Public Programs
Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver: Extreme Behavior
April 4 2008
Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver are New York City artists who mix physically intense performance, personal confession, pop culture satire, and profane humor to create playfully explicit work that is disarming, charming, and shockingly direct. Neal Medlyn’s work cannibalizes and regurgitates the most absurd aspects of pop culture into a type of spastic avant-garde religious revival, while Jack Ferver’s work combines confession, explicit choreography, and a darkly knowing gaze to elicit contradictory intellectual and visceral responses from the audience. Both artists’ work explores role-playing, crises of identity, extreme behavior, and the absurdity of the human body. Tonight, Medlyn and Ferver share the same stage for the first time to premiere two new performance pieces: The Neal Medlyn Experience Live–Neal’s fanatical deconstruction of The Beyonce Experience Live DVD, featuring a cast of Destiny Child impersonators, birthday cake, and a box fan to blow his hair—and I AM TRYING TO HEAR MYSELF—Ferver’s tell-all, show-all choreographed actualization of America’s unrequited sexual fantasy with “more.”