Daniel Fish and Andrew Dinwiddie Create PHIL. 176 / OBIT, Now thru 4/5 at The Bushwick Starr

The Bushwick Starr will present a collaboration between stage and film director Daniel Fish and dance and theater artist Andrew Dinwiddie. Using nearly seven weeks of residency time at the Bushwick Starr, and in collaboration with actor T. Ryder Smith (War Horse, Passion Play) and designers Blanca Añón (ETERNAL, Owned) and Daniel Kluger (Nikolai and the Others, A Map of Virtue), they will create PHIL. 176 / OBIT, an episodic performance installation that draws simultaneously on the text of Shelly Kagan's renowned Yale College philosophy course, "PHIL 176: Death,"* and on current American obituaries and death notices.

The twenty-six lectures of Kagan's course will be presented in succession:

Lecture 1 Course Introduction

Lecture 2 The Nature of Persons: Dualism vs. Physicalism

Lecture 3 Arguments for the Existence of the Soul, Part I

Lecture 4 Introduction to Plato's Phaedo; Arguments for the Existence of the Soul, Part II

Lecture 5 Arguments for the Existence of the Soul, Part III: Free Will and Near-Death Experiences

Lecture 6 Arguments for the Existence of the Soul, Part IV; Plato, Part I

Lecture 7 Plato, Part II: Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul

Lecture 8 Plato, Part III: Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul (cont.)

Lecture 9 Plato, Part IV: Arguments for the Immortality of the Soul (cont.)

Lecture 10 Personal Identity, Part I: Identity Across Space and Time and the Soul Theory

Lecture 11 Personal Identity, Part II: The Body Theory and the Personality Theory

Lecture 12 Personal Identity, Part III: Objections to the Personality Theory

Lecture 13 Personal Identity, Part IV: What Matters?

Lecture 14 What Matters (cont.); The Nature of Death, Part I

Lecture 15 The Nature of Death (cont.); Believing You Will Die

Lecture 16 Dying Alone; The Badness of Death, Part I

Lecture 17 The Badness of Death, Part II: The Deprivation Account

Lecture 18 The Badness of Death, Part III; Immortality, Part I

Lecture 19 Immortality Part II; The Value of Life, Part I

Lecture 20 The Value of Life, Part II; Other Bad Aspects of Death, Part I

Lecture 21 Other Bad Aspects of Death, Part II

Lecture 22 Fear of Death

Lecture 23 How to Live Given the Certainty of Death

Lecture 24 Suicide, Part I: The Rationality of Suicide

Lecture 25 Suicide, Part II: Deciding under Uncertainty

Lecture 26 Suicide, Part III: The Morality of Suicide and Course Conclusion

* Shelly Kagan, Death (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

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Location: The Bushwick Starr theater: 207 Starr Street, Brooklyn, NY [between Irving and Wykcoff]. Directions: Via Subway take the L Train to Jefferson Street, exit at Starr Street, walk against traffic on Starr, and the theater is 3/4 of a block on the right. For detailed driving directions visit: www.thebushwickstarr.org/DIRECTIONS.

Tickets are $18.00 at www.thebushwickstarr.org After a full-price ticket purchase, patrons may return to see future performances for only $5

BIOS:

Daniel Fish is a director of theater, opera and film. He draws on a broad range of forms and subject matter to reinterpret dramatic classics (Shakespeare, Rodgers and Hammerstein) or find theater where none was intended (the writing of David Foster Wallace, the films of Nicholas Ray). His recent production, A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN, based on audio recordings of David Foster Wallace, played a sold-out run at The Chocolate Factory in 2012. His two-channel video ETERNAL (an unedited video document of a performance in which Thomas Jay Ryan and Christina Rouner perform the final scene of the 2003 film, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, in a continuous, wildly ranging loop for two hours, premiered at the Incubator Art Project in 2013 and was remounted for the Under The Radar festival at The Public. His work has been seen at Incubator Arts Project, Opera Philadelphia/Curtis Opera, American Repertory Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College, Yale Rep, McCarter Theater, Signature Theater, The Shakespeare Theater Company, The Zipper, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Staatstheater Braunschweig, The Royal Shakespeare Company and The Juilliard School. He has a B.S. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. Residencies and commissions include Baryshnikov Arts Center, LMCC/Governor's Island, The Chocolate Factory, Incubator Arts Project and The Bushwick Starr. He is currently developing THE SOURCE, a new music- theater piece by Ted Hearne and Mark Doten that will premiere at BAM/NEXT WAVE in 2014.

Andrew Dinwiddie is a creator, performer, curator and producer. In 2013 he presented Farewell Tour, a funereal solo dance work partially lipsynched to the onstage banter of KISS, on a split bill at Danspace Project. His show Get Mad at Sin!, in which he reincarnates a 1971 hellfire-and-brimstone sermon by the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, premiered at the Chocolate Factory Theater on 2010 and has toured to the Bryant-Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, the Fusebox Festival in Austin, the Time-Based Art festival in Portland and the San Diego Museum of Art. In 2008 at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church, he presented The Accursed Items, a dance-theater work centered on a prose poem by J. Robert Lennon and constructed largely from discarded sections from dances and films. Andrew is a performer with David Neumann / advanced beginner group, and has performed with other terrific dance and theater makers including Big Dance Theater, Ivy Baldwin, Karinne Keithley, Sibyl Kempson, Richard Maxwell and Chris Yon. He produced Nellie Tinder's Evelyn at the Bushwick Starr and Yasuko Yokoshi's BELL as Producing Associate for New York Live Arts' inaugural Resident Commissioned Artist program. He served three years on the selection committee for the New York Dance and Performance Awards ("The Bessies"). With Jeff Larson and Caleb Hammons, he curates "everyone's favorite" hydra-headed, multi-disciplinary, rough-and-ready performance series, Catch (www.catchseries.org).

About The Bushwick Starr: The Bushwick Starr is an Obie Award winning non profit theater that presents an annual Season of new work in theater, dance, and puppetry. We are an organization defined by both our artists and our community, and since 2007, we have grown into a thriving theatrical venue, a vital neighborhood arts center, and a destination for exciting and engaging performance. The Bushwick Starr's mission is to help ambitious artists and ambitious audiences find each other. We provide a springboard for emerging professional artists to make career-defining leaps, and we are a sanctuary where established performance companies come to experiment and innovate. Our past seasons have included new work from cutting edge companies such as The Debate Society, the TEAM, Elevator Repair Service, Half Straddle, and Witness Relocation.

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