THE MAIDS' THE MAIDS to Play Abrons Arts Center

The Mainds' The Maids, director Kathryn Hamilton and artists from her company Sister Sylvester have partnered with domestic household workers in New York City to devise a response to Jean Genet's notorious 1947 one-act The Maids. Using Genet's central device of maids role-playing as their employer to expose the subtle (and not-so-subtle) humiliations involved in domestic labor and the experience of immigrants, the performance invites contemporary domestics to use the theatrical space to stage experiences from their own lives. What emerges is a portrait of two separate New York Cities: a city that serves and a city that is served. One is for the increasingly affluent English speakers who can afford domestic workers, while the other-separated by language and class-is that of laborers who serve them. In the waste and excess of this rich people's playground, who cleans up the mess?

Navigating the intersecting fault lines of labor, language and power, the show presents stories and experiences culled from the experiences of our collaborators in the their time as domestic workers, which are used to give depth and perspective to Genet's celebration of ritual transgression through a "maids' rebellion." The show is performed in the native languages of the performers: English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Performances of The Maids' The Maids will take place October 31, November 1,2 & 7,8 at 8pm. Critics are welcome as of the first performance on October 30. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased by going to www.abronsartscenter.org or by calling the box office on 212.352.3101.

Sister Sylvester makes ensemble-based work that uses multi-disciplinary performance to create stories based in contemporary reality. Since 2008, they have made work in both site-specific venues as well as in theaters, keeping an investigation of the audience-performer relationship at the heart of their practice. The content of their work is concerned with power: how it is wielded within society at all levels and how language becomes a weapon in enforcing those hierarchies. They invite disruption into both the performance and the process, and look for dissonance and difficulty in text, image and sound. Sister Sylvester is interested in exploring/subverting and adapting traditional forms, (musical, sitcom, radioplay etc.) as well as creating a dialogue with performance practitioners of the past, in particular the formal and conceptual innovations of the 1960s Judson Church era artists, and the scale, collage techniques and political engagement of Reza Abdoh.