Performance Art at the BAC

YCBA explores performance art in gallery exhibition – Hilary Faxon – Yale Daily News – October 28, 2008

“The Yale Center for British Art will integrate performance art into its galleries this week with the a new work by the British playwright Tim Crouch. England, the first show in the World Performance Project fall season, explores themes of art, medicine and wealth in an unconventional two-man show, the first half of which invites audience members to stand in the YCBA’s famous J.M.W. Turner collection as the actors respond to the art on the walls.”

Q&A: Tim Crouch discusses his professional development – Hilary Faxon – Yale Daily News – October 28, 2008

“…Theater doesn’t need ‘a Theater’ in order to be theater. It is created through a relationship with an audience, a relationship between agency and reception, between action and reaction, between an aesthetic act and a critical witness to that act. This relationship can happen anywhere. We have become lazy in our architectural notions of theater with the need to place the audience in the dark, in a passive configuration. All I’m doing with England is taking these ideas for a walk — literally as the audience is guided around the gallery. ENGLAND is two acts, however. In the second, the more traditional theater configuration is reasserted. The audience sits and faces forward, engaging with an alternative reality. So the two models are presented, but ‘theater’ is in both of them.”

Upcoming events w/Tim Crouch:

OCTOBER 30, 2008 AT 4:00 PM – Trumbull College – MASTER’S TEA WITH TIM CROUCH
OCTOBER 30, 2008 AT 6:30 PM – Yale Center for British Art – Performance – ENGLAND – Tim Crouch
OCTOBER 30, 2008 AT 8:30 PM – Yale Center for British Art – Performance – ENGLAND – Tim Crouch

Posted by: Tanya

Would you catch this woman?

Lilly McElroy is a performance artist who literally throws herself at men. She enters bars and asks random men whether she can jump on them. If they say yes she does so and has a friend take a picture. Check out the photo collection on her website entitled “I Throw Myself At Men.”

From the Chicago Reader: She Throws Herself at Men: Lilly McElroy rethinks the desperate woman. By Kelly McClure, March 20, 2008

“She’s thrown herself at about 30 guys now, and sometimes she’ll do two or three in a night. ‘There’s no way to stereotype who will say yes,’ she says. ‘I’ve thrown myself at guys who look like they’ve gotta be at least 21 because they’re at a bar, to guys that are in their 50s and 60s.’… The man’s role is simple. ‘I tell them to make sure not to bend their knees,’ McElroy says. ‘They have the option to catch me or not to catch me. I would say 80 percent catch me, and the rest just like to stand there and let me bounce off them.’ The scene is replayed several times for the camera. Only once has there been a mishap: ‘I fell and wrenched my neck and couldn’t move it for days.’”

Posted by: Tanya