Sharing Power with PTP
Sharing Power is a podcast and performance series about distributed leadership and consent-based processes. The podcast, co-hosted by Flux Creative Partners Lori Elizabeth Parquet, Corinna Schulenburg, and Jason Tseng, invites other creators and organizers who are practicing distributed leadership/consent-based processes to discuss how they’re doing it.
Our third Sharing Power episode was with Rena Anakwe and GENG PTP about their collaboration in PTP, aka Purple Tape Pedigree, aka Power Through People, aka Protect The Peace:
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcast
Read the transcript (coming soon)
“If I can’t rock with you, if I can’t eat multiple meals with you, then like, why are we even working?…We’re trying to get away from the transactional relationship, this thing that is fueled by some form of capital, right? Whether that be monies or hype, clout, whatever, these false economies, right?”
-GENG PTP“Do you want to be in the world of corporate?
Do you want to be in the world of what is nonprofit, which is also sometimes still corporate?
Or do you want to find these other sides of creation, which can lead you to collectives,
to the independent,
to the grassroots?”
-Rena Anakwe
PTP, also known as Purple Tape Pedigree, aka Power Through People, aka Protect The Peace, is an American artist collective and independent record label based in New York City. PTP has been called “New York’s experimental incubator”, and the collective has released recordings named among the best in new experimental, hip hop, metal, avant-garde, and electronic music. Pitchfork noted that “PTP’s mission seems to be to annihilate genre boundaries and revel in the brilliant debris”, and VICE has called PTP “home to some of the most boundary pushing music being made.”
THE GUESTS
Rena Anakwe (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, poet and healer working primarily with sound, visuals, and scent. Exploring intersections between traditional healing practices, spirituality and performance, she creates works focused on sensory-based, experiential interactions using creative technology. Most recently, she was awarded a 2022 Art Matters Artist2Artist Fellowship, a 2021-2022 MacDowell Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2022 Jack Nusbaum Artist Residency at BAM and the 2021 Canadian Women Artists’ Award from NYFA & the CWC of New York. Rena has collaborated, produced, and shown work at (select list): The Guggenheim Museum, SCAD Museum of Art, Counterpublic, The Momentary, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Basilica Hudson, TFNA (Theatre for a New Audience), Park Avenue Armory/NY Live Arts, En Garde
rts/Brookfield Place, Weeksville Heritage Center and the Dia Foundation.
Under the moniker A Space for Sound, Anakwe released the first in an ongoing audio series titled “Sound Bath Mixtape vol. 1”, through New York City-based label and collective PTP. In Fall 2021, her album “Sometimes underwater (feels like home)” was released through RVNG Intl’s Commend THERE series.
She is based in Brooklyn, New York, by way of Nigeria and Canada.
GENG PTP is a Manhattan-born, Queens NYC-based sound practitioner (producer, poet/vocalist, sound engineer, DJ), educator, archivist, writer, visual designer, organizer, and physical trainer. With 3+ decades of participatory roots in NYC’s underground music/DIY communities, he has been making work through a multitude of solo and collaborative processes. Most currently, he performs as King Vision Ultra (est. 2017), a channeling project considering memory and voice as quantum weaponry in relation to honoring/making/taking space, remembrance (the archive), and protecting the spirit. In January 2023, he released his fourth album as KVU, SHOOK WORLD, featuring 16 collaborators + Algiers (Atlanta, GA).
Recent collaborations: Nile Harris (TESTIFY, 2023), Jeremy Toussant-Baptiste (…and Drive (Far Away), 2022), Jonathan González (Practice, 2022, Lucifer Landing II, 2019), and Matana Roberts (Sandy Speaks…II, 2022, Sandy Speaks…, 2019, Blood.Blue(s), 2018).
Past work: Julia Santoli (Siren Sore), Salome Asega (Revision Suite), and Black Quantum Futurism. GENG’s organizing and coalition work expands to the visionary collective and label, PTP (Purple Tape Pedigree / Power Through People), which he established in 2009. As “counter-industrial purveyors of weaponized media,” PTP stands to create space for us.
THE CO-HOSTS
Lori Elizabeth Parquet, co-host, (she/her), is a Flux Creative Partner and actor, director, and playwright from New Orleans, Louisiana with a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University. Her New York City stage credits include Macbeth, Dispatches From (A)mended America (Off-Broadway, Epic Theatre Ensemble), The Providence of Neighboring Bodies (Dutch Kills Theater/Ars Nova), The Honeycomb Trilogy: Sovereign (Gideon Productions), Medea (Phoenix Theatre Ensemble), Dog Act, Ajax in Iraq, Honey Fist, Operating Systems (Flux Theatre Ensemble), and Republic, Baal, Murder In the Cathedral (JACK/Hoi Polloi). She made her international debut performing in Pillars of Society at Teater Ibsen in Skien, Norway. She also performed in The Providence of Neighboring Bodies at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018. In 2019 she was nominated for and won the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Lead Role for her performance in Operating Systems. As a director, Lori has directed Topdog/Underdog at Princeton Summer Theater and assistant directed The Public Theater’s most recent Shakespeare in the Park productions of As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. She was alsoas an acting coach on Disney’s Hercules, a Public Works production. Lori just served as Associate Director of New York City Center’s Encores: Off-center production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Promenade and has directed many readings and workshops with Public Works, Flux Theatre Ensemble, The Brooklyn Generator, and other theatre companies across New York City. As a playwright, Lori was selected as one of six featured playwrights for Season Five of The Fire This Time Festival, which produced a reading of her full-length play In Communion, and her short plays have been produced through Flux Theatre Ensemble, New York Madness, and other NYC indie theatres and festivals.
Corinna Schulenburg, co-host, (she-her), is a Flux Creative Partner. She is a trans artist and activist committed to ensemble practice and social justice.As a playwright, her work with Flux includes Riding the Bull, Rue, Other Bodies, The Lesser Seductions of History, Jacob’s House, DEINDE, Honey Fist, Salvage,The Sea Concerto, and Operating Systems. With Flux, she directed Ajax in Iraq (NYITA nomination), A Midsummer Nights Dream, and the Food:Souls Goldsboro and Volleygirls. As an actor with Flux, she has played Sam in Metra: A Climate Revolution Play with Songs; Max in World Builders, Dr. X in Hearts Like Fists, Ezekiel in 8 Little Antichrists (NYITA nomination), and the Professor in Rue.
Jason Tseng, co-host, (they/them) is a queer, non-binary Chinese-American playwright based in New York City, originally hailing from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Their plays have been presented and developed by Flux Theatre Ensemble, Judson Arts, Mission to dit(Mars), Theatre COTE, Inkubator Arts, Second Generation, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, and LA Queer New Works Festival. They are a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble, a member of The Civilians’s 2019/2020 R&D Group, a member of Mission to dit(Mars)’s Propulsion Lab, and their plays have been honored as Semi-finalists for the New American Voices Playwrights Festiva, Bay Area Playwrights Festivall and the Eugene O’Neil National Playwrights Conference. Jason’s full-length plays include Rizing (World Premiere, Flux Theatre Ensemble), Like Father, Same Same, Ghost Money, Fear and Wonder, and The Other Side. Find more at jasontseng.com.
