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Alex Kahn

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Alex Kahn (b.1967) is an American visual and performance artist, best known for his creation of the large-scale puppet performance works that lead New York's Village Halloween Parade each year.

Pageant Puppetry and Processional Art

Luna Moths, from Alex Kahn's Metamorphosis, from the 1998 NY Village Halloween Parade

Since 1998, Kahn and his partner, Sophia Michahelles, have worked together under the name Superior Concept Monsters, conceiving, designing, and directing 10 commissioned works for the Halloween Parade. These works are often developed through open community workshops that bring hundreds of volunteers together to build, rehearse, and ultimately perform cyclical pieces specifically for the parade. The performances typically incorporate elements of puppetry, sound, dance, costume/mask, lighting/projection and mobile architecture, an amalgam of mediums Kahn calls “processional art.”

In addition to leading New York's Village Halloween Parade each year, Kahn’s creations have appeared in venues nationally and internationally. His work, Metamorphosis, involving 20’ tall pupating luna moths, officially opened the 2000 Henson International Festival of Puppet Theatre. In 2002, he and Michahelles initiated a midsummer pageant project in the Italian Alps village of Morinesio, drawing on local folklore and oral history to create a unique site-specific pageant. Inspired by the success of the now-annual tradition, they have seeded similar projects in diverse locales in Italy, Texas, Maine, Oregon, New York, and Michigan. In 2006, Kahn was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Trinidad and Tobago, to study the artistic and cultural structures behind Caribbean Carnival and Trinidadian “Mas’”, or costumed procession.

Other Works

Kahn has maintained an independent practice as a theatrical designer, printmaker, installation artist, and teacher. His interdisciplinary approach was strongly influenced by his experience as technical director of the Kitchen Performance Center during the 1990s. During this time he created lighting, objects, and effects for performance artists including John Jesurun ("Chang in a Void Moon"), Mikel Rouse ("Failing Kansas"), Roseanne Spradlin, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, and David Hykes. His ongoing 10-year project, a fictional traveling museum called the Archive of the Synapse, has been exhibited nationally. San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker described the work as follows in a review from August 19, 2000:

“In a dark box several objects, including a broken fluorescent tube and a floppy disk, glow with touches of color under ultraviolet light. Beneath it, a backlit label explains that traces of a lost dimension called the Synapse persist in, for example, "the fractures along which things break inexplicably . . . the penny which flips only tails, even the virus-infested computer disk." Kahn's piece makes these traces visible. He makes sly analogies between mystic-scientistic cult thinking and new art's uneasy position in the culture at large. Most remarkably, Kahn reawakens us to a true spookiness of art through the fiction of an ``X-Files-style obsession.”

References

"The Greatest Free Show on Earth: Carnival from Trinidad to Brazil, Capetown to New Orleans" Claire Tancons. From exhibition catalogue for "Prospect 1: New Orleans" (PictureBox, 2008)

Puppetry International: Mega-Puppets Issue (Fall/Winter 2007-8) – "Greenwich Village Halloween" article by Rolande DuPree.

Trinidad Guardian (4/25/06) – “Puppeteers Find That Cultural Link” by Kayode James

La Guida (6/13/03) – “I Puppazzi gigante di Morinesio” by Massimiliano Cavallo

Middletown Times Herald-Record (2/23/03) – “It Takes a Community to Build a Puppet” by Deborah J. Botti

Harvard Magazine (Jan/Feb 03) – “Community Puppeteer” by Ellenor J. Honig

Art New England (Feb/March 2) – “Light Upon Light: Towers of Remembrance” by Chris Thompson

Portland Phoenix (10/26/00) – “Gathering Intelligence” by Chris Thompson

Teokikixtli - Mexican Review of Puppet Arts (July 1) – ”The Mysterious Life of Giant Puppets” by Sophia Michahelles

New York Times (11/1/ 00) – “Night of the Living Dot-Com” by Shaila Dewan

NyTeknik (11/00) – “Halloween årets rysare” by Jan Aschan. Swedish technical journal – feature article on puppetry works

San Francisco Chronicle (8/19/00) – “Artists Create Show at Refusalon’s ‘1:1’ ” review by Kenneth Baker

Chronogram (September 00) – “Pulling Strings: Hudson Valley Puppetry Renaissance” by Pauline Uchmanowicz

New York Times (11/1/98) – photo from performance work

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