Down with Childhood
by Amy Ruhl with Seung-Min Lee, Morgana Birch, Marianne Shaneen, and Zach Layton
Géza, 306 Maujer
Join us for a performance conceived by artist and performer Amy Ruhl, unfolding through a series of live acts including video, readings, and music, with contributions by Morgana Birch, Seung-Min Lee, Zach Layton, and Marianne Shaneen. The program’s title references a chapter in Shulamith Firestone’s infamous manifesto The Dialectic of Sex, setting the tone for a performance that positions childhood as an oppressive historical construct, solidified by school—a modern institution designed more for discipline and surveillance than for learning.
Shifting roles throughout the performance, Ruhl will appear as a radical feminist substitute teacher, a stand-up comedian with a taste for insurrection, and an oversexed gym teacher. She will perform alongside an ensemble featuring Seung-Min Lee and Marianne Shaneen—who will each present a short performance and reading, and Zach Layton as the Down with Childhood Music Class Conductor. The evening will open with an interactive video work by Morgana Birch.
At a time when education is under attack by the federal government, the performance casts school as a site of both profound trauma and collective solidarity. Down with Childhood acknowledges university’s recent and historical roles as one of the most potent arenas for organized struggle in the United States, while also channeling the revolutionary power of laughter.
Amant programs are always free. RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Seating is first come, first served with some standing room available. Doors for Down with Childhood will open at 6:45pm on Wednesday, June 25 in Géza, located at 306 Maujer.
Please note: This program has been updated as of June 16, 2025 to reflect a new title and lineup.
Amy Ruhl is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of performance, new media, moving image, installation, and experimental theater. Her practice spawns long-term projects that flesh out complex narrative and conceptual worlds, create embodied fictions, and continually branch off into correlative work and collaborations. In 2021, she organized the feminist performance ensemble “Flowers in the Basement,” which included at various times Alisha B. Wormsley, Kite, Mel Elberg, Frances Ines Rodriguez, and Tsedaye Makonnen. She has exhibited her visual art and films at galleries and venues such as KAJE, Participant Inc, Lubov, Essex Flowers, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Kansas City Art Institute Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (KC, Missouri) Vitrine Gallery (London), Public Fiction (Los Angeles), and Pleasure Dome (Toronto, Ontario). In 2026, she will have a solo show for her long-term project, Between Tin Men at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY. Ruhl has performed at NYU Skirball Center, Roulette Intermedium and Irondale Theater (Brooklyn, NY), The Broad Museum and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) and the Live Arts Biennial at Bard Fisher Center (Red Hook, NY). In 2021, she was a finalist for NEFA’s National Theater Project, and earned a Franklin Furnace Fund Award in 2023 (with Flowers in the Basement), and a Brooklyn Arts Council Grant in 2025 for her recent solo show at KAJE, We shall not miss it.
Morgana Birch works with creative coding, animation, and sculpture to build simulated environments and games. Her work focuses on disability theory, queer theory, and autoimmune disease within the intersection of digital surveillance and consent. Birch’s animations and games play with experimental forms of locomotion and coding to propose alternate forms of movement and being. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College. Birch has exhibited at Sculpture Center, NY, Pioneer Works, NY, MOMOK, Vienna, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, and the Servais Family Collection, Brussels. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Coding at City College of New York.
Zach Layton is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, curator, and educator working collaboratively across genres and disciplines. His work has explored musical approaches to biofeedback and brainwave signal, transcriptions of insect rhythms for string orchestra, sonification of internet traffic, multichannel sound installations, and photographic representation of sonic vibration. He has performed at the Guggenheim Museum, Moma/PS1, Roulette, the Kitchen, EMPAC, Museum der Modern Salzburg, and many other venues in New York and abroad. He has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Music/Sound award, Jerome Foundation, Fulbright NAF, Wave Farm, Signal Culture, and the Art OMI music residency.
Seung-Min Lee is an artist based in New York. She has an MFA from Hunter College and BA from Harvard University. Selected exhibitions and performances include: TedTalks iChicken, “MoMA Downtown”, New York, 2020; Freeport: Kim Jong Un Liberation Art, Hauser and Wirth, New York, 2020; Kim Jong Un: Spring Awakening on the Pacific Rim, Human Resources LA, Los Angeles, 2019; Popular Revolt, iRape : Ted Kavanaugh SoulCycle Instructor, NYU Skirball Center, New York, 2019; Intolerable Whiteness, The Kitchen, New York, 2018; On Whiteness, The Kitchen, New York, 2018
Marianne Shaneen is a Lebanese/Mexican-American writer and film and documentary video maker. She received her M.F.A. in writing from Bard College Milton Avery School of the Arts. Her essays on artists such as Christine and Margaret Wertheim’s Institute for Figuring, Ken Jacobs, and Madeline Gins/Arakawa, have appeared in publications such as Bomb Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. Shaneen is directing a feature documentary film about people who have animal alter-egos: a poetic, playful, provocative exploration of fluid identity and trans-species possibility. She received a NYSCA New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant, 2010, and is a Yaddo fellow.