Post-Paradise, Sorry Again is the culmination of My Barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) workshops, a residency project at the New Museum in which the collective worked with local artists, musicians, and actors to develop this original work. The performance addresses the staging of liberation and is adapted from the Living Theater’s Paradise Now (1968) and the antitheater’s Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now (1969). PoLAAT continues My Barbarian’s self-conscious performance of counterculture, translating what’s thought of as the ’60s into a performance of the present. Through this project, the artists consider the successes and failures of countercultural movements as models from which to organize one’s life in the face of increasingly powerful hegemony.
My Barbarian is a Los Angeles-based performance collective founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade. The trio creates and performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts, theatrical situations, and video installations that explore contemporary political challenges by playing out allegorical narratives drawn from history and mythology. My Barbarian has performed and exhibited at REDCAT, the Hammer Museum, MOCA, and MAK Center, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Participant, Inc., and Joe’s Pub, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Aspen Art Museum; the Power Plant, Toronto; De Appel, Amsterdam; Torpedo, Oslo; El Matadero, Madrid; CCA, Tel Aviv; and Galleria Civica, Trento. My Barbarian participated in the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials, the 2006 California Biennial, and the 2007 Montreal Biennial.