Fire Escape Performance Research

Another Conflux festival project that resembles ideas I've been having about performing in NYC:

Fire Escapes

Tom Peyton - DoTank:Brooklyn

Fire Escapes reveals and revels in the timbre of one of the most ubiquitous structures in New York City. A unique and enveloping soundtrack is generated through a fundamental element of the urban fabric.

6 drummers will play two fire escapes on E. 7th as instruments. Performers will be on a pair of structures facing each other on either side of the street. Utilizing interlocking patterns, Fire Escapes will accentuate the dynamic spatial characteristics of the vertically positioned ensemble. The piece will be cyclical, patient, and repetitive.

The piece expands on the existing exploration of New York residents into how fire escapes can serve everyday social purposes beyond their intended function. Currently, fire escapes become terraces, reading rooms, and sunbathing decks. Fire Escapes redefines these structures as performance spaces.

A performance I've just started thinking about involves developing a durational performance on the ubiquitous and quintessential New York Fire Escapes, sites we are all familiar with when imagining the urban landscape and language of NYC.

The particular Fire Escape I would be performing within would be the one just outside the back wall of Grace Exhibition Space, where the only access from within the GES is through a small porter door with a A4 white sheet scrawled in pencil saying 'Do Not Open Ever!!'. This sign however has nothing to do with GES and its author remains unknown.

So far current ideas are growing out of looking at the metal materiality of the site, the spaces and construction of the bars and the space- perhaps tying threading weaving material through the bars to create a shelter of some kind? a web or nest or bolthole? Other ideas involve creating a kind of 'community garden' of a more surreal nature whereby products as well as more conventional organic vegetables and food consumables would be buried in banana boxes laid out along the metal construction of the Fire Escapes, and my 'role'/performance would be to be a performance gardener and to 'garden' the products and give them away to the audience- or perhaps following on the trajectory of Chaw Ei Thein's (who has performed at Grace Exhibition Space) performance "Mobile Market", where she sold basic food consumables, such as rice, salt, spices at prices before inflation which generated a fantastic 'economic nostalgia' in her audience buying and selling- trading is what I mean! Therefore, I would 'sell' or trade the products for a lower price than is the current RRP in the USA for the products at supermarkets and deli stores.

However, as with all site specific work, as opposed to site dominant and purely interventional work, I would want the performance and installation to come out of my communication with the site i.e. spending time exploring the site, experimenting with materials and how the site is performing its function and how to use that as stating points for devising, and how to subvert and expound upon its present performativity.