Performa 09, the third biennial of new visual art performance, will be held in New York City from November 1-22, 2009.

The three-week city-wide festival will feature new Performa Commissions and an exciting program of performances, exhibitions, educational forums, film screenings, and radio and television broadcasts. Presented with a consortium of arts institutions and a network of public and private venues across the city, Performa 09 will showcase the work of approximately 150 artists in collaboration with over 40 curators — institutional and independent — in a lively, performance-driven “festival as think tank” that will be a catalyst for envisioning New York City as “the city of the Future”.

Performa 09 will mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” in 1909, which launched the most provocative and cross-disciplinary artistic movement of the twentieth century, bringing some of the radical propositions of the Futurists a century ago back to life in unexpected ways. Using the Futurist template of manifestos-for-the-future in all disciplines, Performa 09 will explore exciting new ideas in visual art, film, music, poetry, graphic design, dance, architecture, and urbanism. The city of New York itself will be featured as an evolving ignition of ideas, its streets, transportation, and airwaves providing a platform for public engagement and inspiration. Following the biennial, several Performa Commissions will tour to venues in Milan, Mexico City and Shanghai. The countdown to Performa 09 began with a special Futurist Banquet on February 20th — the date, one hundred years ago, of the publication of the original manifesto on the front page of Paris’s Le Figaro — featuring an inventive menu of recipes from Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook (1932), live music, and performances celebrating this historic occasion.