TRADE PRACTICES, PROTOTYPE and More Set for HERE's 2013-14 Season

HERE has announced its 2013-2014 producing season, launching in Fall 2013 with a premiere Artistic Director production, Trade Practices, by Kristin Marting & David Evans Morris; followed by three productions from artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP): BOTCH by Joe Diebes; The Pigeoning by Robin Frohardt; and Keep Your Electric Eye On Me by Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty. HERE's upcoming season also includes the second annual PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre Now festival in January; HERE's yearly CULTUREMART festival which gives audiences a first look at new work in process from HERE Resident Artists; and a presentation from the Dream Music Puppetry Program, to be announced. The multidisciplinary productions in HERE's 2013-2014 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, visit www.here.org.

HERE's 2013-2014 season:

Trade Practices
October 16 - November 2, 2013
An Artistic Director Production by Kristin Marting (HERE Artistic Director) & David Evans Morris
Trade Practices is an immersive site-specific theater experience (venue to be announced) created by director Kristin Marting and scenic designer David Evans Morris, which examines the notion of "value" against the backdrop of the booms and busts of the past decade. The journey of a fictional currency company, Tender, Inc., from family business to publicly ­traded corporation is told 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 different groups: Owners, Managers, Marketers and Workers. Audience members get to choose which story to follow at a given moment, and as they "invest" their time and money, create a living market trading in the works they experience within the overall performance. Collaborators include Elizabeth Bourgeois, Erin Courtney, Eisa Davis, Xander Duell, Chris Kuhl, Robert Lyons, Jared Mezzocchi, Qui Nguyen, KJ Sanchez, Jane Shaw and Chris Wells.

Produced in association with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Additional support provided by the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, Mental Insight Foundation and Venturous Theatre Fund. Additional development support from Mass MOCA and the 2012 Williams College Summer Theatre Lab.

Kristin Marting has constructed 25 works for the stage, including 12 original hybrid works, 8 adaptations of novels and short stories and 5 classic plays. She works in a collaborative, process-driven way to fuse different disciplines into a cohesive whole. Projects include Lush Valley, a live art participatory performance; Orpheus, an alt-musical co-created with David Morris; and James Scruggs's Disposable Men. She directed Sounding and Dead Tech, both of which received MAP Fund awards. Her works have toured the US. She has collaborated on several large-scale political action art events, including The Line (2004). For over 20 years, she has been developing a unique hybrid directorial/choreographic form that features a "gestural vocabulary" as an emotional signifier & as a choreographic element. She was named Person on the Year by nytheatre.com (2011) and honored with a BAX10 Award. She is a co-founder and Artistic Director of HERE, where she cultivates artists and programs for two performance spaces-including 18 OBIE-award winners - for an annual audience of 35,000. She created and co-curates HERE's Artist Residency Program. For 19 years, she curated The American Living Room, an annual summer festival featuring works by emerging artists; and for 8 years, QUEER@HERE, an annual festival of LGBT work. She serves on panels for NEA, NYSCA, DCA, and TCG. Previously, Marting co-founded and served as co-artistic director of Tiny Mythic Theatre Company. She served as Robert Wilson's assistant for HAMLETMACHINE and Salome. She graduated from NYU with honors in 1988. She teaches at NYU and lectures at Harvard, Columbia, Brown and Williams College, among others.

David Evans Morris makes original performance work and scenographic environments for the theater. He works regularly with Young Jean Lee (scenic design for Untitled Feminist Show, Lear, and The Shipment, US and European tours of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Church), Taylor Mac and Target Margin Theater. He co-conceived, with Kristin Marting, and designed scenery for Orpheus - an alt-rock opera based on the Classical myth, the design of which was included in the United States pavilion at the 2007 Prague Quadrennial. Also with Ms. Marting: Erendira, Dead Tech and Possessed. With Les Freres Corbusier (Associate Artist) he co-created and designed the Off-Broadway hit Boozy: The Life, Death, And Subsequent Vilification Of Le Corbusier And, More Importantly, Robert Moses, as well as designing the scenery for the Obie-winning A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, The Franklin Thesis and President Harding Is A Rock Star, all directed by Alex Timbers. As an Affiliated Artist with Clubbed Thumb he designed scenery for Quail (directed by Kip Fagan), Demon Baby (directed by Ken Rus Schmoll), The Typographer's Dream and The Train Play. He holds degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle and Williams College, where he teaches design. He has received a Princess Grace Fellowship, been nominated for a Henry Hewes design award, and was a previous HARP artist when he began developing Exercises for the Body Politic, an ongoing series of theatrical events about American civic life.

BOTCH
November 13 - 23, 2013
A HERE Resident Artist Production by Joe Diebes
BOTCH is a hyper-administrated performance system made of bodies and voices. Within a fluid installation environment, a virtuosic ensemble of vocalists cut, paste, reverse and scramble each other's words and motions according to the logic of corporate "performance optimization." Colliding with an ever-changing sculptural environment of call centers, boardrooms and broadcast studios, the human psyche overflows its bounds. The result is a soundscape of intricate vocal patterns, uncanny mimicry and pulverized speech. BOTCH is performed by Christina Campanella, Michael Chinworth, Joe Diebes and John Rose.

With additional support from the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space Residency. Project space is donated by Capstone Equities. A preliminary workshop was sponsored by STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam, funded by The Netherland-America Foundation.

Joe Diebes creates works that converge around the categories of visual art, music and performance. From 1996-2003 he was a core member as well as the musical force behind the hybrid arts group GAle GAtes et al. described by The New York Times as "an adventurous troupe with one foot in the world of post-modern art and the other in downtown performance." Since then, his own work has been shown equally in performing arts and visual art venues. His opera environment, Strange Birds, received its UK premiere in 2005 at Tramway (Glasgow) and his sound-theatre collaboration with Phil Soltanoff, I/O, was presented at Fusebox (Austin 2007) and Theatre Garonne (Toulouse 2008). He has also exhibited internationally his sound installations, video and works on paper in galleries, museums and public spaces including Paul Rodgers/9W (New York), The '06 Olympics (Torino, Italy), PrixArs Electronica (Linz, Austria), Yuanfen Gallery (Beijing) and the Liverpool Biennial.

The Pigeoning
December 4 - 21, 2013
A HERE Resident Artist and Dream Music Puppetry Production by Robin Frohardt
The Pigeoning uses bunraku puppetry, video and original music to explore the ideas of obsessive compulsion, safety and order in the context of the end of the world. The story is told through the main character, Frank, a bunraku-style puppet working in an office in the early 80s, who is absorbed and ultimately transformed by his pigeon obsession.

Additional support provided by The Jim Henson Foundation. Additional development support and premiere performance by the Pittsburgh Festival of Firsts (October, 2013).

Robin Frohardt is multidisciplinary artist and designer living in and working in Brooklyn. She began as a painting major in Seattle and was soon lured to San Francisco by its colorful underground theater and circus scene. There, she began teaching herself and learning from a host of others the skills needed to contribute creatively to a number of large-scale sculptural projects as well as a few vaudeville style theater and performance troupes. Traveling to Taiwan and Thailand in 2005 and 2006, her focus shifted primarily to puppetry and large-scale puppet building for parades and puppet festivals. Upon returning to the US in 2006 she founded the Apocalypse Puppet Theater in San Francisco. In 2008, she came to New York to work with a team of artists called the Swimming Cities building sculptural junk rafts that traveled down the Hudson River and into New York City. This adventure was so inspiring she decided to stay. With the exception of two more raft trips (one to Venice and one down the Ganges), she has been working in New York ever since, creating installation and puppet pieces for galleries, theaters and beyond. In 2011 she began work on The Pigeoning, her first original full-length puppet piece, with longtime collaborator and friend Freddi Price. She workshopped the first act at St. Ann's Warehouse as part of the Puppet Lab and developed the piece in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP).

PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now
January 8 - 18, 2014
An annual festival of visionary opera-theater and music-theater works by pioneering artists from New York and around the world. A new body of work is on the brink of exploding out of New York and onto the national scene, as a rising generation of composers and collaborators focus on the creation of chamber-sized opera-theater works in new and unique ways. PROTOTYPE is at the forefront of the movement, showcasing these works for new audiences and presenters alike. PROTOTYPE returns in 2014, following a very successful debut festival in 2013, which featured the world premiere of Mohammed Fairouz's opera Sumeida's Song and the New York premiere of David T. Little's.