The New York City performance biennial returns next month with new commissions by artists including Ayoung kim, Pakui Hardware and Aria Dean
This November, New York City becomes the epicenter of live performance as Performa Biennial unveils a new slate commissions for the 2025 edition including new works by Diane Severin Nguyen, Lina Lapelytė, Tau Lewis, Ayoung Kim, Pakui Hardware, Aria Dean and Sylvie Fleury.
Diane Severin Nguyen remixes the legacy of American protest music by introducing lyrics and instrumentation from contemporary pop songs. Working alongside composer Laszlo Horvath and a band of ten performers, her piece considers how these ballads persist not only as symbols of political conviction, but as unstable artefacts that obscure historical records and shape collective memories of conflict.
For The Speech (NYC), Lina Lapelytė, who won the Golden Lion for her work Sun & Sea presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale, brings together a cast of 270 children. Throughout the work, they shift from words to primal sounds – coos, cries, barks, howls and roars – revisiting a pre-language realm where communication is raw and detached from fixed meaning.
Tau Lewis will present her first live performance in the neo-gothic Harlem Parish, reimagining the ancient Sumerian epic The Descent of Inanna. Acclaimed vocalists Gelsey Bell, Alicia Hall Moran and Justin Hicks perform as Inanna, Ereshkigal and the three father figures, with composer and vocalist Lyra Pramuk as narrator. Pramuk has also composed an original score – interweaving composition and improvisation – to be performed live with Eli Keszler (percussion) and Kevin Sun (saxophone).
In her first-ever live motion-capture performance, Seoul-based artist Ayoung Kim boldly weaves speculative fiction, martial arts, stunt choreography and cutting-edge motion-capture technologies. The performance centers on two martial arts-trained performers, choreographed by celebrated Squid Game stunt performer Cha-i Kim, whose movements are captured and transformed into a range of dazzling digital avatars.
Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda, working together as Pakui Hardware, explore the evolving relationship between technology and the human body in their experimental opera, Spores. A protagonist speaks with an AI therapist as a community choir – guided by Vaidas Bartušas – acts as a collective voice of reason and myth. An electronic score by Miša Skalskis accompanies the dialogue, with sculptural elements by the artists integrated into the set.
Set in Berlin’s Tiergarten shortly after World War I, The Color Scheme by Aria Dean imagines a dialogue between two Black American expatriates – the Poet (played by Nile Harris) and the Philosopher (by Zaid Arshad) – as their date in the park morphs into a broader meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and the nascent political movements of the twentieth century. In this work, the historical space of the Tiergarten is doubly replicated: first through a series of fabricated stage elements, and again through a virtual set created by Filip Kostic in Unreal Engine.
Sylvie Fleury presents a new interdisciplinary installation, interweaving performance, sculpture, sound and music in a live exhibition. Fleury takes the history of action-based performance, including Fluxus and Happenings, as a point of departure to reimagine a series of scores with her own inimitable twist on gender roles, serving as inspiration for a performance combining action, objects and sound. Performers will wear costumes designed by Chris Peters.
