PRELUDE FESTIVAL 2024

A renaissance, albeit on a dime. With new performance spaces in New York proliferating despite the interminable precarity of arts and culture funding, it can feel more challenging than ever to be in the know on all the performances happening in the city on any given night. The scene, if there ever was one, has splintered into silos within silos, with performance diets increasingly dictated by the algorithm of one’s Instagram feed. Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes looks towards possible connections in this seemingly diffuse landscape by bringing into conversation and programming together artists working in different corners, edges, and centers of said scene. A series of dialogues seed new relationships and activate old ones within this year’s cohort. ‘Group Dates’ present structured conversations and interviews between featured artists. ‘The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue,’ moderated by critic Helen Shaw, brings artists and artistic directors together to discuss ideas and solutions for the quandaries currently facing our field. ‘Precarious Luxuries: improvisation, performance, and planning for the unplanned,’ the keynote event of the ASAP/15 conference, presented in alignment with Prelude, addresses the stakes and strategies of improvisational practice, a prominent mode of making among this year’s Prelude cohort. The conversations continue in a launch event for Julia Jarcho’s newly published ‘Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism’ and in artist talks through the program. Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes also seeks to cultivate excitement for those more subtle moments and minor benchmarks in an artist’s life and practice. While some of this year’s artists invite audiences into the very beginning of new collaborations, others come with teasers of works to be presented later this fall, and still others activate their archives to dig deeper into the traces of past performances. Again, the between. Jess Barbagallo & John Hoobyar Prelude 2024 Co-Curators