"To Be Sold To Be Let" for Voices. For Penny Arcade.
Bil Smith Composer
RECORDING:
The overwhelming majority of Laboratorie New Music composers' works thus far reproduced inscribe themselves in a syntactic stucturElist perspective created expressly for our ambitions. Indeed the creative effort in our works is principally brought to bear on the formal aspects of composition: sonic, consonantal, vocalic, rhythmic, graphic, prosodic and numerical constraints, structures and programs.
Penny Arcade (born Susana
Ventura, July 15, 1950), is an American performance artist, actress, and playwright based
in NYC.
Ventura's
long association with alternative performance began at age 17,
when she performed with John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous,
and appeared in the Jackie Curtis play Femme Fatale,
followed by an appearance in the Andy Warhol film, Women in
Revolt. She traveled Europe during the 1970s, returning to New
York in 1981, where she worked with many underground theatre artists, including Jack Smith, Charles
Ludlamand the Angels of Light. She co-starred with Quentin Crisp in
the long-running performance/interview piece, The Last Will and
Testament of Quentin Crisp.
As Penny
Arcade, she has been performing her own monologues since 1985, mostly in New
York. In the late 1980s she created a character named Margo Howard-Howard, a 50-year-old drag queen
with a scandalous past, for her performances. The NY Times refers to the character as "patently
unbelievable", but in a later article acknowledges that her monologue was
"based on real Lower East Side residents." Howard-Howard received an
obituary in The Village Voice.
The Village Gate Sign on the corner
of Thompson and Bleecker streets,
January 2006
In the 1990s
she toured internationally with her most popular show, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!,
which, like much of her work, was an opinionated commentary on sexuality and censorship;
it featured a chorus of amateur reverse strippers. In 1998 she performed at the
first Gay Shame event
(as opposed to gay pride) at DUMBA in Brooklyn she appears in
the documentary film of the event by Scott
Berry, entitled Gay Shame '98. Her 2002 performance New
York Values, which also toured abroad, addressed the loss of cultural
identity in New York during the Giuliani years.
The famousVillage Gate marquee in New York is still
adorned with her name and the title of her performance piece, although the
nightclub no longer exists.
Arcade is a
co-founder of the Lower East Side Biography Project, a video
production and oral history workshop that trains
participants in documentary filmmaking and preserves the stories of Lower
Manhattan artists and activists. Recently profiled individuals
have included Herbert Huncke, Jayne County,
and Marty Matz, among others.
In 2002
Arcade ran for the New York State Assembly as a candidate of the Green Party. She
received 1,054 votes out of 32,976 in the 74th Assembly district, losing
to incumbent and anti-rent control advocate Steven Sanders.
In January
2011 Arcade had an on stage spat with notorious performance artist Ann Liv
Young who was in guise as her alter ego Sherry.
In 2012
Arcade took up residence at London's Arcola Theatre for a run of her show "Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!"
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