VANITY PARTY
PALISSIMO COMPANY 2019 Fundraising Event
Monday, OCTOBER 7, 7-9PM
at the Heller Gallery (303 10th Ave. – btw 27/28th St.)
The VANITY PARTY mixes revelry, fantasy and fundraising into an annual celebration of entertainment in a beautiful Heller Gallery, a national leader dedicated to the glass art works.
This year, PALISSIMO is raising funds in support of its upcoming new large scale performance work HEBEL* which will premiere at the NYU Skirball in April 2020. We hope you will join us in celebrating our history, the future of PALISSIMO Company and its contributions to the arts community.
This year, in honor of HEBEL production we have created the Vanity Project Fund. The Fund will support the final development of the new large-scale performance involving 14 artists lead by the Palissimo director Pavel Zuštiak. Living and producing live performance works in NYC is challenging. Many of our artists are navigating challenging path of a NYC artist and subsidizing creation of artistic work through their life choices, often against all odds. The Vanity Project Fund will offset the artistic fees of the HEBEL artists.
Many thanks for your gracious support – we can’t wait to celebrate with you on October 7th!
With gratitude,
Palissimo Board of Directors: Mary Ellen Obias (President), Julio Tumbaco (Treasurer), Roger Kingsepp (Secretary), Jess Edkins, Dickse Fitzgerald, Kathy Liu, Min Pefanis
and
Pavel Zuštiak, Director, PALISSIMO Inc.
TICKETS
Purchase SINGLE TICKETS
Purchase VIP GROUP TICKETS (5 guests and sampling of Czech BECHER liquor)
Contribute to the Vanity Project Fund (select the amount in the form and write a designation note: VPF)
I CANNOT ATTEND but would like to support PALISSIMO INC
Purchase an ad for the event – please email office@palissimo.org
Sponsor an artist to attend the event – please email office@palissimo.org
Sponsor the guest DJ fees – please email office@palissimo.org
Donate an item for the auction – please email office@palissimo.org
All contribution are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. All proceeds to benefit Palissimo, Inc. To join the benefit committee or request further information please contact office@palissimo.org
*ABOUT HEBEL
“What do you gain from all your work?” An interdisciplinary performance on human ambition, embodied presence, and meaning.
Slovak-American Choreographer, Director and Designer Pavel Zuštiak creates an evening-length performance work in three parts while teaming up with scenographer Keith Skretch, composer Christian Frederickson and lighting designer Joe Levasseur—merging the non-narrative qualities of dance with image-based forms and reaching spectators as a totalizing multi-sensory experience.
Through an interdisciplinary, strongly visual and textured approach, Zuštiak excavates themes of human ambition, rootlessness, meaning and identity. The word hebel comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes, appearing there 38 times, and still prompting an ongoing discourse. Hebel can be translated as vanity (as in vanity of vanities) but also emptiness, vapor, breath and absurdity. It lies at the heart of the Book’s key question: “What do you gain from all your work?” HEBEL reflects on temporal human effort and individual life’s worth.
Reflecting the scale and proportions of the HEBEL’s ontological questions and informed, too, by Michel Foucault’s writings on docile bodies, power and architecture, Zuštiak in collaboration with scenographer Keith Skretch create a large-scale kinetic scenography that changes to steadily re-contextualize performers’ bodies and to destabilize the audience’s assumptions, thus extending the piece’s inquiries into time, effort, and ending.
Other creative points of departure include: Vera Chytilova’s Czech feminist movie Daisies (1966); Michel Foucault writing “Of Other Spaces” on heterotopias, and NASA’s recordings of black holes emanating sound. Integrating choreography, kinetic scenography and live music, HEBEL crosses disciplines to make a visceral performance in quest for meaning where the turbulent past and present are alive and the future is envisioned.