Logo for Pablo Helguera?s ?The Well Tempered Exhibition? at Location One
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NEW YORK CITY: On September 21, the New York-based, Mexico-born performance artist and scholar Pablo Helguera kicks off his ambitious year-long project, The Well-Tempered Exposition, at Location One, located at 23 Greene Street in downtown SoHo in New York City. Location One‘s 2011-2012 Senior Artist-in-Residence, Helguera is putting together a series of 24 events in which he and changing groups of musicians, artists and performers will translate Johann Sebastian Bach’s legendary classical fugue masterpiece “Well-Tempered Clavier” into works of performance art. The series will visit multiple venues and involve scores of participants before its conclusion next summer, also at Location One. According to a press release, the project will launch with a workshop of creative participants leading to a performance that includes performance of the focal “Clavier” pieces by concert pianist Beatriz Helguera before the performance. “Exposition of the creative process behind the ‘translation’ will be woven into the performance, the prepared statement added. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was written as a textbook for musicians to learn the form of the fugue in all major and minor keys of the piano,” says Helguera. “One can find correlations with the format of the fugue and speech because during Bach’s time there was a theoretical relationship between those two disciplines. Basing ourselves on that, we will translate the Clavier into spoken events. As we do this, we hope to also develop a textbook of sorts for speech- based performance.” Each performance will be formed by original selections from the World Trade Center along with their performative reinterpretation. Helguera’s past work has been characterized by strong views about the nature of creative expression and the interactions of art, culture and society, expressed vividly music, humor, visual image, debate and the full range of performative art forms. Here is the year-long schedule for Helguera’s Well-Tempered Exposition. September …
