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| SPARTACUS CHETWYND Plumbing pipe ...1...2...3:Props Unplugged May 21–25 Click here to download a zine created by Spartacus for the performance Click Here to see Photos of the Event TUESDAY MAY 22 2PM-4PM WEDNESDAY MAY 23 THURSDAY MAY 24 12PM 3PM-5PM FRIDAY MAY 25 Spartacus Chetwynd, with a team of four nomadic players from England, travel from Manhattan to Coney Island, over a period of five days, creating and documenting improvisational interventions along the way. Spartacus Chetwynd (born 1973), previously known as Lali Chetwynd, creates paintings and large-scale collaborative performance works that explore notions of the grotesque using humor and references to cultural icons. Recreating seminal moments in cinema, art, literature, and performance, the presentations are deliberately amateurish in tone and style, and combine elements of fantasy, props, and found objects. The artist has exhibited in Video Cocktail, Tate Modern, London, England, 2006; Metropolis Rise: New Art from London, temporarycontemporary, London, England, 2006; Tate Triennial 2006 – New British Art, London, England, 2006; London in Zurich, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, 2005; Beck’s Futures 2005, CCA – Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland, 2005; Think & Wonder, Victoria and Albert Museum; London, England, 2005; White Columns, 2005 and 2007; and more. The artist was also nominated for the 2005 Times/South Bank Show breakthrough award. For this NYC performance, Spartacus will be attempting to combat, take on and respond to the funfair architecture of Coney Island and the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Each member of the troupe takes his or her turn at leading the improvised activity at key points of the route. Spartacus and the troupe plan to walk towards Coney Island from Manhattan King Kong, early Disney movie, Charlie Chaplins depiction of immigration to America, Rem Koolhaus’s publication Delirious New York, and 'walking backwards'/corprol mime and Soylent Green. As with Chetwynd’s previous performance The Walk to Dover (2005) - in which she emulated the narrative from Charles Dickens' semi-autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, and led a group of walkers from London to Dover – she again turns her back on the city and heads to the coast. Employing the methodologies of Brechtian theater in the round and the traveling theater of Shakespearean England, along with a knowing nod towards MTV Unplugged, the collective will stage unrehearsed performances related to key cultural referents related to the city from King Kong (1933), Soylent Green (1973), Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) to the work of blind street musician, composer and poet Moondog (1916 – 1999). Frieze Magazine - Read about Spartacus in the recent Frieze Magazine review 1. To what extent is your project subject to a "built environment"? 2. Is your project at all a reaction to work that has come before it; for example, historical interventions in public places? 3. In terms of audience do you see your work as either 1:1 or 1 to infinite? Or, possibly, both? 4. Is there an attempt to compete with the city or create a competing spectacle within a city? 5. Similarly, how does the city frame your project? 6. What's specific about this project in this place, NYC? |