Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) is a conflux of practices and identities.
1.) Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle have been collaborating as “Panoply Performance Laboratory” or “PPL” for the past 7 years on work that combines music, sculpture, social arts practices, conceptual art, and performance art. Each site-and-context-specific performance theorizes compositional and constructive systems, ideological structures, modes of production, and epistemic geneologies via actions, relational constructs, images, and objects. PPL perform barefoot, employing extended vocal techniques, manipulating sculptural objects and analog electronics, and operating crude wood/rope/plastic contraptions. Often participatory and created in the moment with a collaborating audience, PPL performances swing violently between the hyper-structural and the indeterminate, dealing with causation, reaction, conception, cognition, and active human practices of construction and reality-projection.
McCorkle and Neff split their practice by scale: on one hand, they create self-contained performance art “pieces,” durational performances, and actions for galleries and public spaces. They have performed in Berlin at BLO Ateliers, KuLe, Serendipity Gallery, and Gruntaler9, in New York City at Flux Factory, IV Soldiers, Grace Exhibition Space, Vaudeville Park, Fitness Center for Arts and Tactics, Glasshouse, Bronx Arts Space, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, 109 Gallery, The Delancey, Gowanus Ballroom/Gowanus canal, as part of FIGMENT and SUPERFRONT’S Public Summer at Industry City, and many bars, parkinglots, rooftops, apartments, parks, sites, and spaces. They have also performed around the Midwest USA (Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery and MANA Contemporary in Chicago, etc) with flexible, portable, and responsive works. Neff and McCorkle also form the PPL part of "Valerie Kuehne and the PPL" a "band" founded while on tour in Montreal that performs to the limits of expectations and modes for bands, as such.
2.) PPL the flexible collective, intentional community, and organizational current. PPL are currently two groups of performers working in collaboration with Lindsey Drury, Esther Neff, and Brian McCorkle to create a dance opera called "Any Size Mirror is a Dictator." PPL the collective researches social construction and communal cognition by performing organizational actions ranging from the production of (rehearsive) projects like theater plays, dances, and operas through the organization of conferences and public forums. These larger and longer-term PPL projects have many layers, existing as clouds of interviews, public “Focus Workshops,” interactive surveys, theoretical writings, video, participatory frameworks, hand-made props, public meetings, installation elements, roles, and pieces of through-written music and text. Within these modes, Brian McCorkle operates as a composer and music director, HR and stage manager, technical director, and social liaison, while Esther Neff operates as a librettist/playwright and director and/or administrator, producer, curator, organizer/ideologue. They also operate anonymously, when possible. These projects share collective, public form, regardless of their framing within institutionally-fabricated performance disciplines or academic spheres. Historically, PPL have made many pieces/experiments/projects that might be better described above under 2.), which then evolve into hyper-complex and tightly wound long-form “operas” over a period of 6-14 months in collaboration with audiences, artists, and “non-artists” from all over the world and from many different walks of life. These more mimetic, social, "productions" have been supported through LMCC Swing Space (14 Wall Street), chashama (42nd Street Theater and window on 37th St.), the LAB residency at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, incubation from the cell, residencies through the Performance Project @ University Settlement, Grace Exhibition Space, IRT (3B), Surreal Estate, and with the Intergalaktische Kulturverein e.V. Performances have been additionally presented at The Brick Theater, ABC No Rio, Gathering of the Tribes, Dixon Place (old and new), The West End Theater and many of Manhattan’s other small off-off-Broadway theaters, at Exapno, and many other music venues, and alternative/DIY/underground/multiple use spaces.
3.) PPL Space. This is the collective's studio gallery, regularly home to performance art, performance music, and social projects curated and/or organized by Esther Neff, Valerie Kuehne, and Brian McCorkle. Click on SPACE to see current programming.
Find PPL’s ideological document HERE.
Click HERE for a list of past and present PPL collaborators.
Find out more about Brian McCorkle’s other projects and work, the composer’s ensemble Varispeed, his solo performances and composition, + find musical downloads HERE.
Find out more about Esther Neff’s other projects including curation, organization, solo work, collaborations with other artists and texts, critical writing, visual art, and other work HERE.
PPL PRESS
“The performance artist’s body is an evolving frame, freeing the viewer from expectation and offering a sense of anticipation. You get a different experience every time you listen to the same music; watching performers, musicians, the audience and sometimes entire acts shift location gives you a subtle feeling of newness.” David Lagaccia, hyperallergic.com
“This is a uniquely sublime experience, simultaneously startling bizarre and familiarly fitting, like a long forgotten home, or the body from a past life.” Catrin Lloyd-Bollard, newyorkarts.net “Watching the operas of Panoply Performance Lab is always an enlightening experience. Their work forces the analytical faculties and the imagination to come alive in equal measure. The result, in the author’s experience, may lead to some startling questions about how art, learning, and music can be created and received. For instance, why couldn’t Devo be a free jazz band that played educational songs a la Schoolhouse Rock? What if critical theory professors threw strange objects at their pupils instead of putting them to sleep? Or why shouldn’t a scene like the virgin sacrifice from Rite of Spring be performed not as a ballet, but as an LSD-informed brawl?” John Thomas, Creative Sugar Magazine TIME: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts “The chaos gives the audience agency to engage with the presented landscape of ideas as they choose.” Will Fulton, nytheatre.com “All of this, however, is not just simple nonsense; it is hyper-structured nonsense.” Eugene Reznik, L Magazine “The deft mixing of video, music, and word-play allows audience members to take in whatever they wish, along with ideas on making use of their own time.” Patricia Contino, Flavorpill The Last Dreams of Helene Weigel or How to Get Rid of the Feminism Once and for All “my melting ears are still recovering” Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice
Nine Performance Artists by Allison Klion and Ernesto Menendez-Conde
“Neff and McCorkle successfully transpose the satiric, sexual, and political aspects of Brechtian theatre for a wildly fanciful, song-filled exploration of Helene's (Andrea Suarez) inner world.” Patricia Contino, Flavorpill
“Helene is robbed by linoleum salesmen, kills a swan (her husband in a feathered suit), and identifies with Heloise's suffering at Abelard's hands, among many symbolic, esoteric vignettes.” Di Jayawickrema, nytheatre.com
