaces for theatrical innovation. Adaptive reuse has also been recognized as a key component of sustainable development and green building. In this session, we’ll bring together three of the world’s foremost practitioners in adaptive reuse for live performance for a far-reaching discussion about this complex phenomenon.

Who should attend?

Open to all: especially directors, designers and architects.

Price: £6

BUY TICKETS

Key contributors

Katie Oman Moderator –Senior Consultant, Arts Consulting Group.

Jean-Guy Lecat - Director, Studio JGLecat.

Andy Hayles – Managing Partner, Charcoalblue

Jean Nicholson – General Manager, Birmingham Opera Company

New Ideas Need Old Buildings: Adaptive Reuse and the Performing Arts « World Stage Design 2013 World Stage Design 2013.

Sanitation is culture

talking with
Brooklyn Museum employee Peggy Johnson

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes: In New York last week, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist in residence since 1977 for the New York City Department of Sanitation, conducted a series of live interviews with Brooklyn Museum’s daily maintenance staff, window washers, floor sweepers, security guards, and told them what they do is “the first kind of culture”.

In her performance, which also included architects and city planners, she asked each person a series of questions: How do you personally survive? What do you need to do to keep going? What happens to your dreams and your freedom when you do the things you have to do to keep surviving? What keeps New York Cityalive? What does the city need to do to survive after Sandy?.

Ukeles told the workers, “Here’s the museum with all this stuff, and then there’s what you do. You are culture, and your work is culture. And the endless hours that will never be done, that’s what enable us to be in an institution like this. Mopping up the garbage from yesterday. It’s safe. And the things in here are taken care of. That’s culture.”

Full interview with Ukeles on Gallerist NY.
photo: Carole DeBeer, courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

h/t to ecoartscotland.net

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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Trash Talk: The Department of Sanitation’s Artist in Residence Is a Real Survivor

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

“Last week, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who is the first and, to date, only artist in residence in the history of the New York City Department of Sanitation (a title she has held since 1977), was speaking at the Brooklyn Museum’s daily staff roll call. She told the museum’s crew of maintenance workers—among them window washers, security guards and floor sweepers—that even though their work can seem boring and repetitive, what they do is “the first kind of culture.”

Continue reading on GalleristNY…

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.
It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

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Gardens Beyond Eden: Bio-aesthetics, Eco-Futurism, and Dystopia at dOCUMENTA (13) – The Brooklyn Rail

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

T J Demos’ review in Brooklyn Rail of the gardening and other ecological projects at dOCUMENTA.  He’s positive about the projects, but critical of dOCUMENTA’s lack of any overarching critical framework.

Gardens Beyond Eden: Bio-aesthetics, Eco-Futurism, and Dystopia at dOCUMENTA (13). 

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

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The Reverend Billy says OCCUPY and 350.ORG—You Come Down Here and Embrace!

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

This is the cover story in Brooklyn Rail…

On Henry Street just uptown from Foley Square in Manhattan, there is a church called Mariners’ Temple. One Sunday we were among hundreds of folks listening while Mother Henrietta Carter preached. She stood up there, white-robed, and gestured out across the assembled faithful. “We need to see some embracing today,” Mother Carter said, and then she explained that two families were blessed just recently with newborn babies, in the same week.

She boomed out: “I want you two families—come down here and embrace each other! We’ll wait! Oh, you come down here! I know you two families been quarreling about something, you don’t speak much anymore. Oh we all know about it. Now—You come down here and you embrace each other. You bring those babies with you!”

The two families slowly came to Mother Carter and embraced. They were in tears. People called out “Praise!”

Embrace

As you see from the title of my little sermon, I am asking the people from two movements, 350.org and Occupy Wall Street, to do the same.  Read on…

Also of interest a review of Nature, the new volume in The Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

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Superhero Clubhouse: the Call to Grow Theater – The Brooklyn Rail

…This type of question isn’t always asked, but for Superhero Clubhouse, it’s de rigeur.  Founded in 2007 by Jeremy Pickard, Superhero Clubhouse is a “society of theater artists engaged in making original plays and events about the natural world via a green and collaborative process.”  How they make their work is equally as important as the subject matter itself.  A rehearsal room populated with handheld devices may be a solution to printing multiple versions of a script, yet it is also a manner of developing work with more fluidity.  They’re measuring multiple efficiencies here as they constantly tackle large-scale issues: water pollution, mercury poisoning, ethical food production.  In the process, they’re also examining an issue that theater artists are only just starting to acknowledge: how the act of creating theater can be so inherently wasteful.  For Jeremy a play is “a way to realize or actualize the conversations we’re having about bigger issues.”

via Superhero Clubhouse: the Call to Grow Theater – The Brooklyn Rail.

LEED-Seeking Theater for a New Audience Breaks Ground on Dramatic Black Box Building in Brooklyn | Inhabitat New York City

Brooklyn’s budding cultural district will soon raise the curtain on a new classic theater. Just Last Friday, construction started on the Theater for a New Audience, a Hugh Hardy designed flexible theater created specifically for the performance of Shakespeare and classic drama. Cloaked in a dramatic black box exterior, the LEED Silver-seeking building will seat nearly 300 and be surrounded by a gorgeous public arts plaza, creating a complete cultural experience.

via LEED-Seeking Theater for a New Audience Breaks Ground on Dramatic Black Box Building in Brooklyn | Inhabitat New York City.

New York’s Waterpod; artists of the floating world

When Radical Nature opened, some critics bemoaned the fact that the exhibition was cloistered away from both the environment it discussed, and the audience that it deserved to reach. EXYZT’s wonderful Dalston Mill project was a clear answer to those critics

In New York, The Waterpod – pictured above – has been slowly circumnavigating Manhattan. Conceived by artists Mary Mattingly and Mira Hunter as a literal platform for art, it brings New Yorkers to the water that surrounds their island. Like Dalston Mill it provides not only a space for performaces, artworks and discussions, but it creates a triangulation between food, community and environment. This live-aboard ark grows at least some of its own food and includes its own henhouse.

For a taste of what it’s like to live and work aboard The Waterpod, try this NY Times article, which reveals that the floating pod was built from a variety of donated materials, including metal railings used in a Broadway production of Equus, and foliage print wallpaper recycled from the US soap As The World Turns.

It’s currently moored at Pier 5, Brooklyn Bridge Park but will be moving on to Staten Island after the 17th. Have any readers visited The Waterpod? Did it work?

Photo: thanks to BH301.A7

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology