NEGATIVE LIBERTY/POSITIVE LIBERTY opens at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn
the american vicarious in collaboration with The Invisible Dog Art Center present NEGATIVE LIBERTY/POSITIVE LIBERTY
a socially distanced performance installation on March 18 - April 18 at The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn
Following-up on their most recent collaboration, Static Apnea 2020, the american vicarious and The Invisible Dog Arts Center proudly present the world premiere of Negative Liberty / Positive Liberty, a socially distanced performance installation exploring famed British philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s historic 1958 lecture/essay: Two Concepts of Liberty: Negative & Positive.
Negative Liberty / Positive Liberty is an artistic distillation of Berlin’s lecture, in which he points out that when concepts of liberty
are used rhetorically to control and repress individuals in the name of liberty itself, it will eventually, and inevitably, lead to violent conflict.
Inspired by recent events - events that were fueled by an artificial rhetoric that eventually, and inevitably, become participatory, real and violent - a single viewer is offered an experience. In less than ten-minutes, it is delivered to them in artificial fashion. What follows is an invitation to participate; to lend the actual to the artificial, thus making the experience real. All of this is done in the name of exercising one’s Liberty…but whose?
Negative Liberty / Positive Liberty is created by Christopher McElroen, the Founding Artistic Director of the american vicarious,
and was developed in collaboration with performers Sarah Ellen Stephens and Olivia Gilliatt; scenographer Troy Hourie; video designer Adam J Thompson; sound designer Andy Evan Cohen; and lighting designer Lucrecia Briceno.
Negative Liberty / Positive Liberty opens March 18 and runs through April 18, 2021, Thursday through Saturday from 1pm – 7pm and Sundays from 1pm to 5pm at The Invisible Dog Art Center 51 Bergen Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.
Tickets are free. Reservations for specific entry times can be made at theamericanvicarious.org. Walk ups will be accommodated as entry times are available.
