Melissa Sills

An evening of performance and music by Mike Kelley presented at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in 2009. Including: The Judson Church Horse Dance and The Horse Dance of the False Virgin, and live performances of instrumental soundtrack from Kelley’s Day is Done, composed in collaboration with Scott Benzel. Plus: the world premiere of The Offer (Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #33), a composition for 12 horns and vocalist.

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A Catholic priest, Father Anthony Romano (Nick Chinlund), intervenes with the police when his colleague attacks a drifter named Lil (Georgina Cates). When Anthony reluctantly provides her asylum in his rectory, the brash hustler soon discovers a secret he has hidden from his diocese and parish. Through this unlikely muse, Anthony finds a path to regain his honor and calling in a post-scandal world where priests are guilty until proven innocent.

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Day Is Done is a carnivalesque opus, a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue. Running over two-and-a-half hours, this riotous theatrical spectacle unfolds as a series of episodes that form a loose, fractured narrative. The video comprises parts 2 through 32 of Kelley's multi-faceted project Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, in which trauma, abuse and repressed memory are refracted through personal and mass-cultural experience. The source material is a series of high school yearbook photographs of "extracurricular activities," specifically those that represent what Kelley has termed "socially accepted rituals of deviance." Kelley then stages video narratives around these found images.

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