Incubator Arts Project Presents MONTGOMERY PARK, OR OPULENCE 11/4-13

Montgomery Park, or Opulence, pairing archival installation with luminous chamber opera, immerses its visitors in the unsettling history of an asylum that provokes the question of where the boundaries between conscious beings lie.

Karinne Keithley's
Montgomery Park, or Opulence
November 4 - 13
8pm Curtain

Montgomery Park, or Opulence is an essay in the form of a building in the form of a performance: a work of fluid genre. Pairing archival installation with chamber opera, visitors are immersed in the history of an asylum, provoking questions of where the boundaries between conscious beings lie. Re-imagining theater space as a hybrid of solitary and group experience, the piece creates a mood of deep listening in a luminous environment.

As the play begins, the audience is let into a museum built entirely of paper walls, where archival documents-case studies, photographs, diaries, ephemera-of the residents of Montgomery Park are displayed in small chambers. These documents accumulate to point toward a strange phenomenon: the building seems to be conscious. The audience first tours the museum of Montgomery Park, listening to and reading the founding tales alongside the other documentary objects.
The audience is then ushered into a new chamber for the performance of the Fire Story, a cycle of tales part opera, part radio play, part light projection, part ballet. The environment is delicate and strange, inviting and provoking. The text is deployed in song, speech both live and recorded, and overhead and video projections, in a manner consistent with Keithley's explorations into new staging strategies for theater writing unconnected to traditional playwriting scenarios.

Karinne Keithley: writer, performer, sound/video/image designer
Katy Pyle: performer, collaborating creator
Emily Wexler: performer
David Brooks: performer (sound)
David Neumann: collaborating director
Christy Pessagno: videographer
Sara Smith: collaborating director and choreographer
Amber Reed: additional video, sound
Kristen Kosmas: performer (sound/video)
Heidi Schreck: performer (video)

Karinne Keithley is a writer, performer, scholar, choreographer, animator, videographer, and publisher. She lived and performed in New York for 12 years, showing work in the downtown dance world and in the theater world loosely clustered around the writing experiments of Mac Wellman, with whom she studied at Brooklyn College. She founded the 53rd State Press and co-hosted the Acousmatic Theater Hour on WFMU.

More information: www.fancystitchmachine.org

About Incubator Arts Project
The Incubator Arts Project supports independent, experimental performing artists through a series of programs aimed at offering production opportunities and guidance with long-term growth and artistic sustainability. Its programs primarily support world premieres of original work and also include a concert series, work in progress opportunities and artist salons and roundtables.

The Incubator Arts Project grew out of the Incubator, a project of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. In 2010, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater announced that it would leave its permanent home, St. Mark's Church, and that the Incubator would take over the space and operate year-round.

Beginning in 1993, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, in addition to its primary support of the work of Richard Foreman, opened its doors to emerging, independent artists. Since 1993 the emerging artists program at the Ontological took many forms, including the Obie-winning Blueprint Series for emerging directors. In 2005, the OHT reorganized the programs under the name INCUBATOR, creating a series of linked programs to provide young theater artists with resources and support to develop process-oriented, original theatrical productions. By 2010, the program had quadrupled in size, involving a range of artists and increased support. The programs included the centerpiece Residency program for premieres, two annual music festivals, a regular concert series, a serial work-in-progress program called Short Form, and roundtables and salons aimed at keeping Incubator artists involved year-round. In May, 2010, the Incubator received an OBIE grant.

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