TILTED AXES: CLASS ACTION
music for mobile electric guitars

as part of

Art in Odd Places 2026: UTOPIAS

September 26, 3-5pm
14th Street btwn 1st & 3rd Avenues
New York City
more iNFO TBA

Produced by: Peppergreen Media
Music by: Patrick Grant and Tilted Axes: Music for Mobile Electric Guitars
Choreography by: Christopher Caines
Performed by: Patrick Grant, John Ferrari, Angela Babin, Jeremy Nesse, Howie Kenty, Gene Ardor, Chad Ossman, Christopher Caines, Dmitri Shapira, Jason Goldstein, Liz Hogg, Kammy Yedor, Jim Lee, Igor Icaza, Lori Bingel, Dan Gitlin, Jerry Zheng, George Korein, and more TBA

More information: www.tiltedaxes.com • @tiltedaxes • #tiltedaxes

Tilted Axes: Music for Mobile Electric Guitars, created by composer and artistic director Patrick Grant, is an ensemble of electric guitarists and percussionists that transforms streets, parks, galleries, museums, and theaters into immersive musical environments. Performing untethered with battery-powered amplifiers, the musicians invite audiences into an experience where music is living, physical, and shared. Moving continuously through the performance space, they create an environment that is at once ritual, procession, and music theater. Now in its sixteenth season, Tilted Axes continues to bring contemporary music into public life through movement, community, and shared experience.

AiOP 2026: UTOPIAS, is an immersive public art initiative that encourages artists to explore how unconventional art spaces can ignite imagination and foster community engagement. We seek innovative installations, performances, and interactive works that challenge traditional boundaries and inspire collective dreaming. Curated by Arantxa Araujo + Pancho López; with Juliana Maurer + Valentina Zamora, assistant curators; Katya Usvitsky, Producer; Laurie Waxman, Designer; Ross Mabbett, Web Developer; Robin Schatell, Consultant; Michelle Leidecker, Social Media Strategist, and Ed Woodham, Founder & Director.

Program Note

For several years I have been thinking about what feels like a growing absence of a middle within New York City's artistic life. Contemporary culture often seems divided between institutions and individuals, patrons and applicants, insiders and outsiders. Between these poles lies a widening space occupied by artists who do not fit established categories, yet continue to build independent creative lives.

Tilted Axes has always existed within that middle. Our ensemble brings together musicians from diverse musical traditions, economic backgrounds, generations, and professional experiences. We perform not on a stage removed from daily life, but in streets, parks, plazas, and neighborhoods where distinctions of status become less visible and encounters become more direct.

For Art in Odd Places 2026, whose theme is UTOPIAS, I propose Class Action, a new mobile performance that imagines public space as a site where social divisions can momentarily dissolve.

The title is intentionally borrowed from the familiar legal phrase. At first it evokes conflict and litigation. Gradually its meaning shifts. Here, class action becomes people taking action across class boundaries, discovering forms of cooperation that are rarely visible within the cultural structures that ordinarily separate them.

Rather than illustrating a political argument, the performance creates a social situation. Performers move continuously through public space, inviting audiences to travel with them. As people join, leave, mingle, and circulate, conventional distinctions between performer and audience, institution and community, professional and passerby begin to soften. The work proposes that movement itself can become a model for social permeability.

The utopia imagined here is neither technological nor ideological. It is modest, temporary, and embodied. It asks what might happen if public space became a place where artistic value was measured less by pedigree than by participation, curiosity, and shared experience.

Tilted Axes has long explored music as procession, encounter, and collective ritual. Tilted Axes: Class Action extends that practice by asking whether movement through a city can also become movement across invisible social boundaries. Rather than offering solutions, the work invites participants to inhabit, if only briefly, a different way of being together. — PG NYC