ADA/AVA to Make NYC Premiere at 3LD Art & Technology Center

3-Legged Dog (Kevin Cunningham, Artistic Director) is thrilled to present the NYC premiere of ADA/AVA, conceived by Chicago's Manual Cinema, directed by Drew Dir, and part of The Tank's Flint & Tinder, their flagship theater program. ADA/AVA begins performances on Tuesday, June 16 for a limited engagement through Sunday, July 5. Press opening is Sunday, June 21 at 3 PM. The performance schedule is Tuesday - Saturday at 8 PM; Sunday at 3 PM. Please note there is an added performance on Monday, June 22 at 8 PM; there is no performance Tuesday, June 23. The performance schedule for the final week (6/30 - 7/5) is Tuesday - Friday at 7 PM & 9 PM; Saturday at 3 PM; Sunday at 3 PM & 7 PM is Performances are at 3LD Art and Technology Center (80 Greenwich Street, at Rector, in downtown Manhattan). Tickets are $24. Tickets are available by calling Ovationtix at 866-811-4111 or visiting www.3ldnyc.org.

Bereaved of her twin sister Ava, septuagenarian Ada marks time in the patterns of a life built for two. When a traveling carnival and mirror maze come to town, Ada is plunged into a journey across the threshold of life and death. This exquisite mix of live theater, puppetry, cinema, and live music creates a haunting, ephemeral tale that is "sculpted in shadows" (Chicago Tribune).

ADA/AVA is a gothic, Hitchcockian tale that uses old-school overhead projectors, actors in silhouette, an original score, and over three hundred shadow puppets to create a live, handmade animation about mourning and melancholy.

Through their ingenious use of live performance and puppetry, ADA/ AVA won the Best in Festival award at the National Puppetry Festival in 2013. The Chicago Tribune had high praise of their work, saying, "To describe Manual Cinema as just a shadow puppet show is to say that Pixar makes cartoons."

The puppeteer/performers are Kara Davidson, Sam Deutsch, Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace and Julia Miller.

The sound design and original score is by Kyle Vegter and Ben Kauffman. The production design is by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, and Julia Miller. The live music is performed by Maren Celest, Michael Hilger, and Kyle Vegter.

ADA/AVA is part of 3-Legged Dog's Artist Residency program.

About Manual Cinema
Manual Cinema is a Chicago-based performance company that combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic motifs, and live sound manipulation to create immersive theatrical stories. Using overhead projectors, paper puppets, actors in silhouette, and a live band, Manual Cinema transforms the experience of attending the cinema and imbues it with liveness, ingenuity, and theatricality. Founded in 2010 by five Chicago artists with diverse backgrounds in theater, visual arts, and music, Manual Cinema's work has been featured at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, O, Miami Poetry Festival, Tehran International Puppet Festival in Iran, and elsewhere around the world. They have collaborated with StoryCorps (NYC), Erratica (London), NYT bestselling author Reif Larsen (NYC), and three time Grammy Award-winning eighth blackbird (Chicago).

About The Tank

The Tank is a Manhattan-based non-profit arts presenter, serving emerging artists engaged in the pursuit of new ideas and forms of expression. The organization's goal is to foster an environment of inclusiveness and remove the burden of cost from the creation of new work for artists launching their careers and experimenting within their art forms. The heart of The Tank's services is providing free performance space in a 62-seat blackbox in Manhattan, and it also offers a suite of other resources such as free rehearsal space, promotional support, a cut of the box office, and more. The Tank serves over 1,000 artists every year and presents performances across a range of disciplines: theater, music, dance, comedy, film, and storytelling. It keeps ticket prices affordable and views the work as democratic, opening up both the creation and attendance of the arts to all and positioning the arts within civic and socio-political discourse.

About Flint & Tinder

The Tank's Flagship Theater Program, Flint & Tinder is a curated series of exciting new independent theater. The series showcases ferociously imaginative emerging artists making work that spans (and often flagrantly combines) physical theater, puppetry, dance, clowning, and more. They are storytellers, relentless risk-takers, and theatrical alchemists shaping the future of the medium. Flint & Tinder is curated by Josh Luxenberg and Jon Levin of Sinking Ship Productions, and produced and co-curated by Rosalind Grush.

About 3-Legged Dog

3-Legged Dog exists to produce new, original works in theater, performance, media and hybrid forms. Working out of a strong literary tradition, our mission is to explore the new narrative possibilities created by digital technology, and to provide an environment for our artists to create new tools and modes of expression so that they can excel across a range of disciplines.

3LD Art & Technology Center creates and supports challenging large-scale art within a financially sustainable environment. Its goals are to create viable growth oriented business models for experimental art production, revitalize the experimental tradition in New York by improving the working conditions and quality of production, and foster a community of artists who work cooperatively and aggressively to address their own barriers. In order to achieve these goals, 3LD creates, re-distributes and re-imagines resources that drive core cost reduction while increasing capacity and revenue. www.3ldnyc.org.