Alex Kahn
Encyclopedia
Alex Kahn 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.
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.
("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:
New York's Village Halloween Parade
New York's Village Halloween Parade is an annual holiday parade and street pageant presented the night of every Halloween in New York City’s Greenwich Village...
each year.
Pageant Puppetry and Processional Art
Sophia Michahelles
Sophia Michahelles is one of the two chief artists and puppeteers of Superior Concept Monsters, makers of pageant puppets and other processional art in upstate New York. She works closely with co-director Alex Kahn...
, have worked together under the name Superior Concept Monsters
Superior Concept Monsters
Superior Concept Monsters is an ensemble of performing artists and theatrical technicians devoted to pageant puppetry and processional art. They are best known for creating the large-scale puppet performances that lead New York's Village Halloween Parade...
, 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
New York's Village Halloween Parade
New York's Village Halloween Parade is an annual holiday parade and street pageant presented the night of every Halloween in New York City’s Greenwich Village...
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
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying just off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles...
, 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 JesurunJohn Jesurun
John Jesurun is writer, director and multi-media artist, based in a New York, USA. His work Chang in a Void Moon is a live serial running since 1983, originally at the Pyramid Club in the East Village, and now less frequently at venues worldwide. He was born 1951 in Battle Creek, Michigan.-...
("Chang in a Void Moon"), Mikel Rouse
Mikel Rouse
Mikel Rouse is an American composer. He has been associated with a Downtown New York movement known as totalism, and is best known for his operas, including Dennis Cleveland, about a television talk show host, which Rouse wrote and starred in.Rouse writes music that is idiomatically and...
("Failing Kansas"), Roseanne Spradlin, Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
, Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music....
, and David Hykes
David Hykes
David Hykes is a composer, singer, musician, author, and meditation teacher. He was one of the earliest modern western pioneers of so-called overtone singing, and has developed since 1975 a comprehensive approach to contemplative music which he calls Harmonic Chant...
. 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.”