As part of PERFORMA07, New York’s second biennial of new visual art performance, International Festival takes on the monumental task of re-shooting the entirety of On The Town (98 minutes), Stanley Donen’s seminal 1949 dance film featuring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and others, in order to produce an inter-textual fiction engaging with the spatial and social geographies of New York City.

The actors exploring New York in the original film will be replaced by the performing team of International Festival. This social performance will take place over the course of a twenty-one day shoot, creating a wide variety of social situations as the team searches for and re-films scenes at the locations in the movie. The original On the Town will be running on a loop at Storefront throughout the process, and each day, the new material shot will be superimposed onto the original film, so that the final day’s shoot will complete the “erasure” of the original.

The typical intersection in cinema between spatial and temporal conditions here deviates from a question of “what” to a question of “how,” as the production of the film is transformed from a process of simply creating representation into a dramatic process in its own right. The film, the product of this process, depicts a spatial hyper-fiction, as the image passes from one cinematic reality to another, extraterritorial and actual space, returning it to the general intellect. It simultaneously documents a durational social performance, the expression of which is deliberately weak, and functions as an activation outline, a protocol for an empowered understanding of the city.

International Festival is a long-term collaborative platform between architecture and performance, named “Architects of the Year” in Sweden for 2007. The work of International Festival issues questions surrounding distribution, accountability, and ownership in specific social and economical contexts. Created by an architect and a performance-related artist, International Festival occupies a terrain where opportunities to activate and change spatio-temporal coordination in a pro-active manner are central. This work is embedded in the specificity and singularity of the relations it produces in collaboration with the spectator.

PERFORMA07 (October 27-November 20, 2007) is the second biennial of new visual art performance presented by PERFORMA, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. www.performa-arts.org