genesis, no!
2007, 2008
Performers: Natalie Agee, Carmine Covelli, Neal Medlyn, David Neumann, Adrienne Truscott (with Io Perl-Strahan)
Photo by Paula Court for New York Times
This is piece was originally commissioned by PS122 in 2007 and remounted by Dance Theater Workshop in 2008 as part of then Artistic Director Carla Peterson's deeper curatorial commitment to remounting historically important and significant recent contemporary works. In Genesis, No! the performance and performers honor artifacts, languages, history and pseudo-history as they are assigned, acknowledged, discarded and/or made ready for presentation, preservation and historical inaccuracy in their culturally appropriate or inappropriate institutions - it is 'partly a rumination, both poignant and wildly funny, on what societies choose to preserve' (NY Times). As a way to quote this intention, the set for the DTW iteration of this piece is the iconic second floor theater of PS122 built to scale inside DTW, representing the first layer of inquiry in to terms like ‘artifact’. (Update: Significantly, neither of these iconic spaces for experimental dance, performance and theater physically exists in the same iteration or at all in the current landscape of performance venues in NYC, thus making this piece and set a meta-performative artifact in itself). The piece aimed to reassemble the world from the beginning of time until the most recent 5 minutes of existence over the course of 7 anti-biblical days compressed in to 1 nonlinear hour in NYC.
"This show basically re-creates evolution and the history of humanity from primordial soup to hominid to Soho in just under an hour." - CULTUREBOT
