SITI Company Returns to Columbus 9/30-10/4 At The Wexner Center

Longtime Wexner Center theater favorites the SITI Company returns to Columbus September 30-October 4 with another ensemble work co-commissioned by the Wexner Center, Who Do You Think You Are. This production by the New York City- based company explores the principles of brain science. and will be the keynote for an Ohio State symposium on science, narrative, and performance.

With its text developed solely by the company members (for the first time since The Medium, the first SITI production presented at the Wexner Center in 1996), Who Do You Think You Are is a smartly conceived theatrical exploration of the principles of brain science. Audiences need not worry: Ph.D.s aren't a prerequisite for grasping the dramatic situations that SITI puts into play onstage.

Notes SITI director Anne Bogart: "How does the vast labyrinth, the systems and the layers of chemical, muscular, and neuronal activity, inform our tiniest interaction? When we begin to examine the chemistry of emotion, thought, and action, does our own scrutiny alter the emotion, the thought, or the action? When studying the mind, does the mind study you?....Our task is to construct a play that simultaneously suggests the complexity of human experience and celebrates its elegance and simplicity."

Notes Charles Helm, the Wexner Center's director of performing arts, "We are pleased to continue our long relationship with SITI Company with this co-commissioned piece-one that will fit perfectly into this special symposium focusing on the relationships between the sciences and the arts and support OSU's "one university" aspirations to foster cross-disciplinary learning."

The symposium, called Narrative, Science and Performance-taking place at Ohio State October 1-3 and cosponsored by Project Narrative (an initiative of Ohio State's Department of English) and the Wexner Center-brings scientists and humanists together to explore new possibilities for dialogue across long-standing disciplinary divide, focusing on how science can often serve as a catalyst for the arts. SITI's Anne Bogart will serve as a panelist for a session on Friday, October 1 from 9 to 11 am in the center's Film/Video Theater, and the symposium registration fee includes a ticket to the October 1 performance of Who Do You Think You Are. More information on the symposium can be found on the Wexner Center's event site at http://www.wexarts.org/learn/?eventid=4103 or Project Narrative at http://projectnarrative.osu.edu/events/default.cfm.

THE SITI COMPANY AND THE WEXNER CENTER
The Wexner Center has a rich history of supporting Anne Bogart and SITI Company, and this show marks SITI's ninth appearance at the center. Starting in 1996 with the presentation of The Medium (inspired by the writings of Marshall McLuhan) to the 2007 production of Radio Macbeth (a Wexner Center Residency Award project), with stops in between for the Obie Award-winning BOB (about theater director Robert Wilson); an inventive take on Alice in Wonderland called Alice's Adventures; the one-woman show Room (based on the writings of Virginia Woolf); Score, inspired by the composer and educator Leonard Bernstein; and the Wexner Center co-commission Death and the Ploughman. SITI has also participated in both student and teaching residencies in Ohio State's theater department over the years, and the company's design and technical team will be talking with technical theater students at Ohio State this year. For more on SITI Company, click to: www.siti.org.

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