GAle GAtes et al. was a visual art and performance company active in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

from 1995 to 2003. The company was co-founded by director, designer and visual artist

Michael Counts Michael Counts (born in 1970) is an American stage director and designer of theater, opera, and immersive performance events and a creator and producer of large-scale public art installations and digital platforms. ''The New York Times'' has des ...

, performer and produce

Michelle Stern and scholar and

Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders ...

performe

John Oglevee . In the first two years, GAle GAtes et al. productions were mounted in multiple indoor and outdoor locations in New York, Thailand and Japan ranging from the vacant floors of skyscrapers to the side of a mountain at

Min Tanaka is a Japanese dancer and actor. Biography Tanaka was trained in ballet and modern dance, but in 1974, turned his back on these forms. He began his solo career with a series of nearly-naked primarily outdoor improvisational dances that took place ...

's Body Weather Farm. In 1997, the company became resident in a 40,000 sq ft warehouse space in Dumbo, Brooklyn where it produced five large scale performance installations and presented numerous visual art installations, gallery exhibitions and performances. The ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' described GAle GAtes et al. as "an adventurous troupe with one foot in the world of post-modern art and the other in downtown performance". This feeling can be compared to wandering through a gallery and encountering surprising artworks, much like Counts wandered through the galleries of the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

as a child. In the more frenetic sequences of ''The Field of Mars'', the experience was more like exploring the different spaces of an underground nightclub, or, in the eyes of Peter Marks of ''The New York Times'', “ a little bit like chasing a two year old around an apartment. Archived 27 May 2015.” In ''Art and America'', Douglas Davis described the ''Field of Mars'' audience as “dazzled witnesses to a cosmic event.”. In ''PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art'', Michael Rush describes the experience of a Counts production as "akin to diving into a hypertext on the internet, but he’s doing all the clicking and controlling. It’s also like cruising through a fun house at the carnival, but the creatures popping out of the darkness aren’t just screaming, they’re reciting oblique texts from classical literature, art criticism, Fellini movies, and Dada playlets."

References

{{reflist American artist groups and collectives 1995 establishments in New York City