This year, Frank Hentschker has asked artists to curate PRELUDE 2014. As active makers taking on a curatorial role, we have been interested in what compels artists to make work as much as what is made. Playwright, Conceptual Artist, Director, or Dramaturg: these are the identities through which we make art, but they are not the reasons why. Why do we do this difficult thing? How can we do it better? We have been thinking around a few necessary and intriguing tenants of performance: honesty, intimacy, endurance, and care — organizing pillars needed in art as much as in life. We want to discuss how practitioners uncover, explore, uphold, or subvert these pillars through performance. We invite you to consider what artists are after, through process and practice; to explore new strategies for understanding both the performance work itself and how it is shared. We spent little time thinking in terms of disciplinary categories, but rather in terms of meaning and intent. Our process has been one of linkage: attempting to articulate the affinity we feel toward certain artists or projects, fostering connections with other artists or our own practices, and proposing conversations that are connected but rooted in different vantage points — festival as parallax of discussions. We’ve asked the artists to self-identify within these four sites, hoping to provide a more emotional (and yes, intimate) platform by which artists and audiences can engage with the community vision of PRELUDE. We are among friends and peers here. Like the best and thorniest of conversations, the ideas guiding PRELUDE 2014 begin a little messier, get a little more obsessive, feel a little more personal, in part because we invite participation to mutually define them. You are invited as a maker into this festival. We’ve included our own initial thoughts on honesty, intimacy, endurance, loss and care, to initiate conversations we hope to have with you over the course of these three days: through performances and parties, through discussion on stage and in hallways, through workshops and a space for reflection (The Resource Room — go there!). Thank you for joining us.

– Chloë Bass, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Sarah Rose Leonard, Allison Lyman