You are the ceremony.

This is the ritual.

Torn Space Theater’s Duodecennial at Silo City

November 2026 – March 2027

Burchfield Penney Art Center

1300 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, NY 14222

Spanning twelve original site-specific productions created at Silo City between 2013 and 2024, this retrospective exhibition at the Burchfield Penney Art Center examines Torn Space Theater’s exploration of performance, place, and public ritual. Through a constellation of photographs, artifacts, video, sound, and ephemera, the exhibition reactivates a body of work designed for a campus of grain elevators, processing facilities and nature.

In this sprawling exhibition, Torn Space Theater activates the Burchfield-Penney East Gallery and Project Space with imagery, sound, video, material and performance motifs collected from twelve original site-specific productions produced at Silo City between 2013-2024.

About Torn Space & The Exhibition

Founded in 2000 by Dan Shanahan and Melissa Meola, Torn Space Theater is an experimental performance company based in Buffalo’s Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, working at the intersection of theater, installation, architecture, sound, and public ritual. Since its founding inside the historic Adam Mickiewicz Library and Dramatic Circle, the company has developed large-scale interdisciplinary performances in both traditional and nontraditional environments, transforming industrial landscapes, civic spaces, and historic structures into immersive performance landscapes.

This exhibition examines Torn Space Theater’s twelve-year exploration of site-based performance at Silo City, a campus of abandoned grain elevators and industrial structures on Buffalo’s waterfront. 

At the center of these works was the invention of a parallel society — an evolving ceremonial culture with its own symbols, rituals, beliefs, and systems of governance. Through this imagined civilization, Torn Space Theater explored themes including identity such as resistance, transformation, heterotopias and evolution. Each annual performance functioned as both spectacle and social ritual, inviting audiences to participate in shared acts of reflection tied to seasonal cycles, communal experience, and the changing cultural landscape of early 21st-century America.

Created through collaboration with a wide range of artists, performers, tradespeople, and community participants, the works incorporated military reenactors, marching bands, blacksmiths, gospel singers, operating engineers, boxers, dancers, musicians, horseback riders, and nonprofessional performers alongside contemporary theater artists and designers. Rooted in ancient performance traditions in which civic participation was central to communal ritual, the productions emphasized collective authorship and public gathering as essential elements of the artistic experience.

Torn Space Theater’s site-based work represented the United States at the Prague Quadrennial, including inclusion in the internationally curated exhibition installed at the Trade Fair Palace of the National Gallery in Prague in 2023. Their work has been described by PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art as “conceived on a scale most theatre companies can only dream of.”

Sponsor the Exhibition

Torn Space is seeking sponsorship to support the full realization of this expansive exhibition.

For more information about corporate and individual giving, see our Special Project Sponsorship Packet and contact info@tornspacetheater.com.

Banner image compilation from TST original works “They Kill Things” (2015) and Generation (2023)