Laurie Berg's FOMO:DIPTYCH Announced At The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater presents the world premiere of FOMO:DIPTYCH, a new evening-length performance by Laurie Berg. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

The chameleon's eyes move independently of one another, offering an almost 360 view of its surroundings. Even when both eyes focus on the same object, they do so independently, making the chameleon's vision a naturally occurring diptych. This remarkable ocular duet is the basis for Laurie Berg's new work FOMO:DIPTYCH. A densely layered performance installation to study the diptych: as a form, a way of viewing, listening, feeling, and consuming. A place where missing something is guaranteed (and ok).

Upon entering The Chocolate Factory's raw industrial building, audience members for FOMO:DIPTYCH will be asked to choose an environment, each sitting side by side within the space, from which to view the performance: either a white box art gallery (with bubbles and conceptual canapes), or a sports bar - a 16' triangular bar complete with 55' TV monitors and celebrity bartenders Lori E. Seid and Heidi Dorow.

In lieu of football, the bar plays live video feed from a camera fixed to a toy train running along a closed track near the bar. Shifting slowly throughout the performance, the "trainview" (by Myssi Robinson) reveals interchangeable objects strategically placed within view as the train passes by.

Performers Jodi Bender, Laurie Berg, Ayano Elson, and Marion Spencer move throughout the gallery space creating a binocular rivalry of live and digital diptychs. Grab a drink. Write notes for your next great novel on a bar napkin (pens provided) while getting lost in deconstructed cover songs performed by Madison Krekel with a sound score by Omar Zubair.
FOMO:DIPTYCH asks if performance - as an inherently ephemeral experience - can help us recognize our capacity to hold multiple perspectives at once, and when considered collectively, reveals the cacophonous jumble of inputs we piece together to make meaning. Our eyes move independently of the eyes of our neighbor, each of our brains collecting only the objects we choose to let in. And where we sit affects what we encounter.

FOMO:DIPTYCH is created by Laurie Berg in collaboration with Matt Romein (technical design); Madison Krekel and Omar Zubair (sound); Jodi Bender, Laurie Berg, Ayano Elson, and Marion Spencer (performance); Myssi Robinson (trainview designer); Charlie Welch (sports bar design); jess pretty (creative consultant); and Shana Crawford (lighting design).

Whether working with dance and performance, collage, or jewelry, Laurie Berg draws on her interest in iconography, detail, humor, and absurdity to cultivate a collaborative, creative space that allows for rigorous play. Working across, under, around and through different mediums, she creates performances that feel like living collages. Recent works include superposition (Roulette Intermedium 2021), EZ Pass (Roulette Intermedium 2019), scape: Times Square (co-commission by Times Square Arts and Danspace Project 2018), Ziegfeld Goes Down (as part of Charles Atlas Presents: The Kitchen Follies 2018), Terrifying Times Call For Terrifying Jewelry (Dixon Place 2017), and The Mineralogy of Objects (Danspace Project 2015/2016).

Berg was a 2020-2021 Movement Research Parent Artist Resident supported by The Sustainable Arts Foundation, was a 2016-17 LMCC Workspace Artist-In-Residence, the 2016 recipient of the Tom Murrin Performance Award, a 2013 New York Live Arts Studio Series Artist and a 2010 Movement Research Artist-In-Residence. Berg is a co-organizer of AUNTS, an underground platform for dance and performance.

In the summer of 2021, the AUNTS organizing cohort produced AUNTS Goes Public! (three large scale outdoor events as part of the OPEN Culture NYC Program) and AUNTS Triple Threat (a three-way collaboration between the Chocolate Factory Theater and NYU Skirball Center).

To post a comment, you must register and login.