HERE Sets 2014-15 Season: TRADE PRACTICES, BLOOWST WINDKU & More
By: Tyler Peterson Jul. 28, 2014
HERE announces its 2014-2015 producing season, commencing Labor Day Weekend with the premiere of the Artistic Director production, Trade Practices, by Kristin Marting & David Evans Morris; and followed by the HERE Resident Artist productions Send for the Million Men by Joseph Silvosky and Bloowst windku by Rebecca Davis. HERE's upcoming season also includes the third annual PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/ Now festival and HERE's yearly CULTUREMART festival, which gives audiences a first look at new work in process from artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP). The multidisciplinary productions in HERE's 2014-2015 season represent the culmination of commissions and developmental residencies of up to three years through HARP, and/or the Dream Music Puppetry Program.
HERE is located at 145 Sixth Avenue, just below Spring Street. For more, please visit www.here.org.
HERE's's 2014-2015 season:Trade PracticesAugust 31 - September 21, 2014 / Governors Island, Pershing Hall
An Artistic Director Production by Kristin Marting (HERE Artistic Director) & David Evans Morris
Trade Practices is an immersive site-specific theater event that examines the notion of "value" against the backdrop of the booms and busts of the past decade. The adventure begins with a ferry ride to Governors Island and continues as the audience explores room upon room of Pershing Hall, engaging in varied storylines performed by an ensemble cast and participating in intermittent trading rounds. This new work follows the fictional currency company Tender, Inc. on its journey from family business to publicly traded corporation through original texts presented simultaneously in competing episodes. Each episode centers on the same period in the life of the company, told from the perspective of a specific group: Owners, Managers, Marketers and Workers. Using a fictional currency, audience members buy '"shares" in one of these four storylines, granting them admission to that perspective's episodes. Periodic trading rounds present opportunities for swapping shares, or selling them for a profit that can be used to buy additional stock. Throughout, audience members don't just watch - they get to choose which story to follow at a given moment - exploring how we decide what something is worth, and what we value.
December 3 - 13, 2014 / HERE
A HERE Resident Artist Production by Joseph Silovsky
Send for the Million Men examines the controversial executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, convicted of murder during a 1920 armed robbery in a Massachusetts shoe factory. Their case was a Cause Célèbre and still enflames passionate responses from advocates and detractors alike. In collaboration with Victor Morales (video designer/performer) and Catherine McRae (sound), and working in his unique style of oratory, with animatronics, robotics, puppetry and handmade projectors, Joseph Silovsky illuminates the humor and tragedy in the story and connects it to today's political strife as well as his own micro-tragic biography.Joseph Silovsky has been performing and making machines for theater since 1990. A "mad scientist" of New York's experimental theater, he is known for his odd and ingenious mechanical creations that he uses to tell stories of obscure historical incidents and the minutiae surrounding them. The combination of low and high-tech props that he builds creates an extraordinary landscape for his singular performance style. Solo performances:? St. Ann's Warehouse, PS122, Pete's Candy Store, Dixon Place's Little Theater, CATCH! at the Bushwick Starr, and the 25 Cent Opera at Barbez in New York, as well as various venues in Chicago and at the Kananahk Performance Art Festival in Rakveres, Estonia. He recently has been developing scenes from Send for the Million Men at Little Theater, The Twenty Five Cent Opera, and CATCH! His most recent large-scale show was The Jester of Tonga (2007-2010). Other solo pieces include The Reddest Dirt in Oklahoma (2006); The Prisoner's Song (1993-2005); The Cowboy Song, Interrupted (2001-2002); I Am Not an Epileptic (1998-2001); and Lessons From a Dead Man (I'm So Sorry) (1997).? Through his solo shows, Silovsky created the endearing and critically acclaimed robot, Stanley, who has become an integral part of Silovsky's performances. He has collaborated with Victor Morales as Tutto and the Ragman (2001-2005), as well as the Radiohole (2003-2012), The Builders Association (1999-2010), Lucky Pierre (1998-1999), HMS (1995-1997), and the Cook County Theater Department (1994).
April 20 - May 3, 2015 / HERE
A HERE Resident Artist Production by Rebecca Davis
Bloowst windku, by choreographer Rebecca Davis, is a sculpture that is performed. The familiar is rendered strange as three performers shift with dream-like logic from basic pedestrian movement to highly abstracted forms within an equally mutable sound score by Zach Layton. Materials collected over three years are joined to create a structure that literally envelops the audience.Rebecca Davis' work encompasses performance, installation and sculpture. In 2011, she choreographed three works in collaboration with Allora & Calzadilla: Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American) for the U.S. Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, and Revolving Door for the Manchester International Festival. Davis was a Re-performer in the Marina Abramovic retrospective: The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. She has since taught with Ms. Abramovic on several occasions and has restaged her work in Essen, Manchester, Moscow, Milan and LA. She danced for Kathy Westwater (2009-2012) and has performed in the work of Ursula Eagly, Deborah Hay, Juliette Mapp and Steve Paxton. Rebecca was a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence (2010-2012). Her work has been supported by commissions from The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Howl Festival and by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and the American Music Center and the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation. She has been in residence at The Atlantic Center for the Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Bogliasco Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, and The Field. Her work has been presented by The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Chelsea Art Museum, The Old American Can Factory, P.S. 122, DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), and Performance Works Northwest (Portland, OR). Davis established the Dance Forum series at The Brooklyn Museum and served as its curator from 2001-2006. She received a Brooklyn Arts Exchange Passing It On Award for her work on this program, which presented performance in conjunction with the Museum's rotating exhibitions. She was the Director of Education for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, where she worked from 2002-2010. She is a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method and currently teaches at the Mark Morris Studio. PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now
January 7 - 17, 2015 / HERE & additional venues
PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now is the annual festival of visionary opera-theater and music-theater works by pioneering artists from New York City and around the world, co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE. The third edition of PROTOTYPE, running January 7-17, will feature two world premiere co-productions-composer Stefan Weisman and librettist David Cote's The Scarlet Ibis, a dreamy contemporary family opera that weaves puppetry into its story-telling, and Korean-American artist Bora Yoon's multimedia music-theater work, Sunken Cathedral, which takes the audience on a sonic journey of deep psychological impact. The festival also includes Toxic Psalms, an international co-presentation with Slovenian vocal theater company Carmina Slovenica and St. Ann's Warehouse; Kansas City Choir Boy, a theatricalized concept album by Todd Almond, at HERE; two work-in-progress presentations of Beth Morrison Projects operas in development: Winter's Child, by Ellen Reid and Amanda Jane Shank, co-presented with Trinity Wall Street, and Aging Magician, by Paola Prestini, Rinde Eckert, and Julian Crouch, co-presented with Park Avenue Armory and Opera America's New Works Forum; and a one-night-only performance by Timur and the Dime Museum at Joe's Pub. PROTOTYPE returns in 2015 following very successful festivals in 2013 and 2014. Past PROTOTYPE festivals featured the world premieres of Mohammed Fairouz's opera Sumeida's Song and Kamala Sankaram and Susan Yankowitz's Thumbprint, the New York premieres of David T. Little's Soldier Songs, Gregory Spears's Paul's Case, and international presentations of Collective 33 1/3's Bluebeard and Operamanija's Have a Good Day!. New York magazine named PROTOTYPE one of the 10 Best Classical Performances of Last Year: "an extravaganza...show[ing] how much life there is in New York's underground opera scene."
Co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, with lead funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
CULTUREMART Festival
March 3 - 14, 2015 / HERE
Annual Resident Artist Festival
Live arts. Up close. CULTUREMART is the annual festival of hybrid works in progress by artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP). Process becomes the focus as projects spanning dance and technology, opera for young people, visual art installation, puppetry and object theater, and works representing everything in-between are shown at various stages of development on their way to full production.
Donovan and Calderón are in development on a new mixed form theater project entitled Abaddon (working title), which uses Luis Buñuel's 1962 film The Exterminating Angel as its point of departure. Working with a multi-generational cast the piece will explore the notions of entrapment, enclosure, and the breakdown of social institutions intrinsic to the film. CasablancaBox by Sara Farrington & Reid Farrington
CasablancaBox is a hybrid video-theatre piece by new media artist Reid Farrington and old media artist Sara Farrington. The classic 1942 film Casablanca is the spine, from which stories branch off: Bogart's violent third wife, Peter Lorre's scene-stealing and homelessness, Bergman's scandalous affairs, the mercurial and cruel Jack Warner and hundreds more. Blending live performers and intricate video design that projects the film's characters, CasablancaBox studies the success, failure, struggle, glory, despair and madness of being an actor. Chang(e) by Soomi Kim
Chang(e) is based on the life and work of Philadelphia-based Asian American performance artist and activist Kathy Change. This politically driven dance-theater piece peers into the life of a woman whose mission was to save the world. Genet Porno by Yvan Greenberg
Genet Porno is based on Jean Genet's 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers, and follows the loves and betrayals of a cross-dressing, gay prostransvestitute prostitute named Divine. Divine's story is staged within the production of a present-day gay porn video, incorporating narrative elements from the confessional video blog of a real-life porn star. Mata Hari by Matt Marks & Paul Peers
An interdisciplinary opera-theater piece, Mata Hari is inspired by the life of Mata Hari, the exotic dancer who was executed for espionage during World War I. The story is placed during last months of her life while incarcerated in St. Lazare prison in Paris. It focuses on her relationships with the five men that lead to her execution in 1917. Science Fair by Hai-Ting Chinn
Science Fair is an opera singer's love-song to the scientific worldview. Conceived and performed by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn and pianist Erika Switzer, Science Fair features songs, slides and live experiments, as excerpts from scientific studies, articles and interviews, are turned into art-songs by various new-music composers. This original work marvels anew at how science, like art, is a vital and wondrous part of the human experience. Ship of Fools by Jessica Scott
Ship of Fools is a multidisciplinary theater piece involving live music, puppetry, movement and strong visual design that seeks to illuminate the age-old practice of pathologizing women. The audience travels with the performers, weaving through re-imagined moments in history, interrupted by moments of jarring fantasy that turn the narrative on its head. Soundstage by Rob Roth & Amelia Zirin-Brown (Lady Rizo)
This is considered the second episode in the triptych of 'female lead' studies that began with Roth's award-winning visual rock spectacle, Screen Test. Whereas Screen Test's focus was on 'the Goddess and the grace within,' Soundstage begins to ask the question, 'What are the merits of temptation and how does it lead to the perceived fall from grace?' Is what seems to be destiny self-oriented or is this just a grand experiment by an outside force? Stairway to Stardom by Amanda Szeglowski / cakeface
Stairway to Stardom is a mixed media dance-theatre tour of shattered dreams, inspired by and sourcing footage from the public-access television series by the same name, which aired in New York City from 1979 to the early 1990s. This new work synthesizes intricate choreography, immersive video, and original texts delivered via cakeface's signature style of linguistic performance art. ?? Thomas Paine in Violence by Paul Pinto
Set in and around the mind of revolutionary activist Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Thomas Paine in Violence is a mad psychedelic opera, depicting the final days of the American Founding Father's life, the strange events of his "afterlife," the censorship of his work, his philosophies, his complaints and his profanities. In this electronic-heavy work, Paine's actual words are embedded in stylized rants. The words of his activist pamphleteering are juxtaposed with the shock jock punditry of our contemporary media landscape, distorted and often censored. Thomas Paine in Violence looks at to the inability to communicate ideas of the "perfect state" to citizenry, and how it feels to see those ideas torn apart by the body politic.
The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Artistic Director and Kim Whitener, Producing Director), founded in 1993, is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performance viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines-theater, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art. Standout productions include Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique and Arias with a Twist, Hazelle Goodman's On Edge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Corey Dargel's Removable Parts, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge and Yoav Gal's Mosheh, among many others. In 2008, following an extensive renovation, HERE re-opened the doors to its longtime downtown home for the arts, where it continues as a vibrant, welcoming haven for artists and audiences alike. In addition to commissioning, developing and producing innovative new work from artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), through its SubletSeries, HERE proudly hosts adventurous artists, companies and productions - whether emerging or acclaimed - from New York and around the globe. The HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) has been HERE's core program since 1998. HARP commissions, develops and premieres new hybrid performances. Productions developed at HERE challenge existing boundaries between disciplines -- theater, dance, music, opera, puppetry, media, visual arts, installation, spoken word and more. Through HARP, the Resident Artists are given the unique opportunity to develop their projects for up to three years through free works-in-progress showings, workshop presentations in HERE's annual CULTUREMART festival, culminating in full-scale productions. Each season, HERE premieres several of these Resident Artist productions as mainstage works. These innovative projects are grown in a diverse artistic community where artists receive career development resources and hands-on training. HARP has been widely recognized as a unique model for artistic development for the field to emulate. In honoring HERE with the 2009 Ross Wetzsteon Award, the OBIE Committee noted, "it's become increasingly hard for artists to find a place to take risks, a safe haven where they can develop daring new work. One theater has regularly bucked the trend, making its mission to ensure that artists have a home for their research and development, and that theatregoers can sample the exciting results." HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program, under the artistic direction of Basil Twist, with producing direction from HERE co-founder Barbara Busackino, is one of few programs in the country to grow and commission contemporary adult puppet works, particularly works that feature live music as a collaborative element. Dream Music seeks to secure the future of puppetry by providing increased development and performance opportunities to puppet artists, and by collaborating with artists from other disciplines to develop new puppetry techniques. This program was inaugurated with the premiere of Basil Twist's OBIE-award winning Symphonie Fantastique in 1998 and the opening of the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, an intimate space created specifically for intimate puppetry. HERE is also home to the cross-disciplinary productions of Artistic Director Kristin Marting, and the visiting artist programs startHERE: Innovative Theatre for Young People, aimed at young audiences, and hemispHEREs, which brings innovative national and international visiting artists to HERE for a residency and presentation.
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