Performa 13

Derrick Adams Once upon a time…

• Saturday, November 9, 6:30 pm
• Saturday, November 9, 9:00 pm

Salon 94 MAP
FREE, RSVP recommended rsvp@calder.org

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Once upon a time…, a new performance by Derrick Adams commissioned by the Calder Foundation and hosted by Salon 94, draws inspiration from the Calder Foundation’s archives to inform a subject that Adams has long been interested in developing: how we engage and reinterpret overlooked histories. In this performance, Adams focuses on the American cultural phenomenon of schoolchildren learning to recite historical texts on stage. He employs teenagers to study and reinterpret three Harlem Renaissance-era poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, with their powerful internalizations dramatized in costume on a black-curtained stage as a rudimentary theatrical experience. Projected behind them will be three Calder drawings pulled from the Foundation’s archives, where Adams gleaned letters and sketches in search of Calder’s personal idiolect to engage with the artist’s process—resulting in an intergenerational, multidisciplinary dialogue. The performance will be accompanied by an original musical score conceived in collaboration with composer Philippe Treuille that reinterprets a dialogue on sound between Calder and his friend the composer Edgard Varèse.

RSVP recommended. 

For more information please visit www.calder.org/performa13