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Sample Boston Performance Art At Mobius Benefit

There’s been a flowering of performance art—that resolutely indefinable experimental theater-ish sort of stuff—around Boston over the past half decade.

The size of the scene might be still called relatively small as it’s centered around two venues, Mobius in Cambridge and Anthony Greaney Gallery in Boston, as well as some independent curator-producers like Sandrine Schaefer and Philip Fryer’s “The Present Tense.” But it’s coming to the forefront of Boston aesthetic thought.

The quality of the work by performance artists who’ve stuck around Boston has “matured to a point that it can’t be ignored by the big institutions,” says Daniel DeLuca, a member of the Mobius Artists Group, noting that Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has launched an occasional performance series over the past year.

If you want to sample the local scene, consider “Speed,” a performance, party and fundraiser for the 36-year-old Mobius featuring a mix of more than 20 emerging and established “artists, musicians, and movers” at 7 p.m. Saturday, June 15, at Studio Soto, 10 Channel Center St., Boston.

Kirk Amaral Snow performs in Montreal in 2012. (Andrea Evans photo)
Kirk Amaral Snow performs in Montreal in 2012. (Andrea Evans photo)

Kirk Amaral Snow is planning “a personal contemplative minimalist performative action using sand,” says DeLuca, who is helping organize the event. “He’s going to tie plastic bags around his feet and pour sand into them and then cut holes in the plastic bags and the sand will leave a trail as he walks out the door.”

Yuka Takahashi will “be skateboarding around the space with a live feed from a helmet camera”; Zayde Buti, known for his absurdist sales pitches and jingles critiquing commercial culture, is expected to sing; and Milan Kohout, a longtime Mobius member and radical political artist, is back after a year in his native Czech Republic.

Of Kohout’s plans, DeLuca says, “The only thing I can tell you about that work is he’s been looking for a pressure cooker.”

This article was originally published on June 14, 2013.

This program aired on June 14, 2013. The audio for this program is not available.

Headshot of Greg Cook

Greg Cook Arts Reporter
Greg Cook was an arts reporter and critic for WBUR's The ARTery.

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