Abrons Art Center, New York
November 2023
November 11-14, 2023 Marcel Dzama has created his first evening-length performance for the Performa Biennial 2023. Loosely based on Federico Garcia Lorca’s screenplay, “Trip to the Moon (1929)", the work is titled To Live on the Moon (For Lorca) and interweaves Lorca’s stories with the writer’s assassination in 1936 by General Francisco Franco’s fascist regime in Spain. The poet, playwright, and director Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)––arguably one of Spain’s most revered artists––mixed Spanish folklore, vivid imagery, and a keen understanding of human conflict to craft plays and poems that challenged the conservative social conventions of the time. Written during his year-long stay in New York City to attend Columbia University, "Trip to the Moon" is a screenplay composed of seventy-three loosely connected vignettes, each illustrating a foreboding scene of romance, violence, and mystical beings. Though never realized as a film before his assassination at the age of 38, the screenplay is a paradigm of Surrealist art, comparable to the cinematic experiments of Lorca’s peers Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñel. In To Live on the Moon (For Lorca), Dzama pairs live performance with a newly commissioned film that uses elements of “Trip to the Moon” to tell the story not only of Lorca’s death, but of his resurrection as the Moon itself. Told in the original work’s vignette structure, Dzama follows Lorca from life to death and on to the cosmos, narrating this tale of resurrection and artistic expression through songs and poems in English and Spanish, all written by the artist. The performance in the Playhouse Theater at Abrons Arts Center will see Dzama and his collaborators––musicians, dancers, and actors––accompanying the film with additional prose and live music, carrying the colorful costumes and a grand procession of fanciful characters over from the screen to the theater aisles. Learn more at Performa.