The Festival is now less than a week away – full schedule can be found here. Join us and check out what some of the world’s most amazing contemporary performing artists have in store for audiences next season. You don’t want to miss this!
DIGITAL TRACK
Steve Cuiffo
*Digital Effects* [performed with the fingers]
“Mr. Cuiffo is an appealingly hipster performer…” – -JASON ZINOMAN, New York Times
*Digital Effects* [performed with the fingers] is an evening of sleight of hand magic with playing cards. A “recital of magic” using only two hands and a deck of cards. The stories told are abstract, the patterns are unique, the forms are seductive. Legerdemain and prestidigitation. The performance is a show of skill in performing conjuring tricks with the hands; a demonstration of deceitful cleverness. The hypnotic state of sleight of hand as dance sometimes combined with music and words where the full potential of a simple act of magic is realized. i.e Difficult and strange things wrought with cards.
Steve Cuiffo is an actor and magician. Credits include: Hell Meets Henry Halfway (Pig Iron Theatre); Fluke (Radiohole); Major Bang (Foundry Theater); Lenny Bruce (Spiegel Tent, Joe’s Pub); Rinne Groff’s Orange, Lemon, Egg, Canary (P.S. 122); Lypinska’s Passion of the Crawford; Mark Crispin Miller’s Patriot Act (New York Theatre Workshop); Amazing Russello (Joe’s Pub); Brace Up!, North Atlantic (Wooster Group); David Blaine’s Television Specials (Consultant).
William Cusick
Welcome To Nowhere (bullet hole road)
“Easily one of the best plays I’ve seen this year. I’ve never seen anything like this on the stage… so compelling, so haunting, so thoroughly absorbing.” – Nytheater.com
Work-In-Progress showing of test footage excerpts the film adaptation of the stage production by Temporary Distortion. The stage production was originally written and directed by Kenneth Collins and the video designed, shot, and edited by William Cusick. The film version of Welcome To Nowhere is adapted for the screen, directed, and shot by William Cusick, with production design by Jon Weiss, and costume design by TaraFawn Marek. The film stars the stage performers from the Temporary Distortion acting company, including Ben Beckley, Stacey Collins, Brian Greer, and Lorraine Mattox. The stage production originally premiered in 2007 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, NY.
William Cusick is a video projections designer and filmmaker living in New York City. His projection designs for theater, opera, and dance have been seen across the US, Europe, and Cananda. Current international productions include Rock The Ballet (touring), The Shoe of Manitu (Berlin), and Welcome To Nowhere (touring). Past NYC productions include Arjuna’s Dilemma (BAM Next Wave), The Coast of Utopia (LCT), The Clean House (LCT), and Dead City (New Georges at 3LD).
Upcoming: Welcome to Nowhere (the live stage play) continues to tour Europe through May 2010.
John Jesurun
Liz One
Black-Eyed Susan plays Elizabeth I of England as revealed through her private diaries. She struggles with a revolving set of presences to disentangle, un-write and finally rewrite her own biography. These intensely reflected histories include her perceptions regarding her five estranged children, their fathers, her own father, her hidden relationship with Buddhism and finally her disastrous attempt to invade North Africa. She inter-reacts with the kaleidoscopic array of ideas and characters through Jesurun’s multi-dimensional use of language and video. Jesurun and Black-Eyed Susan are long time collaborators having first worked together in Jesurun’s 1984 production of Red House.
Black-Eyed Susan was an original member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. She has appeared in work by Ethyl Eichelberger, Stuart Sherman, Mabou Mines, Roslyn Drexler, Jim Neu, Charles Allcroft, Stephanie Fleischmann, John Jahnke.
John Jesurun: Writer,Director,Designer. Chang in a Void Moon, Deep Sleep,Faust/How I Rose. Guggenheim, MacArthur, Rockefeller fellowships. Recent work: Philoktetes /Soho Rep,Harry Partch’s Opera Delusion of the Fury/Japan Society. Firefall/Dance Theater Workshop. Two new collections of texts on PAJ and NoPassport Press.
Upcoming: Liz One runs October 14 – 21 2009 at the Chocolate Factory Theater.
David Michalek
Screening + Conversation with Jodi Melnick
David Michalek is an artist who takes the concept and techniques of portraiture as the starting points for the creation of his works, on both a large and small-scale, in a range of mediums. While studying English Literature at UCLA, David worked as an assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he began his professional photographic career, working regularly as a portrait artist for publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. In the late 1990’s he redirected his focus on developing projects that merge photo and video based work with performance practice, installation, text and music. His solo and collaborative work has been shown nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions or performances at The Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, Yale University, Dartmouth University, Lincoln Center Festival, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and the Venice Biennale. He has collaborated with director Peter Sellars on two staged works: Kafka Fragments, presented as part of Carnegie Hall’s 2005-06 season; and St. Franois d’Assise, presented at the Salzburg Festival and Paris Opera. He is a visiting faculty member at Yale Divinity School, where he lectures on religion and the arts. David Michalek lives in New York with his wife Wendy Whelan, principal dancer of New York City Ballet.
HYBRID TRACK
Brian Rogers/The Chocolate Factory
Selective Memory
“smart, beautiful, totally topical, and timeless, and one of the best multimedia performances I’ve seen this century” – Brian McCormick, Gay City News
Selective Memory is a real time video performance about nostalgia for relationships that never took place, events which never happened; the soundtrack to a film which was never made, but which everyone remembers; exploiting the misappropriation of “real” sounds and images to confound, distort, remake and ultimately erase the truth. Inspired by William Eggleston’s video pieces, especially Stranded in Canton, and the processed ambient music of Christian Fennesz and Stars of the Lid – in which the source material and instrumentation used to create the music is processed and recontextualized to the point of near impenetrability – music which feels as if it comes from nothing and is about nothing but around which a certain undeniable poignancy settles like fog.
Brian Rogers – Concept, Direction, Choreography, Sound, Video; Madeline Best – Video; Sheila Lewandowski – Performance; Yoko Myoi – Performance
The Obie Award-winning Chocolate Factory Theater supports the creation of new work in a variety of disciplines including theater, dance, music, multimedia and the visual arts. The Factory’s 5,000 square foot facility is home to new work by the company’s founding artists; and provides support to visiting artists in the form of multi-week creative residencies and performances. Since its first season in Fall 2005, the Visiting Artist Program (curated by Artistic Director Brian Rogers) has become a leading incubator for new developments in experimental performance.
Upcoming: Work in progress showings at The Chocolate Factory: November 2009 / February 2010
Dan Safer/Witness Relocation
The Panic Show
“..a dance-theater anarchist’s utopia” Performing Arts Journal (Rat Experiment)
The Panic Show dives into Panic. Panic attacks, mass hysteria, the stress of being late to the airport, trying to “get a hold of yourself”, fight or flight, and self help and relaxations techniques, as well as material inspired by “Panic Room”, that mess of a film starring Jodie Foster. It is a wild ride with dances, dark confessions, confetti blown through a fan, people getting shoved inside boxes, and real time performance tasks that both refer to panic and actually cause it in the performers.
Witness Relocation combines dance & theater with the energy of a rock show, exploding contemporary culture into intensely physical, outrageous, poetic, and sometimes brutal performances in order to question the assumptions of the modern day experience. The company formed in 2000 and is led by director/choreographer Dan Safer. They’ve created over ten original productions, engaged in a two year residency at the renowned Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok, and performed in theaters, nightclubs, rock videos, and on a Thai TV Soap Opera. They are based in New York City, and work internationally.
Upcoming: The Panic Show- excerpt premiere at Bumbershoot Festival in September 09, full length version premiere at DNA in November 09.
Phil Soltanoff/Mad Dog Experimental
LA Party
“You will not see a more captivating piece of theatre this year,” declared Jasper Rees…. “[a] grand claim, but, I can now attest, far from a mistaken one. Those who don’t manage to see this show will, alas, have missed out on a thing of infinite jest and beauty.” – The London Daily Telegraph; MORE OR LESS, INFINITY
Lately, Phil Soltanoff has been very interested in how people and technology interact. His latest work, i/o — a live art piece in collaboration with Joe Diebes—fuses sound installation, physical theatre, and opera to explore how people and machines co-exist today. This excerpt for Prelude09 was purely the result of an interest—David Barlow’s writing and a simple video technology—fueled by a curiosity; What will happen if we smash these two things together? It is an experiment and a fragment rather than an episode for a larger work.
Phil Soltanoff- Director, David Barlow- Writer, Performer, Krissy Oakes- Performer, Ilan Bachrach- Performer, Stephen Brady- Performer, Claire Siebers- Performer
Phil Soltanoff’s latest creation is i/o, a collaboration with sound artist Joe Diebes. Mr. Soltanoff has created two works in collaboration with CIE111: PLAN B and MORE OR LESS, INFINITY which have performed at many theatres around the world including Kampnagel (Hamburg), Eurokaz Festival (Zagreb), Vidy Theatre (Lausanne), Maison de la Danse (Lyon), Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), Theatre de la Ville (Paris), BITEF (Belgrade) and the New Victory Theatre (NYC) among others.. Mr. Soltanoff was nominated for a Moliere Award in 2007.
Upcoming: PLAN B tours India in December 2009, and Hong Kong in April 2010; A new work to be created with The Center Theatre Group in LA, October 2010.
Adrienne Truscott
Bermuda ($$)
“Bawdy, bold, and bizarre movement; an exercise in existentialism befitting of Beckett.” Vanessa Manko, DANCE MAGAZINE
AdrienneTruscott has been investigating the process and effects of ‘disappearing’ in her recent choreography and set installation. In her new work, Bermuda ($$), to be presented for three weeks at PS122 in Spring 2010, Truscott further pursues the effects of ‘disappearing’ .
Featuring: Adrienne Truscott, Neal Medlyn and Carmine Covelli
Adrienne Truscott has been performing and creating diverse work in NYC for the last 15 years. Her collaboration with Tanya Gagne, The Wau Wau Sisters, tours the world with reckless abandon, sampling cocktails and communities far and wide. As a performer, she has worked with the great Deborah Hay, David Neumann, Sarah Michelson, Circus Amok, Russian ex-pat art pranksters Khomar and Melamid, and collaborates regularly with Neal Medlyn, Kenny Mellman and Carmine Covelli. She looks forward to a nice long run in the downstairs theater at PS122 in the Spring of 2010.
Upcoming: PS122 May 26 – June 13, 2010
POLITICAL TRACK
Marina Abramović
“The godmother of performance art.” Telegraph, London.
Prelude 09 is thrilled to host legendary performance artist Marina Abramović in a discussion regarding her monumental retrospective opening at The Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2010.
From the MoMA website:
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present traces the prolific career of Marina Abramović (Yugoslavian, b. 1946) with approximately fifty works spanning over three decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). In an endeavor to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience, the exhibition includes the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting. In addition, a new, original work performed by Abramović will mark the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. All performances, one of which involves viewer participation, will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes, to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.
Upcoming: March 14th – May 31st 2010 – ” MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT ” – MoMA – New York, US.
Bruce High Quality Foundation
Art History with Benefits
“One word comes to mind when considering the Foundation: omnivorous.”- The Brooklyn Rail
Art History with Benefits continues a series of educational works produced by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. These works aim to invest educational materials with the creative metaphors of art, to further the agenda of a regenerative pedagogy, and liberate arts education from the ballistics of professionalism. They were conceived within the bigger set of educational concerns that contextualize the opening of the BHQFU, a tuition-free, unaccredited art school starting this fall in NYC.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation, the official arbiter of the estate of Bruce High Quality, is dedicated to the preservation of the legacy of the late social sculptor, Bruce High Quality. In the spirit of the life and work of Bruce High Quality, we aspire to invest the experience of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man’s desiring. Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions.
Upcoming: CABAC at P.S.1 conference on contemporary fictions, 7pm, October 1st; Susan Inglett Gallery, December 4; Free teen night at MoMA. January 15th.
Andrew Dinwiddie
Get Mad at Sin!
“I found myself experiencing Swaggart’s surprisingly intelligent preaching through Dinwiddie’s full-throated and full-bodied performance, sans irony, sans modern commentary. Obsessive, yes; not exactly dance, maybe; but it’s an absolutely concentrated experience all the same, with the artist’s desire to show you the rest of his talents and influences refreshingly reduced to nil.” Lightsey Darst, MNArtists.com
Get Mad at Sin! is “one of the most hard hitting messages to the youth of America that you have ever heard. This message pulls no punches, it tells it just like it is, dealing with the problems of entertainment, rock and roll music, sex and a host of other problems that beset our youth today. Jimmy Swaggart, in this dynamic message, deals with these problems, and thousands of young people all over America have been touched by the Spirit of God and lives have changed under this sermon.”
Andrew Dinwiddie’s most recent full-length production, The Accursed Items, was presented in 2008 at the Ontological-Hysterical Theater. He’s a member of David Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group. He is a curator of the acclaimed performance series Catch, which recently presented the sold-out WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!! at PS122. He’s currently developing Get Mad at Sin! with Jeff Larson, which will be presented at the Chocolate Factory in May 2010.
Upcoming: Get Mad at Sin! May 2010 at the Chocolate Factory
Aaron Landsman
Appointment
“…dry, subversive wit.” Charles Isherwood, The New York Times, Open House
Appointment is a series of repeatable 12-15 minute performance works staged in small offices for one or two performers and two viewers at a time. Landsman will develop Appointment over the next two to three years in multiple locations, through collaborations with theater and dance companies, individual artists, and students at live art training programs; the next installment takes place all over Oslo, Norway in March 2010. Eventually, Landsman hopes to coordinate all these Appointments via a website, from which anyone with a bright idea can download instructions and create his or her own appointment.
With: Aaron Landsman, Brent Green, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sibyl Kempson
Aaron Landsman is a playwright and actor whose works are often staged in intimate, quotidian spaces. His most recent piece, Open House was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre and performed in 24 NYC apartments. Previous works include What You’ve Done, in a Houston Row House, Love Story, on an iPod and in a gallery in Austin, and Desk, staged in an abandoned midtown office. Aaron is a performer with Elevator Repair Service
Upcoming: December 2009 – Special Tonight, (reading) University Settlment, NYC; March/April 2010 – Appointment, TITAN, Oslo, Norway.
David Levine
“Enraging and Engaging” — Time Out New York
Levine’s presentation will focus on unsolicited actors’ headshots and cover letters. Specific topics to be covered: the history of the headshot, the economy of the headshot, the demonic & vengeful nature of those hopeful stares, the tragic and transcendent ontology of the unsolicited submission.
DAVID LEVINE’s work encompasses performance, theater, installation, and video. His projects, including BAUERNTHEATER and VENICE SAVED: A SEMINAR, have been seen at Documenta XII [with CABINET magazine], Gavin Brown’s Enterprise@Passerby [NYC], Galerie Feinkost, Galerie Magnus Mueller [Berlin], HAU2 [Berlin], PS122 [NYC], the Sundance Theater Lab, the Vineyard theater, Primary Stages, and the Atlantic. His work has been featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES, ARTFORUM, THEATER, ART IN AMERICA, BOMB, CABINET, THEATER HEUTE, ART REVIEW, DIE ZEIT, TDR, THE VILLAGE VOICE, TIME OUT, and the BELIEVER, and has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kulturstiftung Des Bundes, and Etants Donnes/French Fund for Performance. His exhibition HOPEFUL will be on view at Cabinet Magazine’s Exhibition space from October 3-24.
Upcoming: HOPEFUL; Cabinet Exhibition Space, 300 Nevins Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn; HABIT, a new project, will be developed at the Water Mill Center next spring, and premiere in Toronto’s Luminato Festival — June 11- 20, 2010.
BRICOLAGE TRACK
The Living Theatre
Red Noir
“The most radical, uncompromising, and experimental group in American theatrical history.” – John Tyell
Red Noir is a detective thriller in genre, based on the film noir techniques and themes. It is also to serve as an anthem for non-violent anarchy. The play’s intention is to outdate and displace violence from the theatre to serve as an example of a general need for non-violence.
With: Judith Malina, Brad Burgess, Thomas Walker, Anthony Sisco, Eno Edet, Yasemin Ozumerzifon, Eric Olson, Maia Larraz
The Living Theatre, founded in 1947, has staged nearly a hundred productions, performed in nine languages in twenty-nine countries on five continents—a unique body of work that has influenced theater the world over. In 2007, The Living Theatre opened a new theatre at 21 Clinton Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The decision to return to the Lower East Side reflects the company’s continuing faith in that neighborhood as a vibrant community in downtown Manhattan, without doubt a fertile landscape to cultivate new ideas in art and politics.
Upcoming: Red Noir opens in December and will run for 6 weeks.
Object Collection
Gun Sale
“It’s shows like this that shut down the NEA…” Backstage
Gun Sale is a tabletop theater/music performance piece for objects, army figures, homemade experiments, electronic music and vocal processing. Originally conceived as a duo performance for whatever could fit in a suitcase, it was presented in galleries and art spaces in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Fukuoka during Object Collection’s June 2009 tour to Japan. The piece works with Object Collection’s concerns of simultaneity, densely layered material, and the manipulation of objects and processes, but on a very small scale in contrast to their larger operas and projects. Gun Sale been expanded for this performance to include veteran OC collaborators.
Object Collection is a New York based performance group founded in 2004 by writer/director Kara Feely and composer/musician Travis Just. The group presents hybrid theater-music performances on both a large and small scale. Selected projects include: the opera Problem Radical(s) (PS122, 2009), Eight Miles High (Japan Tour, 2008), Experimental Music Series (Ontological Theater, 2008), FAMOUS ACTORS (Ontological Theater, 2007), the writing and music series Chop Shop (Berlin, 2006), and L-shaped… (Podewil, Berlin, 2006).
Upcoming: The Geometry, The Chocolate Factory Theatre, March 2010
Radiohole
WHA!? Whatever, Heaven Allows
WHA!? Whatever, Heaven Allows bends the theatrical melodrama taking as it’s point of reference Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film All that Heaven Allows and exploring the language and themes of Paradise Lost.
Featuring: Eric Dyer, Erin Douglass, Maggie Hoffman, Joseph Silovsky, Mark Jaynes, Aaron Harrow.
Radiohole is a collaborative founded in 1998 by Maggie Hoffman, Scott Halvorsen Gillette, Erin Douglass and Eric Dyer. The company is based in Brooklyn. Radiohole has performed at PS122, the Collapsable Hole and around Europe. It’s most recent work, ANGER/ NATION, was performed at the Kitchen in September 2008. WHA!? Whatever, Heaven Allows is the companies 10th work. Radiohole’s work is situated in the liminal space between theater, art and party. The company is know for making elaborate use of high technology in the lowest manner.
Upcoming: January 14-16 Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis); February 12-13 Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburg); March PS 122; October UCLA Live Arts Festival (L.A.)
Jay Scheib
Bellona, Destroyer of Cities
“Mixing multimedia with deadpan-cool (and very sexy) actors, Scheib is forging new ways of seeing drama.” – “The Best New York Theater Directors” Time Out New York, March 2009
Following Untitled Mars, the first installment of his trilogy: Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems, Jay Scheib directs Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, based on Samuel Delany’s epic science-fiction masterpiece Dhalgren. A second moon has appeared in the sky, the sun swells, and somehow this once mediocre city is now filled with burning buildings, sexual outlaws, and streets that rearrange themselves— and about to be forgotten forever.
Featuring: Jay Scheib, Director; Tanya Selvaratnam, Producer; Peter Ksander, Scenic Design; Miranda k Hardy, Light; Oana Botez Ban, Clothes; Catherine McCurry, Sound; Performed by Sarita Choudhury, Caleb Hammond, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Jon Morris, April Sweeney, Natalie Thomas, and Greg Zuccolo.
Jay Scheib’s upcoming productions include Evan Ziporyn’s new opera A House in Bali at Cal Performances in Berkeley, Puntila und sein Knecht Matti at Theater Augsburg, Germany and Bellona, Destroyer of Cities at The Kitchen in New York. Recent productions in New York include the Obie Award-winning Untitled Mars (This Title May Change), This Place is a Desert, and Addicted to Bad Ideas. Scheib is Associate Professor of Theater at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Upcoming: March 25-April 4, 2010 at The Kitchen/NYC, Available for worldwide tour after April 2010.
Theatre of a Two-headed Calf
Trifles
“an infectious, full-throttle sense of daring and adventure in increasingly low supply below 14th Street.” The New York Times
The Theater of a Two-headed Calf explores the quiet but transgressive unfolding of Trifles, the 1916 proto-feminist one-act by Provincetown Player co-founder, Susan Glaspell.
The Theater of a Two-headed Calf was founded in 1999 by director Brooke O’Harra and composer Brendan Connelly. They have been a resident company at La MaMa, E.T.C. since 2001 where they created Tumor Brainiowicz, The Mother, Tom Thumb the Great, Major Barbara and the wildly popular Room for Cream, performed by the Two-headed Calf’s new appendage, The Dyke Division. In 2007, along with the HERE Arts Center, they presented Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, which received an Obie Award for actress Heidi Schreck and an Obie grant for the company. They have also created work at PS122, The Perishable and the Soho Rep Studio. Brooke, Brendan and company member Peter Ksander have all received the TCG/NEA Grant for Career Development. Their next work will premiere at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in January 2010.
Upcoming: Trifles, Ontological-Hysteric Theater: opens January 27th. 2010.
POETICS TRACK
Erin Courtney
A Map of Virtue
“It’s Courtney’s nuanced script that allow the actors to shine… Her lighthearted dark comedy is powered not by tired truisms of a disaffected wife’s psyche, but by seismic social disconnection.” Jessica Branch, Time Out (New York City), Demon Baby
A Map of Virtue is a symmetrical play in which a bird statue guides us through a story of coincidence, tragedy and friendship. Part interview, part comedy, part strange middle of the night horror, a group of friends encounter evil and dissect their own responses to it.
Playwright- Erin Courtney, Director- Ken Rus Schmoll
Erin Courtney and Ken Rus Schmoll have collaborated on her plays Demon Baby (Clubbed Thumb) and Alice the Magnet (in its monodrama form, BRIC Studio). They are currently working on her collage/dance/theater piece Black Cat Lost, which was commissioned by Soho Rep and performed in their studio series. A Map of Virtue is slated to be 13P’s thirteenth production in late 2011.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
The Change
A “new” “play” about a “man” and his “coffee shop” and his “Negro” “employee.” Directed by Stephen Brackett.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays include The Change, Neighbors, Thirst, Zoo, Heart!!!, and Content. His work has been/will be seen at the Prelude Festival (2008 and 2009), The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Soho Rep, PS122, McCarter Theatre, Dixon Place, and Links Hall. He is a former NYTW Playwriting fellow, an alum of the Soho Rep Writers/Directors Lab, and a member of the Ars Nova Playgroup and the Public Theatre Emerging Writers Group. He also holds an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU.
Stephen Brackett’s recent credits include Confidence Man with Woodshed Collective, Whore and The Ones That Flutter (Summer Play Festival/Public Theater), Dan Fishback’s You Will Experience Silence (Dixon Place), Alice Wakeman by Corn Mo and .357 Lover (Ars Nova), Bekah Brunstetter’s Real (Abingdon Theater) and Fucking Art (Samuel French OOB Festival Winner), The Reinstitution of Slavery (Clubbed Thumb’s Constitutional Convention), Ixomia (Crown Point Festival), Bixby Elliot’s PN1923.45LS01 Volume 2 (FringeNY), 1.1-1.7 (WMC), Week 34 of 365 Days/365 Plays (The Public Theater’s Shakespeare Lab), No Date: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz and Kilroy Was Here (Williamstown Workshop). In 2002 he co-founded the theater company the Bushwick Hotel with playwright Rachel Shukert; their collaborations include Johnny Apple@#%*er (Ice Factory), Bloody Mary (nominated for 4 NYIT Awards), Sequins for Satan (Galapagos Art Space) and The Blackstone Hotel (The Culture Project). Stephen was the Assistant Director of Passing Strange at the Public and Belasco Theaters. He is a founding member of 425 D Director’s Lab. Upcoming work: The Mattachine Project at Abrons Art Center, FUE at NYMF and The Private Life of Inga Snyder with the Columbia University Graduate Playwriting Program.
Kristen Kosmas
This from Cloudland
“This is not what you think it is, it’s— Imagine a radio. Now imagine ten radios.”
Thirty-five hundred feet directly below the world’s only known micro-nation, two young lovers are holding themselves hostage while someone falls off a high wire and someone else has their head stuck in the mouth of a bear. This From Cloudland is a tender onslaught of text-for-speaking featuring Elizabeth Kenny, Kristen Kosmas, and Christopher Petite as the Spooler of Thread, the Innocent Bystander, the Assembler of Envelopes, and Everybody Else in this benevolent labyrinth where everyone stands before the Origin of the World, eating Cuban sandwiches, drinking sparkling lemonade, and looking for the words for everything.
Elizabeth Kenny is a Seattle actor who has performed at the Seattle Rep, The Empty Space, and ACT. She was a company member of Printer’s Devil Theater from 1995 to 1998. In 1998, she became an Artistic Associate at Seattle’s New City Theater, performing in a number of plays including Trouble in the City of Desire, Big Boss, and T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton in the Salon Series. In 2004 she received a Seattle Times Footlight Award for outstanding performance for her work in Neil Labute’s Bash. She followed that performance with an extended run of Ki Gottberg’s sleeper hit The Compendium of Nastiness. Last spring she performed The Last Letter, from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, at New City Theater.
Kristen Kosmas is a writer and performer. She has had works commissioned by Performance Space 122, Seattle University’s SITE Specific, Dixon Place, and the New City Theater. Her plays include Hello Failure, H-O-R-S-E, Chapter of Accidents, The Mayor of Baltimore, Anthem, and Palomino. She is the writer and performer of four critically acclaimed solo shows, The Scandal!, Slip, Again, and Blah Blah Fuckin Blah, which have been performed at numerous venues in New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, and Chicago. Forthcoming publications include Hello Failure (Ugly Duckling Presse), This From Cloudland (Play A Journal of Plays), and The Mayor of Baltimore & Anthem (53rd State). Kristen is a member of the Brooklyn-based collective, the Ladies Auxiliary Playwriting Team.
Christopher Petit is a director, actor, and teacher. In Seattle he has worked for the Seattle Rep, the Seattle Children’s Theater, UMO Ensemble, and The Group Theater. He was the founding Artistic Director of the Open Circle Theater Company, and an artistic associate for One World Theater. In New York his work as a director has been seen at notable venues including: the Vineyard Theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, Here Arts Center, Abingdon Theater, Mile Square Theater, and The Upright Citizens Brigade. He holds an MFA in Directing from Columbia University, and a BFA in Acting from Rutgers University. He has taught at the University of Arkansas, Rutgers University, Northern Illinois University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater at Whitman College.
NYC Players / Christina Masciotti
Vision Disturbance
At the heart of Vision Disturbance, is Mondo, a Greek exile who loses vision in one eye along with her husband. The stress of her impending divorce triggers an eye disorder that robs her of the ability to perceive depth. The resulting flatness of her two-dimensional world compounds the alienation of her freshly failed marriage. The small Pennsylvania town where she has been living for the past 13 years, offers only one specialist with a practice on the brink of dissolve, and an inspired, if unconventional, approach to healing.
Christina Masciotti (Playwright) studied playwriting at Brown University and holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU. She has developed her work at The New Group, and in artist residencies at Chashama, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Lower East Side Tenement Museum Theater. Her work has been presented in New York at HERE, Performance Space 122, Dixon Place, the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, and the International Theatre Institute in Athens, Greece. She has been a finalist for the Princess Grace Award, and has been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and The Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award. She is currently a Berks County Community Foundation SPA Fund Fellow.
Richard Maxwell (Director) studied acting at Illinois State University and began his professional career with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. While in Chicago, he became a co-founder and a director of the Cook County Theater Department. Maxwell’s work has been presented in over sixteen countries. Richard Maxwell is the Artistic Director of the New York City Players. His most recent play, People Without History, was published in the September 2009 issue of American Theater Magazine.
AMAZING ARTISTS AT PRELUDE09!
The Festival is now less than a week away – full schedule can be found here. Join us and check out what some of the world’s most amazing contemporary performing artists have in store for audiences next season. You don’t want to miss this!
DIGITAL TRACK
Steve Cuiffo
*Digital Effects* [performed with the fingers]
“Mr. Cuiffo is an appealingly hipster performer…” – -JASON ZINOMAN, New York Times
*Digital Effects* [performed with the fingers] is an evening of sleight of hand magic with playing cards. A “recital of magic” using only two hands and a deck of cards. The stories told are abstract, the patterns are unique, the forms are seductive. Legerdemain and prestidigitation. The performance is a show of skill in performing conjuring tricks with the hands; a demonstration of deceitful cleverness. The hypnotic state of sleight of hand as dance sometimes combined with music and words where the full potential of a simple act of magic is realized. i.e Difficult and strange things wrought with cards.
Steve Cuiffo is an actor and magician. Credits include: Hell Meets Henry Halfway (Pig Iron Theatre); Fluke (Radiohole); Major Bang (Foundry Theater); Lenny Bruce (Spiegel Tent, Joe’s Pub); Rinne Groff’s Orange, Lemon, Egg, Canary (P.S. 122); Lypinska’s Passion of the Crawford; Mark Crispin Miller’s Patriot Act (New York Theatre Workshop); Amazing Russello (Joe’s Pub); Brace Up!, North Atlantic (Wooster Group); David Blaine’s Television Specials (Consultant).
William Cusick
Welcome To Nowhere (bullet hole road)
“Easily one of the best plays I’ve seen this year. I’ve never seen anything like this on the stage… so compelling, so haunting, so thoroughly absorbing.” – Nytheater.com
Work-In-Progress showing of test footage excerpts the film adaptation of the stage production by Temporary Distortion. The stage production was originally written and directed by Kenneth Collins and the video designed, shot, and edited by William Cusick. The film version of Welcome To Nowhere is adapted for the screen, directed, and shot by William Cusick, with production design by Jon Weiss, and costume design by TaraFawn Marek. The film stars the stage performers from the Temporary Distortion acting company, including Ben Beckley, Stacey Collins, Brian Greer, and Lorraine Mattox. The stage production originally premiered in 2007 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, NY.
William Cusick is a video projections designer and filmmaker living in New York City. His projection designs for theater, opera, and dance have been seen across the US, Europe, and Cananda. Current international productions include Rock The Ballet (touring), The Shoe of Manitu (Berlin), and Welcome To Nowhere (touring). Past NYC productions include Arjuna’s Dilemma (BAM Next Wave), The Coast of Utopia (LCT), The Clean House (LCT), and Dead City (New Georges at 3LD).
Upcoming: Welcome to Nowhere (the live stage play) continues to tour Europe through May 2010.
John Jesurun
Liz One
Black-Eyed Susan plays Elizabeth I of England as revealed through her private diaries. She struggles with a revolving set of presences to disentangle, un-write and finally rewrite her own biography. These intensely reflected histories include her perceptions regarding her five estranged children, their fathers, her own father, her hidden relationship with Buddhism and finally her disastrous attempt to invade North Africa. She inter-reacts with the kaleidoscopic array of ideas and characters through Jesurun’s multi-dimensional use of language and video. Jesurun and Black-Eyed Susan are long time collaborators having first worked together in Jesurun’s 1984 production of Red House.
Black-Eyed Susan was an original member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. She has appeared in work by Ethyl Eichelberger, Stuart Sherman, Mabou Mines, Roslyn Drexler, Jim Neu, Charles Allcroft, Stephanie Fleischmann, John Jahnke.
John Jesurun: Writer,Director,Designer. Chang in a Void Moon, Deep Sleep,Faust/How I Rose. Guggenheim, MacArthur, Rockefeller fellowships. Recent work: Philoktetes /Soho Rep,Harry Partch’s Opera Delusion of the Fury/Japan Society. Firefall/Dance Theater Workshop. Two new collections of texts on PAJ and NoPassport Press.
Upcoming: Liz One runs October 14 – 21 2009 at the Chocolate Factory Theater.
David Michalek
Screening + Conversation with Jodi Melnick
David Michalek is an artist who takes the concept and techniques of portraiture as the starting points for the creation of his works, on both a large and small-scale, in a range of mediums. While studying English Literature at UCLA, David worked as an assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he began his professional photographic career, working regularly as a portrait artist for publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. In the late 1990’s he redirected his focus on developing projects that merge photo and video based work with performance practice, installation, text and music. His solo and collaborative work has been shown nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions or performances at The Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, Yale University, Dartmouth University, Lincoln Center Festival, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and the Venice Biennale. He has collaborated with director Peter Sellars on two staged works: Kafka Fragments, presented as part of Carnegie Hall’s 2005-06 season; and St. Franois d’Assise, presented at the Salzburg Festival and Paris Opera. He is a visiting faculty member at Yale Divinity School, where he lectures on religion and the arts. David Michalek lives in New York with his wife Wendy Whelan, principal dancer of New York City Ballet.
HYBRID TRACK
Brian Rogers/The Chocolate Factory
Selective Memory
“smart, beautiful, totally topical, and timeless, and one of the best multimedia performances I’ve seen this century” – Brian McCormick, Gay City News
Selective Memory is a real time video performance about nostalgia for relationships that never took place, events which never happened; the soundtrack to a film which was never made, but which everyone remembers; exploiting the misappropriation of “real” sounds and images to confound, distort, remake and ultimately erase the truth. Inspired by William Eggleston’s video pieces, especially Stranded in Canton, and the processed ambient music of Christian Fennesz and Stars of the Lid – in which the source material and instrumentation used to create the music is processed and recontextualized to the point of near impenetrability – music which feels as if it comes from nothing and is about nothing but around which a certain undeniable poignancy settles like fog.
Brian Rogers – Concept, Direction, Choreography, Sound, Video; Madeline Best – Video; Sheila Lewandowski – Performance; Yoko Myoi – Performance
The Obie Award-winning Chocolate Factory Theater supports the creation of new work in a variety of disciplines including theater, dance, music, multimedia and the visual arts. The Factory’s 5,000 square foot facility is home to new work by the company’s founding artists; and provides support to visiting artists in the form of multi-week creative residencies and performances. Since its first season in Fall 2005, the Visiting Artist Program (curated by Artistic Director Brian Rogers) has become a leading incubator for new developments in experimental performance.
Upcoming: Work in progress showings at The Chocolate Factory: November 2009 / February 2010
Dan Safer/Witness Relocation
The Panic Show
“..a dance-theater anarchist’s utopia” Performing Arts Journal (Rat Experiment)
The Panic Show dives into Panic. Panic attacks, mass hysteria, the stress of being late to the airport, trying to “get a hold of yourself”, fight or flight, and self help and relaxations techniques, as well as material inspired by “Panic Room”, that mess of a film starring Jodie Foster. It is a wild ride with dances, dark confessions, confetti blown through a fan, people getting shoved inside boxes, and real time performance tasks that both refer to panic and actually cause it in the performers.
Witness Relocation combines dance & theater with the energy of a rock show, exploding contemporary culture into intensely physical, outrageous, poetic, and sometimes brutal performances in order to question the assumptions of the modern day experience. The company formed in 2000 and is led by director/choreographer Dan Safer. They’ve created over ten original productions, engaged in a two year residency at the renowned Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok, and performed in theaters, nightclubs, rock videos, and on a Thai TV Soap Opera. They are based in New York City, and work internationally.
Upcoming: The Panic Show- excerpt premiere at Bumbershoot Festival in September 09, full length version premiere at DNA in November 09.
Phil Soltanoff/Mad Dog Experimental
LA Party
“You will not see a more captivating piece of theatre this year,” declared Jasper Rees…. “[a] grand claim, but, I can now attest, far from a mistaken one. Those who don’t manage to see this show will, alas, have missed out on a thing of infinite jest and beauty.” – The London Daily Telegraph; MORE OR LESS, INFINITY
Lately, Phil Soltanoff has been very interested in how people and technology interact. His latest work, i/o — a live art piece in collaboration with Joe Diebes—fuses sound installation, physical theatre, and opera to explore how people and machines co-exist today. This excerpt for Prelude09 was purely the result of an interest—David Barlow’s writing and a simple video technology—fueled by a curiosity; What will happen if we smash these two things together? It is an experiment and a fragment rather than an episode for a larger work.
Phil Soltanoff- Director, David Barlow- Writer, Performer, Krissy Oakes- Performer, Ilan Bachrach- Performer, Stephen Brady- Performer, Claire Siebers- Performer
Phil Soltanoff’s latest creation is i/o, a collaboration with sound artist Joe Diebes. Mr. Soltanoff has created two works in collaboration with CIE111: PLAN B and MORE OR LESS, INFINITY which have performed at many theatres around the world including Kampnagel (Hamburg), Eurokaz Festival (Zagreb), Vidy Theatre (Lausanne), Maison de la Danse (Lyon), Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), Theatre de la Ville (Paris), BITEF (Belgrade) and the New Victory Theatre (NYC) among others.. Mr. Soltanoff was nominated for a Moliere Award in 2007.
Upcoming: PLAN B tours India in December 2009, and Hong Kong in April 2010; A new work to be created with The Center Theatre Group in LA, October 2010.
Adrienne Truscott
Bermuda ($$)
“Bawdy, bold, and bizarre movement; an exercise in existentialism befitting of Beckett.” Vanessa Manko, DANCE MAGAZINE
AdrienneTruscott has been investigating the process and effects of ‘disappearing’ in her recent choreography and set installation. In her new work, Bermuda ($$), to be presented for three weeks at PS122 in Spring 2010, Truscott further pursues the effects of ‘disappearing’ .
Featuring: Adrienne Truscott, Neal Medlyn and Carmine Covelli
Adrienne Truscott has been performing and creating diverse work in NYC for the last 15 years. Her collaboration with Tanya Gagne, The Wau Wau Sisters, tours the world with reckless abandon, sampling cocktails and communities far and wide. As a performer, she has worked with the great Deborah Hay, David Neumann, Sarah Michelson, Circus Amok, Russian ex-pat art pranksters Khomar and Melamid, and collaborates regularly with Neal Medlyn, Kenny Mellman and Carmine Covelli. She looks forward to a nice long run in the downstairs theater at PS122 in the Spring of 2010.
Upcoming: PS122 May 26 – June 13, 2010
POLITICAL TRACK
Marina Abramović
“The godmother of performance art.” Telegraph, London.
Prelude 09 is thrilled to host legendary performance artist Marina Abramović in a discussion regarding her monumental retrospective opening at The Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2010.
From the MoMA website:
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present traces the prolific career of Marina Abramović (Yugoslavian, b. 1946) with approximately fifty works spanning over three decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). In an endeavor to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience, the exhibition includes the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting. In addition, a new, original work performed by Abramović will mark the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. All performances, one of which involves viewer participation, will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes, to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.
Upcoming: March 14th – May 31st 2010 – ” MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT ” – MoMA – New York, US.
Bruce High Quality Foundation
Art History with Benefits
“One word comes to mind when considering the Foundation: omnivorous.”- The Brooklyn Rail
Art History with Benefits continues a series of educational works produced by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. These works aim to invest educational materials with the creative metaphors of art, to further the agenda of a regenerative pedagogy, and liberate arts education from the ballistics of professionalism. They were conceived within the bigger set of educational concerns that contextualize the opening of the BHQFU, a tuition-free, unaccredited art school starting this fall in NYC.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation, the official arbiter of the estate of Bruce High Quality, is dedicated to the preservation of the legacy of the late social sculptor, Bruce High Quality. In the spirit of the life and work of Bruce High Quality, we aspire to invest the experience of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man’s desiring. Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions.
Upcoming: CABAC at P.S.1 conference on contemporary fictions, 7pm, October 1st; Susan Inglett Gallery, December 4; Free teen night at MoMA. January 15th.
Andrew Dinwiddie
Get Mad at Sin!
“I found myself experiencing Swaggart’s surprisingly intelligent preaching through Dinwiddie’s full-throated and full-bodied performance, sans irony, sans modern commentary. Obsessive, yes; not exactly dance, maybe; but it’s an absolutely concentrated experience all the same, with the artist’s desire to show you the rest of his talents and influences refreshingly reduced to nil.” Lightsey Darst, MNArtists.com
Get Mad at Sin! is “one of the most hard hitting messages to the youth of America that you have ever heard. This message pulls no punches, it tells it just like it is, dealing with the problems of entertainment, rock and roll music, sex and a host of other problems that beset our youth today. Jimmy Swaggart, in this dynamic message, deals with these problems, and thousands of young people all over America have been touched by the Spirit of God and lives have changed under this sermon.”
Andrew Dinwiddie’s most recent full-length production, The Accursed Items, was presented in 2008 at the Ontological-Hysterical Theater. He’s a member of David Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group. He is a curator of the acclaimed performance series Catch, which recently presented the sold-out WHY WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!! at PS122. He’s currently developing Get Mad at Sin! with Jeff Larson, which will be presented at the Chocolate Factory in May 2010.
Upcoming: Get Mad at Sin! May 2010 at the Chocolate Factory
Aaron Landsman
Appointment
“…dry, subversive wit.” Charles Isherwood, The New York Times, Open House
Appointment is a series of repeatable 12-15 minute performance works staged in small offices for one or two performers and two viewers at a time. Landsman will develop Appointment over the next two to three years in multiple locations, through collaborations with theater and dance companies, individual artists, and students at live art training programs; the next installment takes place all over Oslo, Norway in March 2010. Eventually, Landsman hopes to coordinate all these Appointments via a website, from which anyone with a bright idea can download instructions and create his or her own appointment.
With: Aaron Landsman, Brent Green, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sibyl Kempson
Aaron Landsman is a playwright and actor whose works are often staged in intimate, quotidian spaces. His most recent piece, Open House was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre and performed in 24 NYC apartments. Previous works include What You’ve Done, in a Houston Row House, Love Story, on an iPod and in a gallery in Austin, and Desk, staged in an abandoned midtown office. Aaron is a performer with Elevator Repair Service
Upcoming: December 2009 – Special Tonight, (reading) University Settlment, NYC; March/April 2010 – Appointment, TITAN, Oslo, Norway.
David Levine
“Enraging and Engaging” — Time Out New York
Levine’s presentation will focus on unsolicited actors’ headshots and cover letters. Specific topics to be covered: the history of the headshot, the economy of the headshot, the demonic & vengeful nature of those hopeful stares, the tragic and transcendent ontology of the unsolicited submission.
DAVID LEVINE’s work encompasses performance, theater, installation, and video. His projects, including BAUERNTHEATER and VENICE SAVED: A SEMINAR, have been seen at Documenta XII [with CABINET magazine], Gavin Brown’s Enterprise@Passerby [NYC], Galerie Feinkost, Galerie Magnus Mueller [Berlin], HAU2 [Berlin], PS122 [NYC], the Sundance Theater Lab, the Vineyard theater, Primary Stages, and the Atlantic. His work has been featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES, ARTFORUM, THEATER, ART IN AMERICA, BOMB, CABINET, THEATER HEUTE, ART REVIEW, DIE ZEIT, TDR, THE VILLAGE VOICE, TIME OUT, and the BELIEVER, and has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kulturstiftung Des Bundes, and Etants Donnes/French Fund for Performance. His exhibition HOPEFUL will be on view at Cabinet Magazine’s Exhibition space from October 3-24.
Upcoming: HOPEFUL; Cabinet Exhibition Space, 300 Nevins Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn; HABIT, a new project, will be developed at the Water Mill Center next spring, and premiere in Toronto’s Luminato Festival — June 11- 20, 2010.
BRICOLAGE TRACK
The Living Theatre
Red Noir
“The most radical, uncompromising, and experimental group in American theatrical history.” – John Tyell
Red Noir is a detective thriller in genre, based on the film noir techniques and themes. It is also to serve as an anthem for non-violent anarchy. The play’s intention is to outdate and displace violence from the theatre to serve as an example of a general need for non-violence.
With: Judith Malina, Brad Burgess, Thomas Walker, Anthony Sisco, Eno Edet, Yasemin Ozumerzifon, Eric Olson, Maia Larraz
The Living Theatre, founded in 1947, has staged nearly a hundred productions, performed in nine languages in twenty-nine countries on five continents—a unique body of work that has influenced theater the world over. In 2007, The Living Theatre opened a new theatre at 21 Clinton Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The decision to return to the Lower East Side reflects the company’s continuing faith in that neighborhood as a vibrant community in downtown Manhattan, without doubt a fertile landscape to cultivate new ideas in art and politics.
Upcoming: Red Noir opens in December and will run for 6 weeks.
Object Collection
Gun Sale
“It’s shows like this that shut down the NEA…” Backstage
Gun Sale is a tabletop theater/music performance piece for objects, army figures, homemade experiments, electronic music and vocal processing. Originally conceived as a duo performance for whatever could fit in a suitcase, it was presented in galleries and art spaces in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Fukuoka during Object Collection’s June 2009 tour to Japan. The piece works with Object Collection’s concerns of simultaneity, densely layered material, and the manipulation of objects and processes, but on a very small scale in contrast to their larger operas and projects. Gun Sale been expanded for this performance to include veteran OC collaborators.
Object Collection is a New York based performance group founded in 2004 by writer/director Kara Feely and composer/musician Travis Just. The group presents hybrid theater-music performances on both a large and small scale. Selected projects include: the opera Problem Radical(s) (PS122, 2009), Eight Miles High (Japan Tour, 2008), Experimental Music Series (Ontological Theater, 2008), FAMOUS ACTORS (Ontological Theater, 2007), the writing and music series Chop Shop (Berlin, 2006), and L-shaped… (Podewil, Berlin, 2006).
Upcoming: The Geometry, The Chocolate Factory Theatre, March 2010
Radiohole
WHA!? Whatever, Heaven Allows
WHA!? Whatever, Heaven Allows bends the theatrical melodrama taking as it’s point of reference Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film All that Heaven Allows and exploring the language and themes of Paradise Lost.
Featuring: Eric Dyer, Erin Douglass, Maggie Hoffman, Joseph Silovsky, Mark Jaynes, Aaron Harrow.
Radiohole is a collaborative founded in 1998 by Maggie Hoffman, Scott Halvorsen Gillette, Erin Douglass and Eric Dyer. The company is based in Brooklyn. Radiohole has performed at PS122, the Collapsable Hole and around Europe. It’s most recent work, ANGER/ NATION, was performed at the Kitchen in September 2008. WHA!? Whatever, Heaven Allows is the companies 10th work. Radiohole’s work is situated in the liminal space between theater, art and party. The company is know for making elaborate use of high technology in the lowest manner.
Upcoming: January 14-16 Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis); February 12-13 Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburg); March PS 122; October UCLA Live Arts Festival (L.A.)
Jay Scheib
Bellona, Destroyer of Cities
“Mixing multimedia with deadpan-cool (and very sexy) actors, Scheib is forging new ways of seeing drama.” – “The Best New York Theater Directors” Time Out New York, March 2009
Following Untitled Mars, the first installment of his trilogy: Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems, Jay Scheib directs Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, based on Samuel Delany’s epic science-fiction masterpiece Dhalgren. A second moon has appeared in the sky, the sun swells, and somehow this once mediocre city is now filled with burning buildings, sexual outlaws, and streets that rearrange themselves— and about to be forgotten forever.
Featuring: Jay Scheib, Director; Tanya Selvaratnam, Producer; Peter Ksander, Scenic Design; Miranda k Hardy, Light; Oana Botez Ban, Clothes; Catherine McCurry, Sound; Performed by Sarita Choudhury, Caleb Hammond, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Jon Morris, April Sweeney, Natalie Thomas, and Greg Zuccolo.
Jay Scheib’s upcoming productions include Evan Ziporyn’s new opera A House in Bali at Cal Performances in Berkeley, Puntila und sein Knecht Matti at Theater Augsburg, Germany and Bellona, Destroyer of Cities at The Kitchen in New York. Recent productions in New York include the Obie Award-winning Untitled Mars (This Title May Change), This Place is a Desert, and Addicted to Bad Ideas. Scheib is Associate Professor of Theater at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Upcoming: March 25-April 4, 2010 at The Kitchen/NYC, Available for worldwide tour after April 2010.
Theatre of a Two-headed Calf
Trifles
“an infectious, full-throttle sense of daring and adventure in increasingly low supply below 14th Street.” The New York Times
The Theater of a Two-headed Calf explores the quiet but transgressive unfolding of Trifles, the 1916 proto-feminist one-act by Provincetown Player co-founder, Susan Glaspell.
The Theater of a Two-headed Calf was founded in 1999 by director Brooke O’Harra and composer Brendan Connelly. They have been a resident company at La MaMa, E.T.C. since 2001 where they created Tumor Brainiowicz, The Mother, Tom Thumb the Great, Major Barbara and the wildly popular Room for Cream, performed by the Two-headed Calf’s new appendage, The Dyke Division. In 2007, along with the HERE Arts Center, they presented Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, which received an Obie Award for actress Heidi Schreck and an Obie grant for the company. They have also created work at PS122, The Perishable and the Soho Rep Studio. Brooke, Brendan and company member Peter Ksander have all received the TCG/NEA Grant for Career Development. Their next work will premiere at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in January 2010.
Upcoming: Trifles, Ontological-Hysteric Theater: opens January 27th. 2010.
POETICS TRACK
Erin Courtney
A Map of Virtue
“It’s Courtney’s nuanced script that allow the actors to shine… Her lighthearted dark comedy is powered not by tired truisms of a disaffected wife’s psyche, but by seismic social disconnection.” Jessica Branch, Time Out (New York City), Demon Baby
A Map of Virtue is a symmetrical play in which a bird statue guides us through a story of coincidence, tragedy and friendship. Part interview, part comedy, part strange middle of the night horror, a group of friends encounter evil and dissect their own responses to it.
Playwright- Erin Courtney, Director- Ken Rus Schmoll
Erin Courtney and Ken Rus Schmoll have collaborated on her plays Demon Baby (Clubbed Thumb) and Alice the Magnet (in its monodrama form, BRIC Studio). They are currently working on her collage/dance/theater piece Black Cat Lost, which was commissioned by Soho Rep and performed in their studio series. A Map of Virtue is slated to be 13P’s thirteenth production in late 2011.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
The Change
A “new” “play” about a “man” and his “coffee shop” and his “Negro” “employee.” Directed by Stephen Brackett.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays include The Change, Neighbors, Thirst, Zoo, Heart!!!, and Content. His work has been/will be seen at the Prelude Festival (2008 and 2009), The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Soho Rep, PS122, McCarter Theatre, Dixon Place, and Links Hall. He is a former NYTW Playwriting fellow, an alum of the Soho Rep Writers/Directors Lab, and a member of the Ars Nova Playgroup and the Public Theatre Emerging Writers Group. He also holds an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU.
Stephen Brackett’s recent credits include Confidence Man with Woodshed Collective, Whore and The Ones That Flutter (Summer Play Festival/Public Theater), Dan Fishback’s You Will Experience Silence (Dixon Place), Alice Wakeman by Corn Mo and .357 Lover (Ars Nova), Bekah Brunstetter’s Real (Abingdon Theater) and Fucking Art (Samuel French OOB Festival Winner), The Reinstitution of Slavery (Clubbed Thumb’s Constitutional Convention), Ixomia (Crown Point Festival), Bixby Elliot’s PN1923.45LS01 Volume 2 (FringeNY), 1.1-1.7 (WMC), Week 34 of 365 Days/365 Plays (The Public Theater’s Shakespeare Lab), No Date: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz and Kilroy Was Here (Williamstown Workshop). In 2002 he co-founded the theater company the Bushwick Hotel with playwright Rachel Shukert; their collaborations include Johnny Apple@#%*er (Ice Factory), Bloody Mary (nominated for 4 NYIT Awards), Sequins for Satan (Galapagos Art Space) and The Blackstone Hotel (The Culture Project). Stephen was the Assistant Director of Passing Strange at the Public and Belasco Theaters. He is a founding member of 425 D Director’s Lab. Upcoming work: The Mattachine Project at Abrons Art Center, FUE at NYMF and The Private Life of Inga Snyder with the Columbia University Graduate Playwriting Program.
Kristen Kosmas
This from Cloudland
“This is not what you think it is, it’s— Imagine a radio. Now imagine ten radios.”
Thirty-five hundred feet directly below the world’s only known micro-nation, two young lovers are holding themselves hostage while someone falls off a high wire and someone else has their head stuck in the mouth of a bear. This From Cloudland is a tender onslaught of text-for-speaking featuring Elizabeth Kenny, Kristen Kosmas, and Christopher Petite as the Spooler of Thread, the Innocent Bystander, the Assembler of Envelopes, and Everybody Else in this benevolent labyrinth where everyone stands before the Origin of the World, eating Cuban sandwiches, drinking sparkling lemonade, and looking for the words for everything.
Elizabeth Kenny is a Seattle actor who has performed at the Seattle Rep, The Empty Space, and ACT. She was a company member of Printer’s Devil Theater from 1995 to 1998. In 1998, she became an Artistic Associate at Seattle’s New City Theater, performing in a number of plays including Trouble in the City of Desire, Big Boss, and T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton in the Salon Series. In 2004 she received a Seattle Times Footlight Award for outstanding performance for her work in Neil Labute’s Bash. She followed that performance with an extended run of Ki Gottberg’s sleeper hit The Compendium of Nastiness. Last spring she performed The Last Letter, from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, at New City Theater.
Kristen Kosmas is a writer and performer. She has had works commissioned by Performance Space 122, Seattle University’s SITE Specific, Dixon Place, and the New City Theater. Her plays include Hello Failure, H-O-R-S-E, Chapter of Accidents, The Mayor of Baltimore, Anthem, and Palomino. She is the writer and performer of four critically acclaimed solo shows, The Scandal!, Slip, Again, and Blah Blah Fuckin Blah, which have been performed at numerous venues in New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, and Chicago. Forthcoming publications include Hello Failure (Ugly Duckling Presse), This From Cloudland (Play A Journal of Plays), and The Mayor of Baltimore & Anthem (53rd State). Kristen is a member of the Brooklyn-based collective, the Ladies Auxiliary Playwriting Team.
Christopher Petit is a director, actor, and teacher. In Seattle he has worked for the Seattle Rep, the Seattle Children’s Theater, UMO Ensemble, and The Group Theater. He was the founding Artistic Director of the Open Circle Theater Company, and an artistic associate for One World Theater. In New York his work as a director has been seen at notable venues including: the Vineyard Theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse, Here Arts Center, Abingdon Theater, Mile Square Theater, and The Upright Citizens Brigade. He holds an MFA in Directing from Columbia University, and a BFA in Acting from Rutgers University. He has taught at the University of Arkansas, Rutgers University, Northern Illinois University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater at Whitman College.
NYC Players / Christina Masciotti
Vision Disturbance
At the heart of Vision Disturbance, is Mondo, a Greek exile who loses vision in one eye along with her husband. The stress of her impending divorce triggers an eye disorder that robs her of the ability to perceive depth. The resulting flatness of her two-dimensional world compounds the alienation of her freshly failed marriage. The small Pennsylvania town where she has been living for the past 13 years, offers only one specialist with a practice on the brink of dissolve, and an inspired, if unconventional, approach to healing.
Christina Masciotti (Playwright) studied playwriting at Brown University and holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU. She has developed her work at The New Group, and in artist residencies at Chashama, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Lower East Side Tenement Museum Theater. Her work has been presented in New York at HERE, Performance Space 122, Dixon Place, the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, and the International Theatre Institute in Athens, Greece. She has been a finalist for the Princess Grace Award, and has been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and The Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award. She is currently a Berks County Community Foundation SPA Fund Fellow.
Richard Maxwell (Director) studied acting at Illinois State University and began his professional career with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. While in Chicago, he became a co-founder and a director of the Cook County Theater Department. Maxwell’s work has been presented in over sixteen countries. Richard Maxwell is the Artistic Director of the New York City Players. His most recent play, People Without History, was published in the September 2009 issue of American Theater Magazine.