Online: PENNY ARCADE: My Life As History
Location
This is a thrilling performance of Penny Arcade, New York’s undisputed queen of the underground, and the grande dame of downtown performance art.
My Life As History Penny draws from her Memoir in progress and her long-running oral history project The Lower East Side Biography Project. This bespoke segment created specifically for the Tompkins Square library focuses on a survey of Penny's 50+ year residency in the East Village and her larger-than-life mentors.
PENNY ARCADE (aka Susana Ventura) is an internationally respected writer, poet, actress, and theatre-maker, and one of a handful of artists who created and continue to define performance art. Penny debuted with John Vaccaro’s explosive Playhouse of the Ridiculous at age 17 and was a Warhol Factory Superstar at 19, featured in the Warhol film Women in Revolt. With an artistic career spanning almost 50 years, Arcade occupies a unique position in the American avant-garde. HM Koutoukas referred to her as ‘the little sister of the avant-garde’ because of her long association with the architects of the American counter-culture movement: Andy Warhol, Charles Henri Ford, John Vaccaro, Judith Malina, Taylor Mead, Jack Smith, Harry Smith, Tom O’Horgan, and Charles Ludlam among others. Her focus on the creation of community and inclusion as the goals of performance and her efforts to use performance as a transformative act, mark her as a true original in the American theatre. In this context, Penny has written over ten full-length shows including La Miseria, Sisi Sings the Blues, Bad Reputation, and New York Values as well as and hundreds of solos. Her world-famous sex and censorship show, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, has been performed in over 30 cities around the world and was successfully revived as a ‘landmark production’ (London Times) for its 20th anniversary in 2012.
STEVE ZEHENTNER is a former architect who now works as a videographer, as well as a sound designer, stage designer, director, and archivist. In 1992, he began to collaborate with Penny Arcade. In 1999 they co-founded The Lower East Side Biography Project: Stemming the Tide of Cultural Amnesia, a biography series and oral history archive that works to ensure that future generations have access to the mad souls of the invention that built this New York City neighborhood's reputation as an incubator for authenticity, rebellion, and iconoclasm. The project features performers, activists, visual artists, musicians, writers, scholars, and filmmakers. Various biographies from the project have been screened at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture – Moscow, Outfest Film Festival – Los Angeles, Drexel University Television – Philadelphia, New York University, The New School, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, Pioneer Theatre, Chashama Film Festival - New York, ABC No Rio, Hampshire College, Santa Fe State College, Portland State University, Theatre for the New City, Theatre 80 St. Marks, and the City University of New York Graduate Center. The New York Public Library hosts events online, in person, and/or outdoors. The following information applies to online events.
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