New York turns November into a city-wide laboratory where performance art spills across the streets. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Performa Biennial (1–23 November) presents a vast programme ranging from live performances to interdisciplinary projects. One of the most striking sections this year is the Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls, a selection that, true to its name, dissolves borders and creates fluid relationships between performance, sound, and visual art.
Organised in collaboration with the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in New York, the pavilion offers a contemporary response to the historical bond between Lithuanian avant-garde and New York. The downtown aesthetic shaped since the 1940s by Fluxus founder George Maciunas and filmmaker Jonas Mekas (risk, intuition, and instant creation) remains a living source for today’s artists.
Lina Lapelytė: Memory of the First Sounds
Working between Vilnius and London, Lina Lapelytė presents The Speech (NYC), a performance built on children’s voices. One hundred children move away from words toward coos, screams, barks, and howls, revealing the primal potential of the human voice. Originally planned for Federal Hall but relocated to Harlem Parish due to a government shutdown, the work retains its improvisational spirit intact.
Lapelytė’s approach reconnects us with pre-linguistic memory: attention, play, intuition, and collective rhythm.
Performance dates: 17 and 19 November
Pakui Hardware: Technological Myths and a Live Chorus
Spores, staged at Connelly Theatre 14–16 November, explores the human–machine relationship from both a bodily and mythological perspective. A dialogue between an AI therapist and a human patient turns into a rhythmic performance accompanied by a live chorus.
Raimundas Malašauskas’s Send in the Clowns takes place over two nights at The Players. An experience blending music, speech, and hypnosis, it continually redraws the boundary between audience and performer.
Performances Spilling onto the Streets: Sound Walks and a Nomadic House
Andrius Arutiunian’s mobile sound installation carries the disco rhythms of the Armenian diaspora into New York’s streets. Street corners, walking routes, and ordinary public spaces become an unexpected shared experience.
Another surprise is Augustas Serapinas’s travelling wooden structure, Shed from Long Island. Suddenly appearing at various points across the city, it reinforces Performa’s tradition of spontaneous encounters.
A Map of Experience: A Pavilion Without Walls
Curated by Job Piston, the Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls treats performance not as a finished show but as a method of research. By creating a space where location is never fixed and bodies and sounds are in constant motion, it builds a world that feels simultaneously familiar and alien to the viewer.
This approach makes the pavilion feel less like an institution and more like a living organism: moving structures, wandering sounds, transitions between spaces, and collective experiences.
Festival Information
- Performa Biennial 2025
- Programme Section: Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls
- Dates: 1–23 November 2025
- Locations: Various venues across New York
- Details: performa2025.org
