Perfect City
Perfect City is research and art project created in collaboration with experts in urban planning, and with individuals on the margins of cityscapes. Through conversations with both of these groups, followed by interviews with a cross section of residents where they live, work and commute, the project will try and offer a framework for an impossibly perfect place to live. Perfect City takes on two inquiries: how our cities seem to be changing to reflect seemingly progressive values, yet are coming to exclude all but the wealthiest inhabitants; and how our responses to the same questions can vary, depending on who is asking.
Artist Statement: Aaron Landsman makes performances and other events about urban intimacy and absence, landscape and the body, public life and the structures of government. Some projects are staged in places where people perform their lives, like homes, offices and meeting rooms. Others use established performance venues. Working this way helps the setting become a character, helps implicate the audience into the action and exploits the theatricality of places we go every day.
About Aaron Landsman: Aaron Landsman makes performances, teaches, and appears in other peoples’ shows. His projects are often presented in the kinds of everyday locations where people perform their lives: apartments, offices, meeting rooms and sidewalks. His current project, City Council Meeting, was presented this year in Houston, Tempe, and New York, with additional engagements scheduled for San Francisco and Liverpool. His prior work has been commissioned, produced or presented by The Foundry Theatre, PS 122, and other venues in New York, Texas, Cleveland, Minneapolis and Tempe, and internationally in Belarus, Sweden, Norway and the UK. As an actor, Aaron has appeared in the work of many artists, including Richard Maxwell, Julia Jarcho and Elevator Repair Service, performing Off-Broadway, regionally and internationally, most recently on London’s West End; he will appear in Deke Weaver’s Wolf in September 2013, in central Illinois. Aaron is the current resident artist at ASU Gammage, and will be a guest artist at Stanford University and Columbia College this winter. His work is currently funded by the New England Foundation For The Arts, MAP, NPN, Jerome and Puffin.
Upcoming for Aaron Landsman: Open House, KulturaNova, Serbia, November 2013; City Council Meeting workshop, Keene College, New Hampshire, November 2013; Appointment, ASU Gammage, April 2014; City Council Meeting, Zspace, San Francisco, August 2014