J'S THEATER: Again with Feeling: BOMB Magazine at MoMA PS1

Thursday, March 03, 2016

Again with Feeling: BOMB Magazine at MoMA PS1

On February 28, I had the pleasure of participating in Again With Feeling, a public conversation with poet and friend Tonya Foster that BOMB Magazine organized in conjunction with MoMA PS1's Sunday Series. We were one of 10 pairs who reprised our artist-to-artist conversation from BOMB, though instead of the long free-wheeling conversation we originally had up in Ithaca during Image Text Ithaca last summer, we received 10 minutes to chat. I think it went well; it was a joy to return to some of the themes of our discussion, and to be able to do so in a public venue.

Other conversing pairs, some of which unfolded more as interviews, included BOMB editor Betsy Sussler (subbing for Eric Bogosian) and the hilariously cantankerous former director and now filmmaker Richard Foreman; authors Christopher Sorrentino and Sam Lipsyte, who talked about newish work; visual artist duos Yuri Masnyj and Hope Gangloff, Alan Ruiz and Tom Burr, and David Humphrey and Nicole Eisenman; author Linda Yablonsky and Wooster Group director and performer Elizabeth LeCompte, who was reluctant to talk about herself and mainly talked about Foreman, who went first and then left; dancer Ralph Lemon and writer/performer James Hannaham; and musicians Justin Vivian Bond and Joy Episalla.

Capping things off, Ishmael Houston–Jones, whom I'd always hoped to see dance, engaged in an enthrallingly strange, ghostly duet with Miguel Gutierrez, who made the performance interactive, though with permission. There was also a lively acoustic music performance by Alan Licht. Many thanks to Ryan Chapman, Mónica de la Torre, and everyone else at BOMB and MoMA for inviting us to participate and making the event possible.