Tisch Launches Hemispheric New York Initiative

By Richard Pierce

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at the Tisch School of the Arts is a consortium of international institutions, artists, scholars, and activists dedicated to exploring the relationship between expressive behavior (broadly construed as performance) and social and political life in the Americas. After a decade of growth and innovation, the institute has launched a new initiative to present and make widely available the work of New York City artists who operate at the intersection of “hemispheric” (Americas) identities.

      Entitled Hemispheric New York (Hemi NY), the initiative comprises three interrelated programs: public performances and workshops by diverse local artists whose work is hemispheric in terms of language, form, and/or content, a young performers program, entitled EMERGENYC, for talented youth to work with featured artists to develop and present their own performance projects, and a series of public forums and roundtables in order to create new audiences and establish new connections between established and emerging artists, scholars, cultural institutions, and the public.

      “Through the Hemi NY initiative, the Hemispheric Institute seeks to move into its second decade by focusing its resources and energies on New York City as a privileged locus of encounters and transformations,” said Diana Taylor, director of the institute and professor of performance studies and Spanish at NYU. “We wish to enrich New York City’s civic and cultural life by promoting artistic innovation, strengthening local cultural institutions, and activating relationships among diverse local communities, performance artists, and institutions in ways that will create new avenues for cross-cultural dialogue.”

      Hemi NY’s programs will support engagement with issues of ethnicity, culture, language, and class, highlighting the encounters and the transformations of artistic practices in the city. Taylor believes that the cultural “collisions” that take place in New York continually give rise to new and hybrid practices and art forms. 

      Hemi NY, made possible by a grant from The Rockefellers Brothers fund’s Pivotal Places Program, will hold its inaugural event, “An Evening of Spoken Word Roulette and Critical Theory with Guillermo Gómez-Peña,” on Tuesday, April 22, at 7 p.m. in Jurow Hall, Silver Center. The event is free and open to the public. For more information on this and other events, email hemi.newyork@nyu.edu.