Follow The Leader

May – August 2010

Led by Niegel Smith, Produced by Elastic-City (New York, NY)

Beginning near the steps of City Hall, you are invited to embark on a walking game of “Follow the Leader” in the neighborhood saturated with the offices of local, state and national politicians. We’ll play on the steps, stretch out in metal detectors and throw our voices – all in an effort to remind our leaders that we will not be lead silently or blindly. Together, we’ll confront contemporary notions of security and surveillance and shadow the daily business of our elected leaders through public buildings and back rooms.

IT

OUT OF CONTEXT- this quote provides a very exciting point of entry for contemporary performance, literary and visual art:

“To understand what it has to offer, one must learn how to read it. [It] is not a textbook, but is like an ocean with waves and currents and eddies and whirlpools and quiet caves. It calls for suspending one’s normal mode of conceptual progress until one has discovered where the tides and techniques of this new medium will carry him. Water is, to man, a distorting element, and probably whatever he sees in it will not be seen as it really is. The ecstatic surges in his body as he rides the swells will not be forgotten after he has found his feet once again on the sand. Like riding the waves, or listening to great music, this [it] wafts one to where he can perceive reality in new configurations that unite the subjective and the objective. It does not so much convey specific fact as arrange science, myth, philosophy and poetic narrative in peculiar combinations which can generate remarkable experiences…”