Performance Space New York has announced they are presenting artist, composer, and choreographer Richard Kennedy’s Hybrid Peasant from Jan. 11 – 13 at 8:30 p.m.
Combining opera, dance theater, poetry, sketch, and slapstick comedy to create its speculative hyper-reality, Hybrid Peasant, a three-act performance, is another explosive disruption of opera’s formalism from the interdisciplinary artist with a long history of engaging and subverting the classical. It delves deep into the landscape of the “Nightmerican dream,” experienced through the lives of “the housed citizens of Hirth.”
The story unfolds in an exaggerated past-future version of Richard Kennedy’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio. With references and points of departure ranging from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to SNL’s Weekend Update, the artist shapes a funhouse portrait of contemporary America’s polarized realities. A call to action, Hybrid Peasant urges us to ascend collectively by nourishing each other, forging a path toward liberation.
Richard Kennedy’s multidisciplinary practice is interested in relationships and navigating sexuality as it occurs at the intersection of class, race, and gender. Considering opera through a language of the African American experience, Kennedy disrupts the tradition of Western theatre to generate new participatory modes of viewership.
This piece is really about the hybrid; an access to high and low has produced a sense, in the opera world, of both access from my experiences and training and career, while also being treated as a peasant. I want to continue to explore opera through this hybrid balance to call more attention to the ways we troll ourselves as a society—to acknowledge the past in the present, and question if this is what we want our future to be.
Richard Kennedy
Over the last 40 years, Performance Space has been propelling cultural, theoretical, and political discourse forward. Founded in 1980, it became a haven for many queen and radical voices. Their focus has been not just on presenting boundary-breaking work but on restructuring their organization towards prioritizing equity and access. Qorks that have dissolved the borders of performance art, dance, theater, music, visual art, poetry and prose, ritual, nightlife, food, film, and technology are presented here.
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