HERE Arts Center's CultureMart Fest Held Jan.4-21

The OBIE-winning HERE Arts Center's annual CultureMart Festival will take place January 4 - 21, 2008.  Featuring 11 new works that blur the lines between dance, theatre, music, new media, puppetry and visual art, CultureMart upholds the concept that it's no longer possible for a single art form to reflect the flurry of images and sound bytes experienced on a daily basis.  As we are increasingly inundated with communication from email, text messages, blogs, and other digital streams, the impressions made by words, images and sounds are often simultaneous in today's world.  The hybrid presentations in CultureMart embrace this modern experience by integrating content into exciting new works, creating a sense of voice, purpose and understanding through performance and art.

HERE's unique residency programs (HARP & Dream Music) commission and develop hybrid performance work through long-term relationships with artists over periods of 1-3 years.  While in residence, artists have opportunities to present work during various stages of development through WIPs (work-in-progress readings) and more fully developed workshops during CultureMart. Resident artist projects seen at CultureMart often go on to become main stage productions as part of HERE's season.  This year's festival features 8 works by the newest resident artists, 2 works that have previously been seen in CultureMart festivals, and 1 production by a HERE residency alumna who has been invited back to present a new work-Alexandra Beller.  CultureMart alumni include Young Jean Lee, Lisa D'Amour, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle, Collision Theory, Troika Ranch, Will Pomerantz, Corey Dargel and the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf.   

HERE Arts Center is located at 145 Sixth Avenue (entrance on Dominick Street).  Performances start at 8:30 PM unless noted.  Tickets are $15 ($10 donors).  For tickets & info, call (212) 352-3101 or visit www.here.org.  Sound & video clips of works are available at www.here.org.

*Note: where two performances are listed on the same dates, it is a shared bill.

CULTUREMART 2008 SCHEDULE: 

January 4 & 5 @ 8:30 PM (Friday & Saturday)

THE LILY'S REVENGE / Taylor Mac.  A self-uprooted lily goes on a quest to combat its oppressors and destroy nostalgia.  In his latest work, playwright and gender-bending performer Taylor Mac responds to an ever-growing homogeny in the world around him.  Through puppets, elaborate costume designs, live music and vaudevillian theatrics Mac brings back the macabre, and reveals our national pastime of melancholy remembrances.  Named one of New York's best in 2007 by both The Village Voice and The New York Press, Taylor Mac is a theatre artist working in the genre of pastiche. 

EGO / David Michael Friend.  Questioning the difference between art and kitsch, Ego enters an artist's mind as he develops his newest masterpiece.  Dissatisfied with the state of puppet theater, the artist is confident that he alone can push the art form to the next level.  As his zeal for perfection grows, so does his self-assurance, making him a prime candidate for divine creator status.  David Michael Friend is a freelance art director and illustrator for television and film, whose love for puppetry keeps him ever-entangled in theater.  This work includes pieces ranging from cardboard cut-outs to intricate stage environments, while puppets vary from naive sock puppets to masterfully crafted bunraku.

January 8 & 9 @ 8:30 PM (Tuesday & Wednesday)

MIRANDA 5X / Kamala Sakaram. This one-woman, multi-media chamber opera is based around the idea of a murder-mystery play.  By combining real-time video of the solo performer with digital effects, lighting, backgrounds and camera angles, the audience is able to see through the eyes of the five different murder suspects, and to experience their last interactions with Miranda, the murder victim.  Composer Kamala Sankaram is the bandleader for the multi-media ensemble Squeezebox, as well as a coloratura soprano, accordionist, video artist, and general insomniac.  She has collaborated with artists as diverse as The Wooster Group and the Philip Glass Ensemble.  

WATER / Sheila Callaghan, William Cusick, & Daniella Topol.  It purifies.  It cleanses.  It nourishes.  And like all other essential resources, it betrays.  What do people do when the thing they most need is the thing they cannot trust?  Through textures and tones in a fragmented, epic journey to the "source" which is part installation, part narrative, Susan Smith Blackburn Award-winning playwright Sheila Callaghan, multimedia artist William Cusick, and director Daniella Topol (creators of the acclaimed New Georges' production of Dead City) explore what it means to survive-or to not survive-or to exist in the space between.

January 10-12 @ 8:30 PM (Thursday - Saturday)

THE SOUTH WING/ The Gospel According to Jack Vitrolo.  Jack Vitrolo makes a quiet living selling athletic shoes, but when a group of paramedics kidnap his pregnant wife in an ambulance, Jack is forced to hunt for her in the bowels of a gigantic municipal hospital -- encountering freakish obstacles along the way.  The South Wing theatre company brings its trademark neo-expressionist style to this scathing critique of modern medicine. 

January 12 @ 4:00 PM & January 13 @ 8:30 PM (Saturday & Sunday)

MOSHEH - a VideOpera / Yoav Gal.  MOSHEH re-enacts the biblical saga of Moses as an ancient-futuristic ritual, contrasting the feminine perspectives of Moses' sister, wife, and two mothers with the voice of God, a jealous and fearsome father figure.  "Indie Opera" composer Yoav Gal depicts Moses' early years, reimagined in the creator's own environment of contemporary 'grungy' Brooklyn, as well as in his homeland of Israel.  Gal specializes in the marriage of music and image, and has created works for Bang on a Can and Kaufman Center/Merkin Hall, among others.  Kristin Marting directs.

January 14 & 15 @ 8:30 PM (Monday & Tuesday)

EX.PGIRL / Paris Syndrome.  Based on the phenomenon of extreme culture shock experienced by some Japanese tourists when they visit Paris, Paris Syndrome is the latest dance-theatre piece from the international ensemble of women known as Ex.Pgirl.  Through their trademark use of humorous video interviews, playful multi-lingual text and physicality, Ex.Pgirl engages the ideas of madness, love, beauty, and cultural misunderstanding that surround this psychological condition.  Underscored by original music, Paris Syndrome merges the banal with the spectacular, creating a culturally expansive and entertaining view of our everyday reality.

837 VENICE BOULEVARD / Faye Driscoll.  Humorous and darkly entertaining, 837 Venice Boulevard both satisfies and satirizes our human compulsion to try to solve mystery and understand reality.  Choreographer Faye Driscoll examines the relationship between time, identity and memory, structuring childhood memories as a mystery story in her investigation of the universal need to "make sense" of the past.  Dealing with awkwardness, humor and sex, she bears witness to uncomfortable, radiant realities and queer non-normative sensibilities.  Driscoll is a former member of Doug Varone and Dancers and a former BAX Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence 2005-'06.

January 16 & 17 @ 8:30 PM (Wednesday & Thursday)

FOODSTABLE / Richard Toth.  Like the notorious gore film that inspired it (H.G. Lewis' 1963 cult classic Blood Feast), Foodstable mutilates its source material to create a beautifully fractured performance.  As innocent romance struggles to survive in a world awash in horror and fear, physical theatre writer-director Richard Toth molds and shapes the film's images and sound to create song, dance, and a dialogue with contemporary performers.

WHAT COMES AFTER HAPPY / Alexandra Beller.  This new company work by Alexandra Beller displays a unique blend of passionate movement and demanding text.  She challenges the American obsession with happiness, deconstructing self-help manuals, spiritual guidance and children's television in an effort to find out why we must be so happy.  

January 19 @ 8:30 PM, January 20 @ 4:00 PM & 8:30 PM, January 21 @ 8:30 PM (Saturday - Monday)

RED FLY/BLUE BOTTLE / Christina Campanella & Stephanie Fleischmann.  Does remembering help process loss or prolong it?  In this multimedia song cycle, an elderly entomologist reflects on a bygone war.  Through layers of found sounds and a collection of hypnotic songs, composer/performer Christina Campanella traces the departure of the old woman's companion, and the mysterious mission to which he's been dispatched.  With words by Stephanie Fleischmann and video imagery by Peter Norrman and Mirit Tal, RED FLY/BLUE BOTTLE is a lyrical meditation on absence, the undertow of war, and the transformative properties of objects. 

Directed by Mallory Catlett.

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