Adult Contemporary

Hauser & Wirth Publishers Bookshop and Adult Contemporary co-present a night of readings and performances by performer and musician Constance DeJong writer Jayna Brown and fashion designer and performer Luc Craig aka Lucy Balls. Adult Contemporary is a salon-style site of experimentation, genre collapse, and extra-ordinary conversation, founded in 2013 by Katherine Brewer Ball and Svetlana Kitto. They ask artists, academics, performers, and writers to “read” in whatever way they see fit; to use the platform to experiment in form; to give us words, movements, sounds, or textures. Luc Craig aka Lucy Balls is a Brooklyn-based menswear fashion designer and performance artist. Using drag, dark humor, and found audio he is interested in twisting the seemingly mundane with the unexpected. He received his BFA from Parsons the New School for design in 2008. He has performed at the Bushwig Berlin Festival, NY Live Arts, the Boffo Fire Island Performance Festival, and the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, among others. He hosts and performs a monthly show called “Its My Party” at The Rosemont in Brooklyn. And is always looking for another dark corner to dissect. Jayna Brown is a writer living in Brooklyn. She works as a Professor at Pratt Institute where she teaches in the Graduate Programs of Media Studies and Performance and Performance Studies. Her first book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008) is about black women variety stage performers, 1890–1945. In her second book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (forthcoming from Duke) she contemplates the meaning of (not) being human in music and science fiction. She has also written articles about a range of topics including punk rock in Britain (Social Text), tech music in Africa (Journal of Popular Music) and Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (South Atlantic Quarterly). Constance DeJong is a writer, artist and performer, producing fiction writings and language/image based work for performance, audio and video installations, audio objects and user-navigated digital formats. Her first book, Modern Love, originally published by Standard Editions with Dorothea Tanning in 1977, was re-issued in March 2017 by Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, NY, London and Seattle. DeJong has twice collaborated with Tony Oursler on live performances; was a collaborator on Super Vision, A Builders Association production (2005); librettist for the opera, Satyagraha, composer Philip Glass. She produced and exhibited* a series of re-engineered radios programmed with spoken word-foley tracks, written, performed, recorded and mixed by DeJong, 2016-18. NightWriters, a digital text-image project, was published on-line by Triple Canopy, March 2018; and, Bureau gallery exhibited NightWriters drawings, audio works and a performance, April-May 2018. DeJong is represented by Bureau, NYC.