Annie Dorsen transforms FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall into a planetarium in The Great Outdoors
French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 21-23, $35
Festival continues through October 15
212-355-6160
crossingthelinefestival.org
www.fiaf.org
Obie-winning, New York–based algorithmic performance artist Annie Dorsen often uses appropriated text in her pieces, drawing meaning out of an endless supply of information, logic, and language, and she’ll be doing so yet again in her latest work, The Great Outdoors, part of FIAF’s 2017 Crossing the Line Festival. She’s asked audiences to take the mic and recite snippets of famous and not-so-famous speeches in Spokaoke (CTL 2013), had actors use Shakespeare’s Hamlet as data in A Piece of Work (BAM Next Wave Festival 2013), and in Magical (Coil 2013) repurposed words and movement by Martha Rosler, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović, and Carolee Schneeman, with the help of choreographer Anne Juren. In The Great Outdoors, Dorsen, who also cocreated and directed Passing Strange, transforms FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall into an inflatable planetarium, where every star is like a human being currently online, a countless number of seemingly anonymous blips seeking and supplying content and making connections, primarily commenting on reddit. Of course, the title is more than ironic, as so many people experience the great outdoors from the comfort of their computers at home. Kaija Matiss will read text taken live off the internet by programmers Marcel Schwittlick and Miles Thompson; Sébastien Roux does the sound and music, while the video programming is by Ryan Holsopple, who designed the starshow with Dorsen. Dorsen has been building a rather impressive resume; her collaborators have also included DD Dorviller (Pièce Sans Paroles), Questlove (Shuffle Culture), Stew (Passing Strange), Laura Kaplan and Jessye Norman (Ask Your Mama), and ETHEL (Truckstop). The Great Outdoors runs September 21-23; CTL continues through October 15 with such other presentations as Faustin Linyekula / Studios Kabako’s In Search of Dinozord, Nora Chipaumire’s #PUNK, and Alessandro Sciarroni’s UNTITLED_I will be there when you die.