The Black Sheep: Performancy, by Esther Neff: Thursday, March 13, 2014, 7 p.m.

On Thursday, March 13, at 7 p.m. Counterpath hosted a performance by The Black Sheep of Esther Neff’s piece PERFORMANCY: social experiments defined by absence.

PERFORMANCY: social experiments defined by absence is part performance, part workshop, and part lecture, a theatrical text and score for collective actions outlining and practicing cognitive framing processes which analyze and complicate social learning and individual identity.

PERFORMANCY: social experiments defined by absence is part of a body of work that exists as a methodology and as a two-year process of live operations. Beginning with the perspective that human social practices are ‘performed’, as public expressions and presentations of the self, PERFORMANCY draws on methodological ‘performative turns” in the humanities and social sciences, problematizing representation and promoting metaphysical sensation through the use of objects, language, and group action. PERFORMANCY seeks to frame social construction as a creative act, one that implicates each participant in any social situation, self-mediating its own hierarchies, identifications, and indices of experience. Ultimately, the performance practices framing itself as an act, researching the concrete making of artistic decisions across situational spheres.

Esther Neff is the founder of Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL). She is a performance artist, writer, sculptor, theorist, and curator. Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) is not bounded by discipline or field, collecting around processes, theorizing social systems, building ideological structures, and parsing modes of production and epistemic geneologies via actions, relational constructs, images, noise, and objects. Past projects have included a durational diner, a silviculture museum, video and film, full-length operas, workshops, solo and duo actions, conferences, concerts, gallery exhibitions, and works of constructional institutional critique like the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival (BIPAF), and the ongoing monthly PERFORMANCY FORUM. PPL is also a performance space in Brooklyn, NY. www.panoplylab.org/estherneff

About  the Choreographer and Performers:

Ye Taik is a New York-based performing artist and independent curator of multidisciplinary art and media projects. He has been officially invited to participate in the project, ” Wake up and take some sleeping pills with a cup of roasted coffee” in Garage Performing Arts Center, Athens, Greece in this summer and his short film ” Nut and Butter” will be premier at the Crisis Art Festival, Arezzo, Italy in 2014. His current work includes “Auteur : My personal life is not for Sale,” mentored by Barbara Dilley in Boulder, and a collaboration with the University of California – Irvine, as part of the”Virtual Venues” project. Additional works have been archived with the Library of Congress and previous works have premiered in New York, Berlin, Boulder, Toronto, and elsewhere. Taik’s practice is influenced by the fusion of abstract expressionistic dance and is immersed in Eastern and Western philosophy. He is the artistic director of “the Blacksheep Collective.”
Geoff Bylina is a squatter, thinker, writer, performer, anarchist and organizer (among other things) currently finding home in Denver, CO.  Much of his work concerns structures of thinking, (de/con)struction of identity,understanding the architecture of oppression, the role of language in liberation, the city and the body. He runs a small press, Dig It! Press, publishing non-fiction and avant-garde literature, exploring the relationships between community, performance, literature and action toward liberation. He is a member of ” the Blacksheep Collective.”

The Blacksheep artists also collaborate with musician Benjamin Bentele.