Panoply Performance Laboratory is a thinktank, organizational entity, and flexible performance collective. Founded in 2006 by Esther Neff and co-directed with Brian McCorkle through 2018, PPL has also existed as a physical lab site (“institution as a verb”) in Brooklyn, hosting projects and performances by artists and thinkers from around the world. Activities are now localized by MARSH (a biocultural life-art project and food systems cooperative) in St. Louis, MO. PPL’s performance projects have included “relational” tours across the US, an opera-as-Midwestern-diner (You’re A Big Boy Now OR Rauschenberg Ist Tödlich), a trilogy of documentary operas (The Transformational Grammar of the Institutional Glorybowl), a “living natural history museum” (NATURE FETISH), a 7-week evolving dance-opera with drearysomebody (Any Size Mirror is a Dictator) and others. Work has been realized through/at Momenta Art, The Brick, LMCC Swing Space, chashama on 37th and 42nd St, Danspace, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Dixon Place, the cell, and widely across the US, and in Berlin, Copenhagen, London, and Montreal.

Esther Neff is the founder of Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL). Neff has written and directed PPL’s operas, organized conferences, symposia, exhibitions, and discursive processes as performances, performed solo, and worked collaboratively as part of collectives including Social Health Performance Club and No Wave Performance Task Force. Critical and theoretical writing has been appeared in Performance Philosophy, Experimental Music Yearbook, culturebot, and CAESURA Magazine; in books produced by Live Art Development Agency, Glasshouse, Culture Push; and in edited volumes published by Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge (the Companion to Performance Philosophy, co-written with Yelena Gluzman). Embarrassed of the (W)hole (UDP) is her first published “libretto.” Neff is currently a PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at CUNY Graduate Center.

Brian McCorkle is a composer, performer, and digital artist. He was co-director of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) for over a decade and a founding member of Varispeed Collective. McCorkle has received residencies from Yaddo, Harvestworks, IDEA New Rochelle, Three Phase, and Chance House at John Cage Memorial Park, and has performed at the Venice Biennale, Adelaide Festival, American Repertory Theater, the Guggenheim, the Kitchen, the Whitney, Roulette, the Stone, PERFORMA, and other spaces across North America, Europe, and Australia. In addition to eight operas and hundreds of smaller performances with PPL, and five epic works of durational music making with Varispeed Collective (including Perfect Lives), McCorkle has worked with Robert Ashley, Joan La Barbara, thingNY, Colin Self and Raul de Nieves, Wang Jianwei, Warren Neidich, Banana Bag and Bodice, Thylias Moss, and others across disciplines.

Kaia Gilje is an artist rooted in physical practice and dedicated to interaction in multiple forms, such as process-based improvisational performance, creation and performance of operas, participation in collective structures, and food justice organizing. She is currently a collaborator at MARSH (Materializing & Activating Radical Social Habitus.)