Tonight, the LA-NYC performance group My Barbarian present the latest iteration of Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) at the festival hub, in participation with their residency at UT Austin’s Visual Art Center. Straddling theater and visual art performance, the group do provocative work, and I’m excited to get to experience PoLAAT, which was developed in New York in 2008, a couple years before I moved there. I interviewed Alex Segade a couple years ago, which you can check out here, but I was provoked by this quote and wanted to share it:

“This is where I think some of the visual art training comes in very handy, because with performance art, one of the things you notice historically in the conversation is that context has been incredibly important, and visual art has investigated that a lot,” he continued. “Theater has too, but I don’t know that tradition as well, of theater in non-theater contexts. But I know how art works, how to design itself in a new context. So when our work changes context that’s one of the things we try to deal with—what are the parameters, what are some of the things that the audience brings with them to their seats and how do they perform their own position as audience in that context? So in visual art usually you have a viewer who’s moving around and distracted and not even paying that much attention. And that’s the kind of audience we’ve often engaged with, even when we have them sit down. We know we’re designing their expectation. Theater is a different animal that’s about focused attention, and an identification with the performer that’s also very different from visual art.”