Ann Hamilton & SITI Company's THE THEATER IS A BLANK PAGE Opens 4/28

UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) presents the return of New York-based Siti Company in the West Coast premiere of the theater is a blank page, a much-heralded collaboration with celebrated visual artist Ann Hamilton. The site-specific performance and interdisciplinary installation, which blends elements of theater, visual art and literature, will run from Saturday, April 28 to Saturday, May 12 at Royce Hall. Tickets for $119 are now available online at cap.ucla.edu, via Ticketmaster, by phone 310-825-2101 and at the UCLA Central Ticket Office.

Co-directed by Hamilton, winner of the National Medal of Arts, and acclaimed SITI co-artistic director Anne Bogart, the project draws equally on Siti Company's impeccable skills as theater-makers, pushing their aesthetic into fresh, new territory. A world-renowned ensemble, Siti Company is lauded for its innovation and the creation of new forms of theater that challenge accepted norms and defy classification.

the theater is a blank page is a meditation on Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. With text drawn directly from the modernist masterpiece, the novel's evocative language and inventive narrative - which skillfully deploy shifting temporal and psychological perspectives alongside poignant ruminations on loss, subjectivity and perception - make it a fertile point of departure for artists of different disciplines to find deep kinship in a collaboration addressing the experience of reading and being read to. It is also a response to the enduring power of words in a digital landscape.

"Throughout history the theater has been useful in specific ways at particular historical moments," said Bogart. "Currently we inhabit a culture in which busyness and distraction have become not only the baseline of modern existence, but also a subject matter of great confusion and, concurrently, of great urgency. The theater is in a unique position to offer alternatives to the fast pace and panic of our times."
The cast includes Zuri Adele, who trained as an M.F.A. actor at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television, and Samuel Stricklen, who received his M.F.A. in acting from the University of California, San Diego, in addition to Siti Company members Akiko Aizawa, Gian-Murray Gianino, Leon Ingulsrud and Ellen Lauren, with Rena Chelouche Fogel and Bahni Turpin as "The Reader" and "A Reader." Student assistants from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television will also participate.
The immersive experience utilizes the entirety of the theater and incorporates spaces in and around Royce Hall and Powell Library. After visiting the library, audience members are guided back to historic Royce Hall, built in 1928 and modeled after Milan's Basilica di Sant'Ambrogio. The intimate journey continues as the audience, capped at 90 each performance, is led through the balconies, to the production shops, into the wings and finally onto the stage itself.

"Like paternal twins, Powell Library and Royce Hall stand face to face as sentinels on either side of UCLA's central staircase," said Hamilton. "If the library is the house of the book and a space of silent, solitary reading, the theater is the house of the voice, a space of sound, an architecture for the collective experience of the vocal. As both readers and speakers we cross between these dwellings and their twin immersions."

Hamilton is internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multimedia installations and has a long history of including performative elements in her installation work. the theater is a blank page demonstrates her interest in shaping performance from a conceptual, visual art-based perspective.

SITI returns to CAP UCLA following the January 2017 production of Kurt Weill's musical Lost in the Stars, directed by Anne Bogart with music direction by Jeffrey Kahane, presented by UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance in partnership with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall. Anne Bogart and Siti Company are CAP UCLA 2017-18 Artist Fellows, an initiative that celebrates the legacy and talent of world-renowned artistic masters through multi-year presentation commitments.
the theater is a blank page premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts in April 2015, and won the Greater Columbus Arts Council's Artistic Excellence Award. Richard Sanford of Columbus Underground called the theater is a blank page "a tribute to life, a paean to sensation fully experienced, a howl into the void, a sensual expression of a deep love of language, and a diamond-hard burst of light ... one of the most moving theatrical experiences I've ever had." Early inspiration for the theater is a blank page came from Siti Company's involvement in Hamilton's massive installation work, the event of a thread at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City in 2012.

Funds provided by Royce Center Circle Endowment Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation multi-year grant for Collaborative Intersections in the Visual & Performing Arts and Deborah Irmas. Additional funds were provided by Susan & Leonard Nimoy and the Good Works Foundation in support of the CAP UCLA Artists' Fellowship program. the theater is a blank page was commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University under the auspices of its Wexner Center Artist Residency Award program. the theater is a blank page was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital, primarily supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional funds come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Support was also given by the Rauschenberg Residency/Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

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