ITINERANT, New York City’s annual Performance Art Festival, will launch its 2017 program on Saturday, May 13th, 8 - 11 pm at Last Frontier NYC in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The festival continues through May 21st with the presentations of performances and public interventions in different venues in the city: Socrates Sculpture Park (May 14th), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (May 15th), Panoply Performance Laboratory (May 16th), Grace Exhibition Space (May 19th), and Flushing Meadows Park (Closing event, Sunday, May 21st, 2:00 - 7:00 pm).

This year's program, organized and curated independently by interdisciplinary artist Hector Canonge, focuses on works that treat notions of human displacement, pilgrimage, physical dislocations, psychological migrations, and corporeal transformations. ITINERANT 2017 will feature performance art works by local, national and international artists coming from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America.

Participating Artists at Last Frontier NYC: Annabel Guérédrat and Henri Tauliaut (Martinique), Carolina Mayorga (Colombia), Alex Côté (Canada), Jerico Domingo (Philippines), Arantxa Araujo (Mexico), Qinza Najm (Pakistan), Jil Guyon (United States), Siw Laurent (Norway), and Amy Wilson (United States).

ITINERANT was created in 2010 by artist Hector Canonge. The initiative was a small platform  for Contemporary Performance Art, and  had its origins in the monthly series A-Lab Forum that Canonge organized at Crossing Art Gallery in Flushing, Queens.  Following the growing interest in Live Art, and the need to present performance in the borough, ITINERANT was launched in 2011 under the auspices of QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development. In 2012, ITINERANT was recognized by the City of New York as the first Performance Art festival taking place in the five boroughs (Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island) that make the metropolitan region.  Following the large scale venture in NYC, Canonge journeyed through Europe and Latin America creating, in 2013, the Spanish edition of the festival and calling it Encuentro ITINERANTe with public presentations in various cities in the Southern Hemisphere.

Participating Artists at Last Frontier NYC:

Annabel Guérédrat and Henri Tauliaut (Martinique)
“It's not going to lick itself.”

Guest artists, Annabel Guérédrat and Henri Tauliaut are based in Martinique.  They are collaborators and co-founders of FIAP, the international festival of performance art in Martinique. Guérédrat is a choreographer and dancer and Tauliaut a visual artist. They started working together in 2015, when Tauliaut invited Guérédrat to be in “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Since then, they have made over twelve performances, taking place in Martinique, Guadeloupe, the French department north of Martinique, and Jamaica. Their work includes the projects: “The Smell of Success,” which involved Guérédrat blessing the graves of the deceased with scented liquid at Guadeloupe's Morne-à-l'Eau cemetery, and the series Parade Nuptiale Iquanesque. Their performances operate under the principle of the four golden positions, standing, lying, walking, and sitting. Their most recent collaboration and recent performance is “La Machi, the Mangoose y La Serpiente” was presented at the Impératrice Hotel in Fort-de-France in the opening night of FIAP 17.

Carolina Mayorga (Colombia)
“Silent/Self Celebration”

Born in Colombia, Carolina Mayorga has been living in the United States for many years. Her work, exhibited for the past 18 years, is part of national and international collections, and has been reviewed in publications in South America, Europe and the United States. Mayorga’s artwork addresses issues of social and political content. Comments on migration, war, identity, translate into video, performance, site-specific installations, and Two-dimensional media in the form of photography and drawing.

Alex Côté (Canada)
“Sun.Sync”

Based in Montreal, Alex Cote deploys a cross-disciplinary practice that travels between art and science, ontology and ecology, technology and spirituality. He assumes the artistic direction of its company, Idyll | living arts, which promotes innovation in multidisciplinary practices, integration of new technologies for the stage and sensitive experiences within ecosystem and community. In previous international residences - Ireland, Spain, France, Portugal - he experienced various creative contexts of space and time, enriching his work in a receptive relationship with artists, scientists and philosophers. His creative process has been evolving through theatre, visual art, digital art and an immersive conscious technology developed by Princeton University in the early 2000s. Alex Cote plunges his work in an interdisciplinary aesthetic quest where he seeks, using the movement of gesture, natural resources or pixels, an idyllic desire for a peaceful world, granted, free of any conflicts in which human fully experience the nature of being. Influenced by the international stage, the contemporary multidisciplinary arts and the shamanistic practices, he integrates technologies to bring out the symbolic, mythical and cosmological senses, allowing a subversive look of our conscience. After presenting the conscious technology at the World Social Forum (Society for Arts and Technology, Montreal) and going through several stages of creation with it, he received grands from the Faculty of Fine arts (University of Quebec in Montreal), Quebec Council for the Arts and Emploi-Quebec through his various formations (performance, movement, stage directing, video & technology).

Jerico Domingo (Philippines)
“Consume Me”

Born in the Philippines, Jerico Domingo is a queer, multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago where the artist investigates the intersections of identity and body politics. Domingo’s body is an amulet against the plague of forgetting within a post-colonial world that reinforces cultural amnesia. Domingo’s art aims to process the cultural exchange between the Philippines and its colonizers. Years of colonialism brought western ideals to the islands, erasing “savage” indigenous traditions for a more civilized lifestyle. What local populations consider home, tourists see as a tropical getaway. By exploring how Domingo’s culture is consumed, digested, and regurgitated, the artist begins to unpack the oppressive constructs implanted within the Philippines and its people. Domingo’s body of work engages with the artist’s Philippine heritage, navigating through topics such as religion, sexuality, and gender. Unapologetically, Domingo not only asserts a narrative but also a presence within a Eurocentric canon of art history.

Arantxa Araujo (Mexico)
“We Are Light"

Mexican multidisciplinary artist, Arantxa Araujo, is also a neuroscientist based in NYC,interested in how art changes the brain by allowing curated sensorimotor stimuli to create awareness about physical, affective and cognitive components that move us to action. Araujo uses photography, video, and movement-based performances to spark curiosity in observers, helping them scrutinize these processes and the relationship between the exuberant world of stimulants, the inner journey of perception, and its role in defining behavior. Araujo's work has been presented by BEAT Festival in the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, JACK, Panoply Lab, Garis & Hahn Gallery, SITI Lab, Live Love Festival, Movement Research, Radiator Gallery, Columbia University, Triskelion Arts, Idio Gallery, Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center, and The CAVE in New York; El Teatro de los Sentidos Residency and El Vicio, in Mexico City; MATCH in Houston; Milk and Cereal Gallery in Austin; The Semel Theater and Huret & Spector Gallery in Boston, and Performance Art Festival (PAF16) at SPACE Gallery and Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh. Araujo has been selected to be part of 2017 Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ EMERGENYC program and Art in Odd Places (AiOP) - NYC (2017). Araujo was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT and holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was a fellow at The Performance at the Center, SKIP! and a resident at Teatro de los Sentidos and a participant in City as Site Residency.

Qinza Najm (Pakistan)
“Tabdeeli”

Qinza Najm is an American-Pakistani artist whose work has been selected for many national and international juried exhibitions. Currently Najm's large-scale work is held in several prestigious public and private art collections. She has exhibited at Miami Art Basel, Sikka Art Dubai, Dumbo Art Fair, Governors Island Art Fair, Times Square, Aicon Gallery and is currently exhibiting works at Children’s Museum of Manhattan. Najm completed her psychology Ph.D. in the United States, which enables her to explore her subconscious and bring it onto canvas and performance. She pursued her fine arts studies at Bath University, the Savannah School of Art & Design, and The Art Students League of New York, where she studied with well known artists. Qinza’s art navigates around her personal experiences and her take on gender issues, islamophobia, spirituality, transformation, displacement and roles of women in the 21st century. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, NY Daily News, International Business News and ArtNet News.

Jil Guyon (USA)
“Widow”

Jil Guyon is an award winning visual and performing artist based in New York. Her performance-videos have been screened at Lincoln Center’s “Dance on Camera” Festival, “Cinedanse Quebec,” “Fashion Art Toronto,” “Women and Fashion FilmFEST” (Best Experimental Film), Symphony Space, and “San Francisco Dance Film Festival," among others. As part of the “Toronto Urban Film Festival” curated by Guy Maddin, her performance-video, "Widow," was seen throughout the Toronto mass transit system, averaging over 2 million riders/viewers per day. She has also performed alongside Kiki Smith and Alvin Curran in Joan Jonas’s "Variations on a Scene" at “The Wave Hill Dancescape” in Riverdale, NY. Guyon’s critically acclaimed multimedia theater piece, "At the Borders of Eternity," based on "The Diary of Anne Frank," starred celebrated German actress Elfriede Irrall and was featured on ORF television (Austria). It is currently part of the collection of the Kulturarchiv in Vienna and was the first theatrical work granted exclusive use of the diary. Jil Guyon is a Lumiere prize (Canada) nominee, and a recipient of the IndieFEST, Global Shorts and Accolade Awards for Excellence in experimental film, as well the Magistrat der Stadt Wien Award (Austria), and a Harriet E. Eagleston Fellowship.

Siw Laurent (Norway)
“What Does It Mean When You Do That”

French-Norwegian theatre artist, Siw Laurent, is graduating from The Stella Adler Studio of Acting in the spring of 2017. She has written, produced and performed Sense Hunger/Do I represent you? (Villa Villplukk), Jørgen Sørensen (Kvernerbyen Scene) and Still Reverberation (Glasshouse, Brooklyn).Short films:I love you/Goodbye (Saman Kamyab and Jon Eirik Kopperud), Elvira (Gunhild Arnekleiv), Ringer (Züleyha Basoda). Stella Adler Studio of Acting conservatory productions: The House of Bernarda Alba (Bernarda Alba) directed by Tom Oppenheim, Fefu and Her Friends directed by John Gould Rubin, Phaeton by Michael Milligan, and Trojan Women (Helen of Troy, Athene) directed by Aaron Rossini. Training:Playback Theatre (Sweden), The International Theatre Academy of Norway, The Project School of Performance Art (Norway) and Institute for Creativity and Awareness (Norway). Penelope Hearne is a choreographer and media artist who utilizes dance and video for installation and performance works. Penelope is currently a solo artist in Brooklyn, NY developing a movement art collective InMoArCo. Penelope was an artistic director for City in Motion Dance Theater, she also performed with 940 Dance Company, The Gamelan Genta Kasturi, Paragon Aerial Silks, Core Projects, The Humans directed by Rachel Bunting, MegLouise Dance, The Blue Printing Project, Poster Child in Temple Gallery, as well as presented choreography with Mordine & Company, and assisted and performed with filmmaker and installation artist Melika Bass. Penelope has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in Dance from the University of Kansas.

Amy Wilson (United States)
“The Gift of Occhiolism”

Amy Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Born in Boston Massachusetts, Wilson spent much of her time painting mythological creatures and angels. Being exposed to a number of devoted Catholics while growing up, Wilson became fascinated with the idea of religion and how it functions in society. Moving to Chicago in 2015, she has expanded her practice into fiber art, fashion, video, installation, and performance in particular. Through these mediums, She combines autobiography and personal mythology with themes of connection, spirituality, and the human disregard to life. While performing, Wilson aims to conduce an introspective environment through engagement with ritualistic activity and terrestrial materials.