GHE20G0TH1K founder Venus X, NYC experimental rock originator Arto Lindsay, and Ratking member Sporting Life will perform at this summer’s You Are Here festival, taking place in a life size maze in Brooklyn. The Knockdown Center event space and multidisciplinary art duo Trouble will co-present the event, and it will take place from June 30 to July 4.
If you’re unclear what a festival in a maze looks like, let us give you an idea: it will be installed in one big warehouse-type space, and the maze’s walls will be constructed out of industrial twine. All the performers will play in one designated part of the space, just like a regular venue, although Trouble tells us they’re free to move around if they want. In order to get to your desired part of the room, you have to navigate the latticework corridors.
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Other artists to perform are Baltimore club rapper/chanter Abdu Ali, Tri Angle signee serpentwithfeet, Glacial Industries affiliate Sharp Veins, Qween Beat affiliate Quest?onmarc, and more.
Considering that hosting a festival in a maze is not exactly… self-explanatory, THUMP spoke to the duo via email to get some backstory on their motivations.
“Performance writ large is oft examined and scrutinized in the visual arts, theater, dance, poetry, and literary communities,” they said. “That said, musical performance adheres to alarming extent to the traditional 4th wall format: performer up here, audience down there. That idea of the maze is to utilize a sculptural installation as a tool to restructure the social ritual of musical performance. Not to be confrontational or unnecessarily difficult, but to playfully nudge folks to examine their assumptions about performance and community by engaging a very different take on those things.”
You Are Here festival was founded in 2010.
You Are Here Festival @ Knockdown Center 6/30 – 7/4 from Lawrence Mesich on Vimeo.
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