Mad Recital Spring/Summer 2025 Presentation

Avant-Garde Fashion Outlet Mad Recital and experimental performance entity slowdanger invite you to Mad Recital Spring/Summer 2025 Presentation, at The Space Upstairs on November 16, 2024.

Mad Recital debuts their Spring/Summer 2025 collection with a haunting new fashion show and collaborative evening at the Space Upstairs featuring performance and sound accompaniment by slowdanger. No strangers to working together, Mad Recital has designed original garments for many of slowdanger’s performance works, most recently, SUPERCELL. For this presentation, they take over the  Pittsburgh warehouse loft known as the Space Upstairs to unveil their new collection.

About the Collection

“The sound outside your window, and then rustling darkness as an otherworldly shape passes by.

Mad Recital Spring/Summer 2025 takes inspiration from primal folklore of nocturnal passers-between worlds. From bonfires built to keep the shadows at bay—or to call to those shadows for their magic and power. And from piles of sticks and leaves that suddenly open their eyes and look back at you.

The vocabulary of the Mad Recital line is a prefect language to evoke a creature-haunted nightscape of legend and lore. Spring/Summer 2025 takes that vocabulary to previously unseen extremes. Deconstructed garments built of fragments and layers into dreamlike structures of stitch and fabric. Folds and gathers simultaneously hide and reveal new and unexpected shapes. While built mostly of blacks, greys, and earthy tones, the color palate is not intended to be somber or melancholy, rather to represent deepest woodlands, what lies concealed beneath a blanket of deadfall on the forest floor, and the inky, shimmering darkness of brooks and rushing streams in nighttime.

These are not direct interpretations of monsters, nor are they nightmares meant to strike fear, Rather, they are abstractions of the theme, aspiring to an undeniable beauty in their sculptural strangeness.

Come join Mad Recital under the summer moon. Come explore the window-spaces up in the hills, and meet the creatures who pass through those thin-spots into our world.” - Richard Ramirez (Richard Saenz) and Sean E. Ramirez

About the Performance

Alongside the fashion show, the evening will include a sound and movement performance by acclaimed Artist duo slowdanger. Directors anna thompson and taylor knight will perform a practice they call untitled still life. This performance is a physical and sonic performance that fuses their interests in noise and ambient sound, dreams, mythology and the unknown, to create a surreal world for audiences to enter.

“The work examines our bodies ontological and somatic communication with vibration, texture, physical labor, absurdity, character and tertiary energies.” - taylor knight / anna thomson

PERFORMANCE INFORMATION

Performance and Fashion Show

Saturday, November 16, 2024

Doors: 7:00pm

Performance: 8:00pm

Location: The Space Upstairs

Tickets: $5-$15

reserve tickets her now. 

tickets will also be availible at door until capacity is met. 

About Mad Recital

Mad Recital is an avant-garde fashion label established in 2010.  The designers involved in the label are Richard Ramirez (who started his own fashion label in 1997 prior) and Sean E. Ramirez. Mad Recital focuses on deconstruction, repurposed garments, handmade techniques, alternative visions of beauty and unconventional designs. Drawing inspiration from nature, folk-lore, myths and legends, film and the arts as well as the history of avant-garde fashion, Mad Recital aims to create wearable art. The end goal, pieces that delight, unsettle, inspire and provoke. Their work has been sold at boutiques in Japan and France.

About slowdanger

taylor knight & anna thompson are co-founding artistic directors of slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performance organism based out of Pittsburgh, PA. slowdanger uses a systematic approach to movement, integrative technology, found material, electronic instrumentation, vocalization, physiological centering, and ontological examination to produce their performance work, which utilizes ritual practice to delve into circular life patterning including effort, transformation, and death.

Their work has been presented by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Museum of Art, Usine C, Dance Place, The Warhol Museum, and more. slowdanger was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” and has been supported by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NPN Creation Fund, NEFA National Dance Project, The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and more.