Early List of Performers and More!
You Are Here (AKA The Maze) is a performance festival in a sculptural maze taking place at Williamsburg's Death By Audio from September 10 - October 2, 2009. Emphasizing the sprawling and interconnected nature of New York's underground, a trip through the maze offers a peak inside NYC's diy art/music scene. A meditation on passage and desire, You Are Here engulfs the space and presents beckoning inhabitants, dead ends, and uplifting epitaphs. Medium and genre vary and overlapping and simultaneous performances are frequent, each performer establishing a different corner or dead end as his or hers. Participating artists in the 3-week festival include Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities, Calvin Johnson, The Coathangers, Zs, Excepter, Mick Barr, Effi Briest, Extra Life, Katie Eastburn (of Young People), Stars Like Fleas, Mike Pride, Dan Friel, Ninjasonik, Vaz, Pygmy Shrews, Nine 11 Thesaurus and many many others.
A full performance schedule will be announced on 8/12/09 but should be used only as a loose guide. You Are Here subverts prefab expectations for both audiences and performers—there is no prescribed order, start time or end time, duration, location of performance, relation of audience to performers, and so on. All of the participating artists have been asked to create something site-specific since the performances will, in fact, take place within the maze. Audiences will be asked only to expect something unusual.
The anti-festival festival OR why this festival is different from all other festivals
You Are Here was first presented by Trouble at Chashama's Visual Arts Space in Midtown Manhattan. This year’s maze returns to Brooklyn and is a real for us by us type of affair. You Are Here is a festival drawn from within the scene, not the work of corporate sponsored parties wishing to develop markets. No one gets free shoes or gift bags full of stuff and the festival doesn’t push any specific beverage or brand. This festival also won't fly people in from all over and make a big super-festival. You Are Here is a local affair, mostly local bands will play, and many of them have personal and ongoing relationships with each other and with Trouble. You Are Here is about Brooklyn and about the diy scene in New York in general. It’s about activism and about relationships and about immediacy and not least about a community that, perhaps in spite of the internet, still exists on a local level.
More about TROUBLE (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris)
You Are Here is also about domesticity in several senses, not least of which is the fact that the artists Trouble (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris) are in fact a married couple with a child and a home in Bushwick which also houses both of their studios. As any one who is an artist knows, your relationship is either part of your creative life or it’s competing with it. Trouble plants themselves firmly in the first category with their work together on the maze. Together, they are devoted to creating extreme environments that have no exterior, public art both condoned and illegal, and other kinds of visual/sound art intended to be used for some purpose. Their work is about community, spirituality, politics, craft, and beauty. Outreach is a part of all of their projects, as is what they call “in-reach”: designing events that strengthen the ties within the DIY art community and the art world as a whole. The inspiration behind the imagery in this year's Maze project includes "the six realms" from Tibetan Buddhism and other elements of Buddhist cosmological theory.
Other partners in this project include Death By Audio, Entertainment for Everyone, Panache Booking, Social Registry, and Build It Green.
For more information, visit:
www.myspace.com/youarehere
A full performance schedule will be announced on 8/12/09 but should be used only as a loose guide. You Are Here subverts prefab expectations for both audiences and performers—there is no prescribed order, start time or end time, duration, location of performance, relation of audience to performers, and so on. All of the participating artists have been asked to create something site-specific since the performances will, in fact, take place within the maze. Audiences will be asked only to expect something unusual.
The anti-festival festival OR why this festival is different from all other festivals
You Are Here was first presented by Trouble at Chashama's Visual Arts Space in Midtown Manhattan. This year’s maze returns to Brooklyn and is a real for us by us type of affair. You Are Here is a festival drawn from within the scene, not the work of corporate sponsored parties wishing to develop markets. No one gets free shoes or gift bags full of stuff and the festival doesn’t push any specific beverage or brand. This festival also won't fly people in from all over and make a big super-festival. You Are Here is a local affair, mostly local bands will play, and many of them have personal and ongoing relationships with each other and with Trouble. You Are Here is about Brooklyn and about the diy scene in New York in general. It’s about activism and about relationships and about immediacy and not least about a community that, perhaps in spite of the internet, still exists on a local level.
More about TROUBLE (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris)
You Are Here is also about domesticity in several senses, not least of which is the fact that the artists Trouble (Sam Hillmer and Laura Paris) are in fact a married couple with a child and a home in Bushwick which also houses both of their studios. As any one who is an artist knows, your relationship is either part of your creative life or it’s competing with it. Trouble plants themselves firmly in the first category with their work together on the maze. Together, they are devoted to creating extreme environments that have no exterior, public art both condoned and illegal, and other kinds of visual/sound art intended to be used for some purpose. Their work is about community, spirituality, politics, craft, and beauty. Outreach is a part of all of their projects, as is what they call “in-reach”: designing events that strengthen the ties within the DIY art community and the art world as a whole. The inspiration behind the imagery in this year's Maze project includes "the six realms" from Tibetan Buddhism and other elements of Buddhist cosmological theory.
“Whether you are a big deal or a small deal, there is always some type of deal going on” - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Other partners in this project include Death By Audio, Entertainment for Everyone, Panache Booking, Social Registry, and Build It Green.
For more information, visit:
www.myspace.com/youarehere
