Special Effects Festival, January 09-10, 2020

/in /by

Special Effects Festival January 09-10, 2020
@ Wild Project, 195 E 3rd St, New York, NY

This year’s edition of Special Effects Festival asks…
How do we combine difference?
How do we assemble coalition?
and what is the power of togetherness.


Artist driven and oriented, Special Effects gathers experimental performance works by practitioners exploring contemporary issues. Drawing on a network of over 8K artists who are part of contemporaryperformance.com, the festival samples the diversity and richness of the discipline of performance and presents an open forum for critical thinking on the issues of the day.

Special Effects Festival (SFX) was founded in 2014 by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson, artistic directors of Big Art Group and editors at Contemporary Performance Network. Our mission has been to present artists during the Annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference in January in NYC each year. We focus on presenting LBGTQIA+, POC, women, and non-binary artists, giving a platform for exciting, inclusive, genre-breaking work and voices.
Tickets are $20.

January 9, 2020 @ 8pm
Packing and Cracking
created by Rachel Karp and Joseph Amodei
Tickets: $20
Directed by Rachel Karp
Designed by Joseph Amodei

Do we choose our politicians, or do our politicians choose us? PACKING AND CRACKING is an interactive mapmaking event about gerrymandering: the pervasive practice of politicians choosing their voters rather than the other way around. Through participatory drawing and map-drawing games, PACKING AND CRACKING uses critical cartography, historical accounts of the first gerrymanders, and interviews with people dealing with gerrymandering today to show how easy and disenfranchising gerrymandering can be and ask what, if anything, we should do about it.

January 10, 2020 @ 8pm
Gray Spaces: Rally
Curated and hosted by Lisa Clair
Tickets: $20

Braulio Cruz  – The Braille of the Soul
Kristin Worrall – The Recipe: The Transformation of Milk
Sauda Aziza Jackson / April Sweeney – I DIGRESS: The intimate insights of a childhood weirdo
Joey Weiss / Kate Benson – PDF on painting

Braulio Cruz – The Braille of the Soul
Tickets: $20

The Braille of the Soul piece aims to connect themes of home, ancestry, and intimacy within the songs to a video collage running on shuffle.

Kristin Worrall – The Recipe: The Transformation of Milk
Tickets: $20

A brief investigation into the potentialities of milk.
Kristin Worrall is a pastry artist, performer, and musician who lives in New York City.

Sauda Aziza Jackson / April Sweeney – I DIGRESS: The intimate insights of a childhood weirdo
Tickets: $20

Sauda Jackson weaves together personal tales from her childhood with the media and memorabilia that defined her past in this multimedia performance piece, part memoir, a sliver of music, a quarter bio-drama, and a dribble of her own special sauce. I DIGRESS, a performance memoir, explores the weight of inheritance and the recollection of memories and material things once lost to time.

Joey Weiss / Kate Benson – PDF on painting
Tickets: $20

In the past painting was slow. In the future painting was free in the future without a job. PDF on painting is a presentation on painting.