Performance artist Leeny Sack will appear in a pair of public – and unscripted – onstage therapy sessions in “Therapy as Performance,” a new interdisciplinary series premiering Jan. 19 at The Cherry Artspace in Ithaca. Sara Warner, associate professor of performing and media arts, will serve as “Distinguished Expert” in the production. Tickets are available at https://therapyasperformance.brownpapertickets.com.

Presented consecutively, the two sessions with Sack as the “Constant Client” are conducted by actual therapists Kate Halliday and Jeff Collins. Warner will lead the post-session discussions.

“The conversation with the audience is not separate from the ‘sessions,’ but integral to the structure of the work,” Sack says. “The discussion is a kind of session in itself, for Sara in her ‘role’ as a researcher, scholar, activist, feminist, cultural commentator, art lover [and] compassionate human being, as well as for the audience, who will be invited to speak personally and experientially and to interrogate me, the therapists, and Sara, but mostly themselves.”

As an advocate for public humanities and for scholarship that engages society, Warner’s work has included collaborations with climate scientists and the staging of “patriot acts” (political performances on national holidays) with the Bad (Hombres) and Nasty (Women) Collective.

“I work on the art of activism,” Warner says. “I look at the ways political actors use performance in experiments for social justice and the ways stage actors use the theater as a laboratory for creating new worlds, reimagining notions of community, citizenship, power and justice.”

Warner also is working this semester with performance artist Rhodessa Jones, founding director of the Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women, and Cornell’s newest Rhodes Professor.