Along with every other performance venue in town, Links Hall went dark in March of this year, cancelling the 40 remaining shows of the season and leaving its wood floor minus its customary dust and polish left there by the many bodies rolling across its lustrous surface. To launch its new season in a time when audiences and live performance are reinventing themselves, Links Hall is hosting a 96-hour pop-up performance festival—a four-day blitz of remote collaboration between teams of artists and technicians who have never worked together before and never worked together like this—during a pandemic. The resulting performances, ranging from 20 to 45 minutes in length, will be presented over livestream with at least one artist from each team on-site for some time at Links. The event will set the stage for the next year of production at the experimental performance incubator.
“We want to see what people will come up with,” says Christina. “We don’t want to restrict them too much, but we want them to have an intentional way of devising the work. Especially with our sociopolitical and socioeconomic climate, with COVID, with Black Lives Matter uprisings, and personal and communal things that are happening that can inform everybody’s work, we wanted to see how they manifest with all the artistic backgrounds. We’ll be there to help guide. We want to be transparent and supportive throughout the process.”
“96 Hours will tell us where we’re going,” says Christina. “We have hypotheses but we don’t have any idea what the conclusion may be. We’re not expecting rentals for the new season. We are moving forward with the Co-MISSION residencies for fall and spring. The festival will inform us how to move forward and how we can support artists through this. The first half of the season will not look as it usually does—we won’t have a live show in the space every other week. This will be our blueprint.”
Sat 9/12, 1, 3, and 5 PM and Sun 9/13, 5 PM; linkshall.org, $12 per team, or $30 for festival pass (see website for schedule).
