R&D Season: VOICE
Spring 2014
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
Organized by the New Museum’s Department of Education and Public Engagement, R&D (Research and Development) Seasons connect various projects across multiple platforms around a new organizing theme each fall and spring. The spring 2014 R&D Season theme is VOICE.
Beginning January 2014, this R&D Season leads an investigative examination of voice via a range of activities. Anchored by residencies with two artists—Jeanine Oleson and Brooke O’Harra—and introducing a new Seminar Series,the R&D Season mines voice for its multiple dimensions, including utterance, affective declaration, political speech, the destabilization of language, communication as agency, and cultural translation. Utilized as a means by which to consider such varied concepts and histories as the current state of opera, alternative modes of activism, and the role of conflict within contemporary theater, VOICE R&D Season components will present an array of rich, research-based speculations around objects, ideas, and artistic practices.
VOICE R&D Season program highlights:
Jeanine Oleson: Hear, Here
April 22–July 6
The New Museum hosts the first museum presentation of work by Jeanine Oleson. During a five-month-long residency, Oleson will develop a group of interrelated new works, constituting an exhibition titled Hear, Here, public programs, workshops, a publication, and an experimental opera. The set and objects for the experimental opera (to be staged in the New Museum’s Theater this June) will be present during the run of the exhibition, forming an impromptu stage set or catalyst for a series of informal programs, mediated by invited guests in the gallery space, leading up to the final performance. An exploration of different kinds of voices—from the musical voice of opera to political acts of speech—Oleson’s project both investigates language and points beyond it. Looking for alternative models, Hear, Here asks questions such as: How can we attune ourselves to each other? Where is the agency in language? What does it really mean to listen?
February 23: Sing, Yell, Tell (Panel)
June 13 & 14: Opera premiere
Additionally, guest music curator Cori Ellison (Dramaturg at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and previously at New York City Opera, 1997–2010) will collaborate with Oleson to produce a series of concerts focused on experimental operatic vocal performance.
Presentation support for Jeanine Oleson: Hear, Hear
Brooke O’Harra: I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in Directing or Nine Encounters Between Me and You
May 16–24
Brooke O’Harra’s I am Bleeding All Over the Place… is a protracted performance in the form of a series of studies on directing. The New Museum presents the first three of nine studies that comprise this two-year project. Each iteration takes a variety of forms: some will be clearly scripted, scored, and rehearsed to perfection, while others will be developed or literally “written” in front of an audience. This examination of the director’s role through different encounters argues that bodies are never neutral. I am Bleeding All Over the Place proposes a kind of theater where each person operates as both reader and maker, and where the potency of a performance happens in the experiential, emotional, and phenomenological gaps produced by encounters between bodies.
May 16: I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Are we in conflict?
May 17: I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Show me.
May 23: I am Bleeding All Over the Place: It’s personal.
May 24: Directing Panel with Brooke O’Harra
Presentation support for Brooke O’Harra: I am Bleeding All Over the Place: Studies in Directing or Nine Encounters Between Me and You
New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collections of Ideas
Classes: March 5–May 28; conference: June 6
Continuing its focus on sustained research and ideas in development, the Department of Education and Public Engagement introduces a new Seminar Series, which kicks off in March. Aligned with the R&D Season theme, VOICE, the inaugural Seminar will provide a platform for discussing and debating ideas as they emerge, in real time, and for developing scholarship directly referencing art’s place in culture. A group of ten to twelve participants from diverse backgrounds will meet regularly for twelve weeks to plan and implement a bibliography, as well as a public-facing conference on June 6 featuring leading figures whose work has shaped the topic of study.
More information, application, and support for New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collections of Ideas
Experimental Study Program
February 6–May 8
The New Museum’s Experimental Study Program (ESP) pairs youths (fifteen to twenty years old) with artists to collaborate on projects and research related to Season themes. Over several months, teens and New Museum staff will undergo an intensive exploration of VOICE as framed by Jeanine Oleson and Brooke O’Harra, including examining private and public forms of language and engaging students in activating performative components of both artists’ work.
Support for ESP
