Immediate Medium Presents THE FUTURE AT THE END OF THE WORLD, Now thru 12/12

To celebrate the conjunction of its 10th anniversary and the "end" of the Mayan calendar, Immediate Medium is creating an immersive, interdisciplinary group performance called The Future at the End of the World. Working with guest curator Andrew Horwitz, Immediate Medium has selected nine makers of dance, theater, performance, music and media to join them in the largely abandoned offices of the James A. Farley Post Office in Midtown Manhattan.

The Post Office, which stands at its own moment of transformation as it becomes a new transportation hub, will serve as the site and inspiration for ten simultaneous, site-specific micro- performances around the themes of time, space, fortunetelling, futurology, reincarnation, the last week of the world as we know it and the beginnings of new worlds to come. A countdown clock counts down an hour, and performances begin simultaneously in ten rooms. The audience explores the rooms freely, and as the clock counts down to the zero, the artists unite in final gesture to this world's end, and the future that follows.

The Future at the End of the World will take place over four consecutive nights at the James Farley Post Office, future home of Moynihan Station, located at 421 8th Avenue, New York, NY. Performances tonight, December 10 through Wednesday, December 12 will begin at 8:00pm, and the performance on Thursday, December 13 will begin at 8:30pm and will be followed by a post-show party in the post office building. Running time is approximately ninety minutes, including security check and accessing the site. Tickets are $15 for the 10-12th, $40 for the 13th, and can be purchased online at immediatemedium.org or by phone at (866) 811-4111.

Curated artists represent exciting emerging voices in dance, theater, media and performance.

They include:
- Vanessa Anspaugh
- The Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (Tei Blow + Sean McElroy)
- The Bureau for the Future of Choreography
- Blake Carrington
- David Commander
- David Conison + Co.
- Immediate Medium Ouroboros (Lisa Clair + Sergei Tcherepnin)
- Rob Ramirez
- Jillian Sweeney + Jeffrey Cranor

The Future at the End of the World inaugurates Immediate Medium's tenth anniversary season, which will conclude in November 2013 with the premiere of The Electric Indian, the first work in its ambitious WINNETOU (vin-e-too) I.T. trilogy.

Immediate Medium, Inc. (IM) is a non-profit performance collective dedicated to the creation of original works of hybrid live performance. Formed in 2002, IM was created to challenge formal distinctions between theater, dance, film, sculpture and architecture. Our community seeks to create new experiential art that engages, provokes and moves creators and audiences alike. Reviewers called Immediate Medium's work "relentless" and "thrilling" (The Village Voice), "sublime," "riveting and powerful," "a rich fusion of live and recorded sounds and images" (Backstage), "a poetry of performance" (theateronline.com) and "unlike anything you've ever seen...get excited! A company worth keeping your eye on." (Show Business Weekly). Immediate Medium is Max Dana, JJ Lind, Michelle Preston, Maki Takenouchi and Siobhan Towey.

ABOUT THE CURATOR: Andrew Horwitz is a curator, producer and writer currently working at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as the curator of The River To River Festival. From 2002 – 2007 he worked at Performance Space 122, where in 2003 he launched Culturebot.org, a website devoted to contemporary performing arts, culture and ideas. From 2007-2009 he curated the PRELUDE Festival of contemporary theater and performance at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Andrew has served as a panelist for numerous arts organizations and funders and continues to work independently with artists on strategic planning and project development.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Vanessa Anspaugh is a choreographer, director, and performer. Her own work has been presented by a Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, AUNTS, Movement Research, The Kitchen, Highways, and Studio 303, among other venues. After being a Fresh Tracks artist at DTW in 2010 she has since received a BAX Space Grant, a STUDIO SERIES residency at DTW and a Hunter College Artist Residency. This January she is looking forward to her first residency at the MacDowell Colony. As a performer, Anspaugh has enjoyed working with, learning from, and performing for, Aretha Aoki, Juliette Mapp, Jillian Pena, Faye Driscoll, Jen Rosenblit, Taylor Mac, Katy Pyle, among others. Currently, she is performing with Robbinschilds at Art in General November 30 - December 15, 2012 and is also loving being a guest teaching artist at Bard College. vanessaanspaugh.com

Blake Carrington operates within the spheres of the visual, sound, and performing arts. His work in all of these forms displays a minimal aesthetic and finds resonance with the graphic sign systems of architectural plans and other minimal spatial representations. This year he completed a commission for Radio del Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, performed in the River to River Festival in New York, and has recently been artist-in-residence at LMCC's Swing Space on Governors Island and at Haeinsa Temple in South Korea. Blake was born in Indiana and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

The Bureau for the Future of Choreography is an apparatus-striving for collective authorship-that produces choreographies and documents. The Bureau's activities include: Desire Dances (2011), which occurred in public spaces and explored contexts that regulate bodies; aiding in the publication of Spangbergianism (2011); a call to map the past fifty years in contemporary dance/choreography through The Flowchart Project (2012) in order to re-sort hierarchies of knowledge through cooperative engagement, enthusiastic attention, and paperwork.

For the last 13 years, David Commander has been a member of Big Art Group, a NYC theater company dedicated to building culturally transgressive and challenging new works through using the language of media and blended states of performance. In his time with the company, he has worked in various capacities: performer, assistant director, videographer and miniature set/prop builder. In addition to his work with Big Art Group, he has written, directed and performed in his own works: PIGGY 1.5 (2006 NYC International Fringe Festival) and Machine World Gospel (2007 Philadelphia Fringe Festival). Since 2011, David has performed short modern toy theater work in New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and most recently the TBA festival in Portland, Oregon.

David Conison is an artist and director. Recent projects include, The Vegetable or, David Conison Directs an Adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Forgotten Play The Vegetable or, From President to Postman but also a Discussion of Politics, Love, Banality and Other Sundry Things as well as Many Interesting Dialogues About the Process of Creation and Whether It's Even Possible (or Desirable) to have a "Real" Experience in the Motherf-ing Theater at The Tank. He is currently working on a series about theatrical mission statements, launching in 2013. For the past year, David has assisted acclaimed director David Levine and has served as an assistant director for his Anger at the Movies (COIL 2012), There Was, Wow (upcoming, BRIC), and Habit (PS122/ Crossing the Line). He has assisted on theater and opera in NYC, Spoleto Festival, and Virginia Opera.

Jeffrey Cranor writes, performs, and directs (mostly short) plays for the New York Neo-Futurists and their long-running show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. He co-wrote & performed in 2008's full-length Neo-Futurist show (Not) Just a Day Like Any Other, for which he won a NY Innovative Theater award for Outstanding Ensemble. In 2009, Jeffrey co-wrote and directed Jillian Sweeney's solo show This Could Be It at The Chocolate Factory. And in 2011, Jeffrey performed in and co-wrote What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us with Joseph Fink at Incubator Arts Project. He is also a co-writer on the bi-weekly podcast Welcome to Night Vale.

Ouroboros is the collaboration of Sergei Tcherepnin and Lisa Rafaela Clair. Tcherepnin is a Brooklyn-based artist who uses performance, composition, and installation to explore the materiality of sound and its physical and psychological effects on the listener. He has performed throughout NYC as an improviser with piano and modular synthesizer at venues such as the Stone, Roulette, Abrons Art Center, the Whitney Museum, the Tank, Douglas Street Music Collective, Paris London West Nile, and i-Beam Brooklyn. His compositions have been performed by ensembles such as Transit, Da Capo Chamber Players, St Luke's Chamber Ensemble, American Wind Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, at spaces such as Merkin Hall, Cami Hall, Dia:Beacon, Chelsea Art Museum, Diapason Gallery, Louis Kahn's "Point Counterpoint II," National Youth Olympic Stadium (Tokyo), Moscow Composers Union Concert Hall, St. Petersburg Composers Union Concert Hall, and the Fisher Center for Performing Arts at Bard College. His multi-channel performances and installations have been mounted at Audio Visual Arts, Societé (Berlin), Casey Kaplan Gallery, 47 Canal, and Recess Art. Clair is a Brooklyn-based theater artist. Her recent work includes Immediate Medium's The Assassins Chase Pinocchio, Dan Fishback's The Material World, Nellie Tinder's upcoming concert version of Evelyn (Incubator Arts Project Other Forces Festival) and an upcoming tour of Beowulf with Banana Bag and Bodice. In Minneapolis, she performed with the Theatre de la Jeune Lune for several seasons, as well as Ten Thousand Things Theater and The Mixed Blood Theater. Lisa is 2013 Artist in Residence at the University Settlement House in which she will workshop her new play Yeh, I've been Searching/I Dream of Bas Jan Ader. Her previous original plays have been presented in residence at IRT, Dixon Place and The Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, MN. With Ouroboros, Lisa has performed alongside Sergei Tcherepnin at The Tank, Roulette, and as part of the Greetings Readings Series at Unnameable Books.

Robert Ramirez is a DJ, computer programmer, and multimedia artist working out of Brooklyn, New York. Since moving from Asheville, North Carolina to Brooklyn in 2004, he has collaborated with several international and New York based artists, musicians, filmmakers, and performers, developing interactive media applications for performance or installation, as well as sound, video, and 3D graphic design. Collaborators include performance artists Phil Soltanoff and Joe Diebes at the Novelum Festival (Toulouse, France), XI recording artist David Watson, sound and video artist Kurt Hentschlager, dancer and choreographer Koosil-Ja, and performance company The Builders Association. Most recently he has collaborated with Phil Soltanoff on An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk (Fusebox Festival 2012, Prelude Festival 2012). Robert holds a Graduate Certificate in Interactive Arts from Brooklyn College, and a M.S. in Integrated Digital Media from Brooklyn Polytechnic University. He is currently employed by the software company Cycling '74, developing the next version of Jitter, and at Parsons University, teaching beginning Max MSP.

The Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (Tei Blow + Sean McElroy) is a musical priesthood devoted to awakening higher consciousness through Pyramid Power and the Death Trance Dance. The Ensemble has been tasked with developing a "guerilla marketing" campaign geared at spreading awareness of Egyptian culture and interests in pre-apocalypse America. Born in Japan and raised in the United States, Tei Blow's work incorporates photography, video and sound design through antiquated processes. He has recently made designs for Big Dance Theater, David Neumann, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He is also re-performing a series of psychedelic-induced interviews with NYC artists and intellectuals (sciencecompany.org). Sean McElroy is a Brooklyn-based artist who makes paintings and installations dealing with the subjects of food, flesh, language, and Bill Clinton (goldensplinter.com). Leanne Grimes is a Philadelphia native who recently moved to Brooklyn from Seattle. Her inspiration lies in sunny climes and yogic practices. Her work reflects transitory experiences and spiritual vibrations (leannegrimes.com).

Jillian Sweeney received her MFA in Dance from Smith College, where she was also a teaching fellow. Her work has been presented by The Chocolate Factory, HERE Arts Center and in festivals/showcases around NYC, including Danspace Project's Food For Thought, DanceNOW, MAD, WaxWorks, Dixon Place, and Galapagos Art Space. She co-created and performed in DTW's Community Choreography Challenge videos and recently developed two solo shows – THIS COULD BE IT and IMAGINARY LINES – in collaboration with director/writer Jeffrey Cranor. She is currently in residence through LMCC's Swing Space and works at a literary agency in Soho.

To post a comment, you must register and login.