Mashinka Firunts / Daniel Scott Snelson

In residence November 13-20, 2011

3B Development Series

Tickets 

ONE NIGHT ONLY: Sunday Nov 20th, 7:30pm – $7

“A ‘literary review’ premised on verbal embellishment…without sacrificing a genuine love for words and their power to effect and affect.”
– Jordan Hruska, Art in America

A verbal varieté strategizing the aesthetics of discourse, Semiospectacle stages sites of exceptional linguistic exchange. The poet’s theater becomes an academic lecture hall fronting as vaudeville house. Its players dispense with disciplinary demarcations, highlighting language-based practices across scholarship, poetics, digital cinema, and visual art performance. Co-curated by Mashinka Firunts and Danny Snelson.

James Hoff reads from the Argot Dictionary, a compendium of new colloquialisms and revised anachronisms. Alejandro Crawford performs a player piano installment of his video organ, the vonome, mixing digital aesthetics with the history of spectacular mechanics. Yelena Gluzman demonstrates her School for Salomés, performed by Amy Huggans, Danusia Roberts Trevino, Cecilia Lynn-Jacobs, Olivia Jorgensen, and Jeffrey Joe Nelson. Danny Snelson presents an ongoing cinema lecture “The Dark Cloud of Dr. Mabuse,” exploring haunted technology and criminal dispersion alongside Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler. Mashinka Firunts delivers micro-lectures on tactics of theatricalized linguistic exchange. Vaginal Davis’s performance Hippo Narcissus will be screened, a cantata wherein Davis portrays Theodor Adorno’s mother channeling 1930s opera diva Grace Moore. Intertitular tap by Gin Minsky of the Minsky Sisters.

The first installment of Semiospectacle was presented at Performance Space 122 in March 2010. For more information, please visit semiospectacle.com.

All proceeds go directly to artists.