Silver & Gold: A Performance by Nao Bustamante

Film

Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:00 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

Still from Nao Bustamante’s multimedia performance Silver & Gold. Courtesy the artist

Acclaimed performance artist Nao Bustamante presents the latest iteration of her multimedia performance Silver & Gold, which was presented at the 2010 edition of New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. Taking underground polymath Jack Smith as her starting point, Bustamante channels his muse, the Dominican film starlet Maria Montez, in a bucolic story taken off-course by a transgressive metamorphosis. Referencing and wholly recasting melodrama, Silver & Gold probes at Hollywood orientalism (then and now) and portrayals of sexuality and eroticism. The performance distills tropes of reenactment, sexual awakening, and tragic denouement into a meditation on ritual and silver-screen glamour that uses the artist’s own body as its site (much as Bustamante cast herself as Cuban icon Celia Cruz in her project Deathbed). All the while, the dislocation of prerecorded images from live sound and performance makes for an unforgettable, genre-defying evening that promises to be both critically trenchant and exuberantly camp.

A special five-night Slithering Screens ticket package ($30 per person; free for members) is now available. (Please note that the ticket package does not include admission to the April 29 PopRally event.)

This film accompanies Slithering Screens: 10 Years of New Frontier at Sundance Institute.

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