By Jesse Moreau
BUFFALO, N.Y. — For twelve Augusts, Torn Space Theater asked audiences to walk out among the grain elevators on the Buffalo River at dusk and become part of a ritual. This month, that ritual moves indoors.
The Burchfield Penney Art Center will open You are the ceremony. This is the ritual. Torn Space Theater’s Duodecennial at Silo City on Saturday, Nov. 21, with a free opening party from 4 to 7 p.m., the museum announced Nov. 5. The show runs through March 28, 2027.
It is a retrospective of twelve original site-specific productions the company created at Silo City between 2013 and 2024, according to Torn Space’s exhibition page. The most recent, Commensality, was a four-course tasting performance staged at a table under a cottonwood tree in August 2024, according to its production page.
What’s in the gallery
The exhibition fills the Burchfield Penney’s East Gallery and continues with a multimedia installation in the Project Space. The museum says it “presents the material record of a civilization that otherwise exists only in performance.”
That civilization is the invented parallel society at the heart of the Silo City pieces, a ceremonial culture with its own symbols, rituals, beliefs and systems of governance. The show gathers artifacts, installation elements, photographs, and video and audio recordings. Highlights include excavator arms recalling the Silo City performance The Gathering, a pendulum marking ritual time and a ceremonial table set with objects gathered across the series. Lighting is by longtime collaborators Eclectric Oil and Light, and an accompanying publication will be sold in the museum store.
Torn Space co-founders Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola said in a joint statement released by the museum that the gallery offers a different way into the work.
“Over twelve years of creating performances across the sprawling campus of Silo City, we developed a visual language of recurring symbols, rituals, and materials,” they said. “This exhibition offers a new way to encounter that world.”
The images and objects, they said, “carry traces of the people, places, and shared experiences that shaped the work,” while the gallery setting highlights “the designers and performers who brought this world to life.”
A curator’s case for the avant-garde
John Massier, the Burchfield Penney’s chief curator, made a pointed argument about what it takes to run an experimental company in a mid-sized city.
“It’s no small accomplishment to establish an avant-garde theater company and sustain it for over a decade,” Massier said in the museum’s release. “Torn Space has made it a routine part of their regimen to provoke, to challenge, and to inspire through images and actions.”
Their productions, he said, “are steeped in local and cultural history, yet always look forward.”
The company’s exhibition page says the Silo City works drew in military reenactors, marching bands, blacksmiths, gospel singers, operating engineers, boxers, dancers, horseback riders and nonprofessional performers alongside theater artists. The work represented the United States at the Prague Quadrennial, including a 2023 exhibition at the Trade Fair Palace of the National Gallery in Prague, the company says.
“We’ve embedded ourselves in this space”
When the company marked its tenth year at Silo City in 2023 with Generation, Shanahan told WBFO’s Jay Moran the site was never just scenery.
“We haven’t used the space as a backdrop in which to design performances. We’ve embedded ourselves in this space,” he said.
Meola described the August gatherings as something closer to a homecoming. “The whole feel of the setting sun, the gathering together, the seeing of people that you might not have seen for a year, coming back, it is a transcendental sort of experience,” she said then.
“The audience is an integral part,” Meola said. “They are not just watching, they are a part of it.”
The money behind it
The museum credits the Zemsky Family Foundation for making the exhibition possible, with additional support from Rigidized Metals and a donor giving in memory of Annette Cravens. Torn Space’s own page says the company is still “seeking sponsorship to support the full realization of this expansive exhibition.”
Public money matters to both institutions. In the proposed 2027 Erie County budget, the county executive recommends $32,900 for Torn Space in cultural funding, the same as this year’s adopted amount and below the $34,545 the company requested. The Burchfield Penney is recommended for $170,000, unchanged from 2026. The Legislature has not yet adopted the budget.
What comes next at Silo City
The company’s 2026 season lists no summer production at Silo City. Its only listed event there is a public presentation by students through Agents of Change, its outreach program with Lafayette International High School. The season otherwise centered on Torn Space’s Fillmore Avenue home, including a mainstage run of The Legend of Georgia McBride with Buffalo performer Jimmy Janowski.
Whether the August rituals return to the river is a question the retrospective raises but doesn’t answer. The Buffalo Chronicle has asked Torn Space and the Burchfield Penney about the future of the Silo City series and about pop-up programming during the exhibition’s run, and will update this story with their responses.
The opening party is free. The Burchfield Penney is at 1300 Elmwood Ave. on the SUNY Buffalo State campus.
Leave a Reply