Dear Colleague,
Please find following the Performance Space 122 offerings for this January's busy season - when APAP, Under The Radar, HERE'S Culturemart and our COIL Festival all coincide. Those with the stamina can gain a rapid degree in current trends in American and New York theatre, dance and performance.
In 2009 we are proud to announce twelve different works from New York, the United States, Australia, the UK and Ireland. The works span all disciplines - theatre, dance, new media, music, cabaret, robotics and more and the companies range from emerging to renowned.
It is a tremendous pleasure each year to present COIL - a festival, now in its fourth year, of works in their full form. The majority of works are reprises from previous P.S. 122 seasons and we feel they are of interest to national and international audiences and presenters. Each year we also surprise and challenge ourselves with New York premiers and previews of upcoming P.S. 122 shows.
In 2009 we are delighted to be working as partners with Under the Radar, (le) Poisson Rouge, the National Theater of Scotland, Culture Ireland, 3LD Art and Technology Center as well as all the artists whose work we will show.
Please feel free to contact me at vallejo@ps122.org and +1 212 477 5829 x314 or Shoni Currier at shoni@ps122.org and +1 212 477 5829 x303. We would be pleased to arrange tickets for you (as in other years, we have discounted Professional tickets available), and to advise you on possible itineraries on this journey through New York's contemporary performance.
Information about our COIL artists is below and more can be found at http://www.ps122.org/performances/coil_2009.html. And check back in to find out about our COIL club event and party.
To simply order tickets, please download the COIL form, found here: http://www.ps122.org/downloads/ps122coilform2009.xls. Fill it out and return to shoni@ps122.org.
We hope we will see you in New York in January, at Performance Space 122 and in the three other venues in which COIL will take place. It is an exciting, time to be here.
Best,
Vallejo Gantner
Pan Pan - The Crumb Trail - 80 min.
SHOWTIMES: Jan 7 @ 6:30pm, Jan 8 @ 10:30pm, Jan 9 @ 2:30pm, Jan 11 @ 7pm, Jan 12 @ 3:30pm
Extension dates: Jan 15 @ 8pm, Jan 16 @ 8pm, Jan 17 @ 8 and 10:30pm
U.S. premiere. Co-produced by: Forum Freies Theater, Dusseldorf; Culture Ireland; Arts Council Ireland; Dublin City Council
The death of the Fairy Tale. Where did being good ever get anyone? The Crumb Trail is a decamerous contemporary installation and performance dealing with the notion of crisis and engagement. It is a play area where theatrical stuff is shown to the public: made up Films/ Live things all arranged and prearranged for different performances. It is Hamlet, it is Hansel and Gretel. They're all dead lost.
Praise for Pan Pan's ''Oedipus Loves You'' (U.S. premiere, P.S. 122, Spring 2008)''…Excellent! A breath of fresh air for connoisseurs of theatre.'' Ben Brantley, New York Times ''…approaches the sublime...the songs are first-rate ear candy'' Variety
Temporary Distortion - Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road) - 60 min.
SHOWTIMES: Jan 7 @ 10:30pm, Jan 8 @ 2:30pm, Jan 10 @ 7pm, Jan 13 @ 7:30pm
Part road movie, part fractured memory, part love story...Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road) is a true hybrid of theatre and cinema.
Using their signature self-contained box set, the company evokes environments using film, music and four actors confined to tiny spaces. In scenes of prolonged stillness, silence and impassivity, the onstage characters and their doppelgangers navigate a hyper-real cinematic landscape as if lost in a dream, creating parallel narratives that echo, reflect and refract each moment of the play. A moody, bleak work situated somewhere between Twin Peaks, Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers' films with video by William Cusick and text and direction by Kenneth Collins.
Welcome to Nowhere has played at Performance Space 122, The Ontological Hysteric Theatre, the VIA Festival International in Maubeuge, France and the Exit Festival in Paris.
BODY CARTOGRAPHY - Holiday House - 60 min.
SHOWTIMES: Jan 6 @ 8pm, Jan 9 @ 7pm, Jan 10 @10:30pm, Jan 12 @10pm, Jan 13 @ 3:30pm
What if you were on tour so much that other people's bathrooms and the rituals of packing your bag were more familiar than your own home? Home becomes a holiday house. On holiday the normal sequence of time unravels. Regular activities, chores and spatial awareness of ordinary places are deconstructed or completely altered. In this space of relaxing (or trying to), perception bends. Reality shifts.
In Holiday House, choreographers Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramsted play with perception and the tools of engagement and choreographic generation developed in their site-based work to create dance and dance video. They transpose, deconstruct, reconstruct, transform, and combine grossly and subtly different formal geographies and media that bleed into each other of their own accord.
"A memorable installation/performance blending media and movement in intriguing ways."
Philip Bither, Senior Curator, Performing Arts, Walker Art Center
Tantrum Productions - EIGHT - 135 min including intermission
SHOWTIMES: Jan 6 @ 7:30pm, Jan 8 @ 7:30pm, Jan 9 @2pm
Extension dates: Wed Jan 14 - Sun Jan 25. Wed - Sat @ 8pm. Sundays @ 5pm
Winner of the 2008 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award and Fringe First Award Winner, EIGHT is a collection of extraordinary tales of remarkably self aware young adults smartly crafted by breakout playwright Ella Hickson.
The play presents obsession in its moral, sexual, and religious guises, raising the question of why nothing is ever enough for our resource-guzzling age. EIGHT works to find the glimmers of faith in a world of wholesale cynicism; this show moves seamlessly from despair to hilarity as its characters search for meaning in a morally and spiritually bankrupt England.
''Stunningly well performed…this is a truly impressive and exciting hour of theatre'' - Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman
The Shalimar - Trash Warfare - 70 min
SHOWTIMES: Jan 8 @ 3pm, Jan 10 @ 10pm, Jan 11 @ 6:30pm, Jan 12 @ 7pm
Winner of The Stage Award for Best Ensemble - Edinburgh Fringe 2007
The Shalimar's rock and roll Phaedra update, TRASH WARFARE, pushes the classic Greek text into the 21st Century.
Using a mix of fierce physicality (boxing, gymnastics, rigorous dance numbers to re-imagined pop), text from modern political speeches, interviews with celebrities, YouTube, Facebook, and the writings of Georges Bataille, writer/director Shoshona Currier satirizes America's celebrity obsession in this time of war with dynamic energy and skillful execution. Political satire for a digital social network near you...
The Shalimar has been presented at P.S. 122 and receives support from The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Their next show will be presented at The Ontological Hysteric Theatre in June 2009.
"The most exciting young American company I have seen up here so far this century." - Financial Times
''…a loud and furious blast of pure pop entertainment.'' -The Stage
Lewis Forever - Freak the Room - 55 min.
SHOWTIMES: Jan 7 @ 7pm, Jan 9 @ 10pm, Jan 10 @ 6:30pm, Jan 13 @ 3pm
LEWIS FOREVER is three sisters and a brother, a director, two dancers and a musician; a family living half in New York and half in Berlin and Brussels, half Dominican and half Jewish American, a performance collective and a bloodline. What happens when we freak the fiction of cultural and familial identification? There is play and fantasy. There is sex and violence. There is an impostor. Words seem to come out almost right.
LEWIS FOREVER's home lies between continents, identities and meanings - P.S. 122 is their living room, and they will freak it.
Isabel Lewis is Brooklyn based choreographer. She is a Movement Research Artist in Residence and a Fresh Tracks Residency Recipient. She dances with Ann Liv Young and is a co-director of The Labor Union.
George Lewis is a Brooklyn based musician. He blends rock and roll, theater, and visual arts in his work and performs with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company.
Sarah Lewis is a Berlin based theater artist. She has created work for English Theatre of Berlin and Plural Arts International.
Eric Green (Lewis) is a Berlin based performer. He studied at Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (HÜZ), Berlin pilot project hosted by the Universität der Künste.
Joe Silovsky - Jester of Tonga - 60 min.
www.ps122.org/performances/jester_of_tonga.html
SHOWTIMES: Jan 7 @ 10pm, Jan 9 @ 7:30pm, Jan 10 @ 2:30pm, Jan 12 @ 9:30pm
What do you do when you find $23 million in a checking account, getting 1.7% interest, and marked with a single word - Tonga?
Joseph Silovsky's show, The Jester of Tonga, is performance of text and objects - part travelogue, and part biography about the rise and fall of the only modern day Royal Jester of Tonga. A constructed web of bizarre true stories: a machine that changes seawater into oil; a new nation built from scratch with dredge boats; a fisherman who uses homemade bombs instead of nets. All told by Silovsky and his hand made machines - suitcase dioramas, an ancient Chinese Southern-facing chariot and of course, world famous Stanley.
Silovsky has performed solo work at St. Anne's Warehouse, PS122, Tonic's Little Theater, and Pete's Candy Store, and has worked with companies such as Builders Association, Radiohole, National Theater of the United States of America, and Richard Maxwell.
''We consider Joe our 5th hole.'' - Radiohole
"Enthralling... [Jester of Tonga] won me over" - John Del Signore, Gothamist
''…a scrappy, delightful show.'' - Jason Zinoman, The New York Times
Okwui Okpokwasili - Pent Up: A Revenge Dance
www.buydemocracy.com/article.php/okpokwasili
SHOWTIMES: Jan 11 @ 7:30pm, Jan 12 @ 2:30pm
In the first full production of her original work, Bessie Award-winner and beloved downtown actress Okwui Okpokwasili spins a modern multi-character folktale. In it, she portrays a woman in exile who sees and seeks revenge as a way of reconciling her present impoverished condition with the belief that she's a direct descendant of the sun.
Interweaving legacy and the loss of old tongues, rituals and original songs, and a good old attempt to get a grip, the story sheds new light on traditional spells and third world brothels, and transforms every scratch & win ticket into a lucky one.
Okpokwasili is a Bessie award winning dancer and actress who has worked with Ronald K Brown, Annie Dorsen, International WOW and many others.
Reid Farrington - The Passion Project - 30 min.
SHOWTIMES: Performances are off-site at 3LD. Check 3LDnyc.org for details.
The Passion Project is a vibrant archival film experiment spun from the reels of the last great silent film, Carl Th. Dreyer's 1928 immortal masterpiece, ''The Passion of Joan of Arc.''
Exploring the intersection of live performance, film, and installation, The Passion Project includes every frame of Dreyer's film - his outtakes and the reels that were thought lost to fire - and explodes the film into three dimensions, placing the audience inside the action and surrounding them with the relentless rhythm of 30mm projections.
For the past seven years Reid Farrington has been a technical artist and collaborator with the Wooster Group. He has designed video and created hardware and software systems for the playback of video and sound for To You the Birdie!, Brace Up!, Poor Theater, House/Lights, WHO'S YOUR DADA, and Hamlet.
"One of the most satisfying theatrical experiences I've had in ages…magical and sinister and strange." - Claudia La Rocco, NY Times
Co-produced by 3LD
The TEAM - Architecting - 165 min.
SHOWTIMES: At Under the Radar in the Public Theatre: Jan 9 @ 8pm, Jan 10 @ 1pm, Jan 11 @ 7pm, Jan 14 @ 7pm, Jan 15 @ 7pm, Jan 17 @ 7pm, Jan 18 @ 2pm .
Extension dates: At P.S. 122: January 22 - February 15, 2009.
Co-Production with National Theater of Scotland.
Architecting is a musical, multi-media time-bending epic peopled with Scarlett O'Hara pageant contests and anarchistic architects - an exhilarating American saga that weaves through America's past and future to create a requiem for modern America. It rockets from the American Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction to a desolate bar in post-Katrina New Orleans where literary legend Margaret Mitchell and presidential grandchild historian Henry Adams watch the country change under their feet.
The TEAM is a New York based theatre company dedicated to dissecting and celebrating the experience of living in America today. Winner of three Fringe First Awards (2005, 2006, 2008).
The TEAM has been presented at Performance Space 122, The Walker, and BAC in London.
"TEAM are theatrical excavators of American culture, American dreams and the American psyche.'' - The Guardian
"a remarkable piece of work...what a joy it is to see new writing that transmits what it is like to live in the 21st century.'' - Financial Times
Palissimo - Blind Spot - 80 min.
SHOWTIMES: Jan 8 @ 7:30pm, Jan 9 @ 10:30pm
Blind Spot draws a complex landscape of relationships set against a world where there's still amazing beauty. Working in a nonlinear fashion, the work presents us with four individuals awakening to their alienation-both from themselves and others. Having been divorced from their world by the daily onslaught of media, violence and urban noise; Blind Spot asks what happens when the psyche rediscovers its physical form.
Born in the former Czechoslovakia, Pavel Zustiak studied at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. He is a recipient of the 2007 Princess Grace Choreography Award. Palissimo has been presented at Dance New Amsterdam, University Settlement, HERE Arts Center, Dixon Place and internationally at venues in Poland, Slovakia, and Czech Republic.
"Blind Spot casts a potent spell." - Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
LeeSaar The Company - Geisha - 55 min.
SHOWTIMES: Jan 10 @ 2pm, Jan 12 @ 7pm
In Geisha, Sher and Harari play with ideas of femininity, beauty, silence, fear, loneliness and control. Archetypal conceptions of the geisha - beautiful and beloved, lonely or vulnerable are teased out in a raw disturbing performance.
Lee and Saar Received the Six Point Fellowship for 2007-2009. They received the Guggenheim fellowship in Choreography for 2008 and the New York Foundation for the Art Fellowship for 2008.
''Geisha,'' by LeeSaar The Company, is a trio with a sexy, raw edge that belies an underlying sense of vulnerability. - The New Yorker
Individual Tickets: $20 each, $15 (students/seniors), $10 (P.S. 122 members) The COIL PASS: $60. See any and all COIL shows EXCEPT Architecting, and The Passion Project for only $60 and email boxoffice@ps122.org for your dates.
Presenter Tickets: $10 each with APAP/UTR/business affiliation. Email shoni@ps122.org
The TEAM's Architecting is ticketed exclusively through Under the Radar and is not covered by the COIL pass. Presenters email mwang@publictheater.org for tickets. For Reid Farrington's The Passion Project please purchase tickets at www.3LDnyc.org
Performance Space 122
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