The Watermill Center is pleased to present, THE SUNDANCE KID IS BEAUTIFUL, a theatrical staging of the legendaryEINSTEIN ON THE BEACH librettist and artist Christopher Knowles’ writings, performed by Knowles himself. This special open rehearsal is presented immediately prior to the work’s presentation at the Louvre Museum in Paris and as part of Performa 13 in New York this November.
ABOUT CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES AND HIS COLLABORATORS
Christopher Knowles’s incredibly diverse practice, which includes writing, painting, sculpture, and performance, exhibits a fascination with the aural and visual elements of language. Born in Brooklyn in 1959, Knowles first became widely known in the theatrical community as an early collaborator of Robert Wilson. While still a young teenager, Knowles provided the libretto for Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s 1976 genre-changing opera Einstein on the Beach.
First exhibited as a solo artist in 1974, Knowles has continued to cultivate a prolific practice that explores themes surrounding communication and sign systems. Knowles’s works employ meticulous geometrical abstractions of text and pattern, and are broadly influential as both objects and performance-art constructions. His work has been exhibited in many solo and group showings internationally, and his poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Interview Magazine. His two and three-dimensional works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and numerous other international institutions and private collections. His large typing Untitled (Christopher Knowles, Puevfgbcure Xabjyrf) was featured in MoMA’s 2012 exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language. Knowles is represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York.
THE SUNDANCE KID IS BEAUTIFUL with Christopher Knowles features the artist performing a selection of rarely-shown works, including The Sundance Kid is Beautiful and texts from EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH in a multimedia environment that incorporates recent poetry and sculpture.
The performance combines elements of a theatrical vocabulary with Knowles’s delicately patterned texts to create a scenography that extends the structured logic observed throughout his two and three-dimensional practice into a performative domain.
This very special open rehearsal is presented immediately prior to the opening at the Louvre Museum as part of LIVING ROOMS, is made possible by the support of American Friends of the Louvre and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. It is staged by Noah Khoshbin and produced by Andrew Gilchrist, with dramaturgy by Lauren DiGiulio, design by Eugene Tsai, lighting design by John Torres, sound design by Bryce Kretschmann, costume design by Kevin Santos and set construction by Stephen Crawford. Originally commissioned by The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY, it is presented in collaboration with The Watermill Center, the American Friends of the Louvre, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, with additional support from The Segal Center, Change Performing Arts, and Dissident Industries.
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