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Opening Night Benefit Featuring World Premiere of Elmgreen & Dragset's Happy Days in the Art World and Special Live Retrospective * Tuesday, November 1, 2011 Skirball Center for the Performing Arts Opening Night of the Performa Biennial is one of the most anticipated events on New York’s winter cultural calendar. Performa will celebrate the start of our fourth international biennial with the premiere performance of a new work by the artists Elmgreen & Dragset. This is the first large performance piece the internationally acclaimed artists have presented in New York City. The performance will be followed by an exceptional party featuring a retrospective of live performances by Elmgreen & Dragset.

Curated by Defne Ayas

The Prompt is a conceptual social club under the influence of Futurist Variety Theater. Sessions held nightly November 11-15, 2009. Cues and propositions are offered each night in the form of conversation pieces, rules, performances and soundtracks, transforming this destination into a pressure cooker for ideas and intimacies. Curated by Kunstverein. November 13th session: RULES: Michael Portnoy CONVERSATION PIECE: The Bruce High Quality Foundation FILM: Marianne Vitale, Sylvie Fleury PERFORMANCES: Joan Juliet Buck, Patrick Cleandenim, Joseph Grigely, Cassie Terman, Benjamin Heller CURATORS/HOSTS: Michael Portnoy, Sarina Basta, Mary Rinebold, Jamie Hook -- shot & edited by Emily Chen

Jeff Crouse and Aaron Meyers present The World Series of 'Tubing at Eyebeam. An augmented reality card game, players compete against one another by selecting and presenting their "best" YouTube video clips. The audience then choose their favorite videos with a cleverly conceived audience response system using laser pointers. By blurring the distinctions between performer, audience, and participant, their work builds upon the inherent qualities of shared culture as it exists online. shot & edited by Emily Chen

Felicia Ballos and Amy Granat are both founding members of Cinema Zero in Brooklyn. Granat has worked on the restoration of the films of Maya Deren and has presented her films in New York and Europe. Ballos trained with Trisha Brown and Min Tanaka and has danced with Yvonne Rainer. Both have ties to extreme underground music. Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis. shot & edited by Emily Chen

Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič , and Miha Turšič take the audience on a 50 hour journey through the concepts of "theatre in zero-gravity", at Eyebeam. shot & edited by Emily Chen

A conceptual social club under the influence of Futurist Variety Theater, cues and propositions are offered each night in the form of conversation pieces, rules, performances and soundtracks, transforming this destination into a pressure cooker for ideas and intimacies.

For designer Martí Guixé, the word “mealing” describes the act of eating a meal, as well as the social concept of a relational meal. Mealing is a three-hour performance and meal-in-motion for approximately 80 people. Participants will be given ceramic glasses with “edible microsnacks” adhered to their surface and instructions for eating them while performing small gestures that will require each person to interact with their fellow diners. shot & edited by Emily Chen

How, why, and when did my child become an artist? The goal of this social interaction is not to solve this mystery, but rather to explore the generational move backward as a creative forward-looking exercise. Darius Miksys presents this conversation between parents of artists, hosted at e-flux project space. Curated by Raimundas Malasauskas, with production support by Sarah Demeuse. Special thanks to PERFORMA's Defne Ayas. shot & edited by Emily Chen

Israeli visual artist Cytter’s first evening-length theatrical production combines dance, video, and music to tell the story of liberal activist John Webber and graphic designer Linda Schultz, who are each unexpectedly transformed into the opposite sex in a performance that uses the artist’s trademark “kitchen-sink existentialism” to wittily address the frustrations and confines of social roles.

The artist will present a special lecture on the history of art in the Grand Gallery of the Tilden Mansion, home of the National Arts Club.

The field trips will gather experts and amateurs alike for a siren-watch across the city, applying the observation and audio surveillance techniques of local wildlife groups and the sonic analysis of a New York City department of environmental acoustics. Participants will include artists Natalie Jeremijenko, following the impact of the sirens on city pigeons, bats and other local species, Maximilian Goldfarb, for whom the emergency cry is an entirely ambivalent signal for both safety and danger, and Daisy Press, a New York-based operatic singer who uses the siren sounds as model for her own repertoire of non-verbal voice exercises.

“3 Day Weekend” is both a performance and material for a live video shoot. The Weekend will unfold as a series of interactions built over the course of three days with a group of people who were chosen through an open application process.

A mini-festival of noise music curated by visual artist Mike Kelley. Born in a suburb of Detroit in 1954, Mike Kelley was brought up with the city’s music scene, which spawned bands such as Iggy and the Stooges and MC5. In 1973, Kelley formed his own band, the now seminal Destroy All Monsters. “A Fantastic World” continues Kelley’s continued interest in musical subcultures and focuses specifically on avant-garde music and sound art that employs elements such as cacophony, dissonance, and atonality.

A two-day symposium with participants including Günter Berghaus, Marjorie Perloff, Claudia Salaris, Barbara Spackman, and Paolo Valesio, among others.

In Cyprien Gaillard’s groundbreaking video “Desniansky Raion,” a view of Belgrade’s futuristic town gate opens a triptych where architecture embodies the failure of the modernist social utopia in a brilliant, fascinating demonstration: an epic fight between hooligans in a Russian suburb; a grandiose lightshow preceding the destruction of a habitation tower near Paris; and a breathtaking flight over a circular ensemble of Ukrainian buildings somewhat remniscient of a concrete, monumental version of Stonehenge. Acclaimed musician Koudlam, a long-time collaborator of Gaillard, will provide his adrenaline-pumping live music to accompany the screening.

The dark abyss of the ocean is the place on Earth that we know the least about. It is populated by photo-luminescent creatures that flicker to the rhythm of their environment’s sound frequencies to produce undersea “light-shows,” a behavior that inspired the concept behind French artist Loris Greaud’s ambitious new project, developed in collaboration with Performa, MIT Sea Grant College Program, and Carnegie Mellon. This ongoing project will launch on November 19, 2009 in Abu Dhabi with breathtaking fireworks designed by the internationally acclaimed pyrotechnicians Groupe F that will recreate the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures, featuring the experimental hip hop group Antipop Consortium. Then, the New York premiere of the video of this elemental sky sculpture, which will be recorded in HD and 35 mm, will be presented on the Times Square LED screens of News Astrovision by Panasonic, NASDAQ and Thomson Reuters as part of Performa 09.

The dark abyss of the ocean is the place on Earth that we know the least about. It is populated by photo-luminescent creatures that flicker to the rhythm of their environment’s sound frequencies to produce undersea “light-shows,” a behavior that inspired the concept behind French artist Loris Greaud’s ambitious new project, developed in collaboration with Performa, MIT Sea Grant College Program, and Carnegie Mellon. This ongoing project will launch on November 19, 2009 in Abu Dhabi with breathtaking fireworks designed by the internationally acclaimed pyrotechnicians Groupe F that will recreate the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures, featuring the experimental hip hop group Antipop Consortium. Then, the New York premiere of the video of this elemental sky sculpture, which will be recorded in HD and 35 mm, will be presented on the Times Square LED screens of News Astrovision by Panasonic, NASDAQ and Thomson Reuters as part of Performa 09.

Ueda invites a selection of her friends–musicians, fashion designers, and artists–to perform, dine and play music at the same time. A not-to-missed neo-fluxus event that will recall the Fluxus Dumpling dinner staged by Maciunas in 1971 in SoHo.

“The Good Life,” a new video installation by Michel Auder involving the poets Kathy Acker, Julien Blainem, William Burroughs, John Cooper Clarke, Ira Cohen, Gregory Corso, Brian Gyson, Harry Hoogstraten, Jean Jacques Lebel, Gerard Malanga, Michael McClure, Giulia Niccolai, Ron Padgett, Adriano Spatola and others performing for an audience and for Auder’’s camera in Amsterdam in 1979.

James Hoff’s “How Wheeling Feels when the Ground Walks Away” presents an audio landscape comprised of various historic riots, from the concert hall and music venue to the sounds of modern warfare. Presented in surround sound, the work relentlessly envelops the audience as the tumultuous panorama of over-layered riots travel around the gallery.