Panoply Performance Lab
Any Size Mirror is a Dictator,” an opera - workshop performance
Brian McCorkle and Esther Neff have been collaborating as “Panoply Performance Laboratory” or “PPL” for the past 6 years on work that combines conceptual music, sculpture, and performance art. Each site-and-context-specific performance theorizes compositional and constructive systems, ideological structures, modes of production, and epistemic geneologies via precise, viscereal actions. PPL perform barefoot, employing extended vocal techniques, using home-made instruments of sound and labor, manipulating sculptural objects stuffed with analog electronics, and operating crude wood/rope/plastic contraptions. Often participatory and created in the moment with a collaborating audience, PPL performances swing violently between the hyper-structural and the indeterminate, dealing with causation, reaction, conception, cognition, and active human practices of construction and reality-projection.
McCorkle and Neff split their practice by scale: on one hand, they create self-contained performance art “pieces,” durational performances, and actions for galleries and public spaces. They have performed in Berlin at BLO Ateliers, KuLe, Serendipity Gallery, and Grunthaler9, in New York City at Flux Factory, IV Soldiers, Grace Exhibition Space, Vaudeville Park, Bronx Arts Space, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, The Delancey, Gowanus Ballroom/Gowanus canal, Wildlife Gallery, as part of FIGMENT and SUPERFRONT’S Public Summer at Industry City, and many bars, parkinglots, rooftops, apartments, parks, sites, and spaces. They have also performed around the Midwest USA with flexible, portable, and responsive works.
Christopher Graham curates
