From the Bronx to Brooklyn, the second PERFORMA biennial inundates New York with four weeks of performance art events by more than 90 artists, touching down at 50-odd institutions, both established and emerging. Organized by performance art guru RoseLee Goldberg, PERFORMA 07 promises to restore a salient aspect of New York's artistic legacy with a major retrospective of Allan Kaprow, various panel discussions, "late-night get-togethers" at select bars, PERFORMA TV streaming on the Internet, PERFORMA Radio, and even historical re-enactments by Eva and Franco Mattes in the virtual realm of Second Life.

Ten commissioned works anchor the biennial, including an ambitious project by Italian provocateur Francesco Vezzoli, whose one-night, star-studded restaging of Luigi Pirandello's 1917 play Right You Are (If You Think You Are) in the Guggenheim's rotunda kicked off the festival. As with PERFORMA 05, the projected image is important to many artists' work; Daria Martin builds her structuralist film Harpstrings and Lava from improvisational sessions with harpist Zeena Parkins and dancer Nina Fog, while Nathalie Djurberg's new claymation film, performed with live accompaniment, depicts the grisly story of children fending off angry canines.

Dance also plays a central role in many of the commissioned works, including Kelly Nipper's Floyd on the Floor — a hurricane-inspired work with a gigantic parachute — at the legendary Judson Church. In the atrium of 590 Madison Avenue, Mexican artist Carlos Amorales' 400-piece wooden platform, Spider Web Negative (stage), resonates with subsonic frequencies as a feral-costumed Galia Eibenschutz interacts with the sculpture and viewers. At the Hudson Theater, conceptual-dance pioneer-turned-heady filmmaker Yvonne Rainer draws inspiration for RoS Indexical from Stravinsky and Nijinsky's 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring. London-born filmmaker Isaac Julien enlists choreographer Russell Maliphant's troupe to transform three of his multichannel epics — True North, Fantôme Afrique, and Small Boats — into a live performance at BAM.

In a multisensory extravaganza at Performance Space 122, Brooklyn noise-rock band Japanther present a wry rock opera with a set designed by Dan Graham and frenetic dance by Robbinschilds. Sanford Biggers explores the complex legacy of early 20th-century minstrel shows in his multimedia, multi-performer work The Somethin' Suite at the Box, and Adam Pendleton presents an experimental sermon, created with playwright Larry Kramer and poets Paolo Javier and Leslie Scalapino, for the music and spoken-word event The Revival at the Stephan Weiss Studio.

PERFORMA 07 also hosts Beijing-based arts organization Long March Project, which sponsors its own range of events, including The Thunderstorm Is Slowly Approaching by artist Qiu Zhijie, featuring multimedia works and a dragon dance, a series of panels at Harlem's Studio Museum, and conceptualist Xu Zhen's performance In Just a Blink of an Eye at James Cohan Gallery.

-HGM