Incubator Arts Project Kicks Off 5th Annual OTHER FORCES Festival Today

The Incubator Arts Project presents its fifth annual Other Forces, a festival of work from some of independent theater's most innovative artists. Other Forces will run today, January 9 - 26, 2014.

LINEUP:

Take Me Home
A mobile performance in a taxi
Written by Alexandra Collier
Directed by Meghan Finn

January 9-26; Previews January 7 & 8 // $25 general

TAKE ME HOME is an interactive live performance that takes place inside the mobile heart of New York City: a taxicab. Transporting three audience members only, from a secret location, the Driver takes passengers on a radical journey through the city, along streets both familiar and strange. The windows to the cab become eyes to a vast theatrical landscape as the streets of New York transform into an unending performance installation. Integrating live performance, sound, video and street action, TAKE ME HOME offers a captivating, dark and irreverent view of the city through an intimate and innovative theatrical experience.

Directed by Meghan Finn (The Downtown Loop, The Service Road), this performance promises to be a completely singular theatrical experience for audiences. Exploring the relationship between cab driver and passenger, the intimate setting of the taxi allows revelations about both sides to come to light. Audiences will be able to engage interactively in various ways, as well as spying surprise performance moments on the streets. The show will run in rep, three times each night.

Alexandra Collier (Playwright) is from Australia, now based in New York. Her plays have been developed at Sydney Theatre Company, Women's Project, New Georges, the Lark and Dixon Place. Her recent work includes WE PLAY FOR THE GODS (created with the Women's Project, Cherry Lane), and UNDERLAND (Sydney Theatre Company workshop and Page to Stage, Dixon Place).

Meghan Finn (Director) Directing credits include: World Premieres of THE DOWNTOWN LOOP by Ben Gassman (3LD), THE SERVICE ROAD by Erin Courtney (Adhesive Theater Project; NY TIMES Critics' Pick), MOTEL CHERRY by Peggy Stafford (Summerworks Clubbed Thumb/New Georges at HERE Arts Center; Huffington Post Top 10 of 2012) and 3 2's; or AFAR by Mac Wellman (Dixon Place).

http://www.willyoutakemehome.com

Produced by Lauren Rayner Productions in association with the longest lunch
Featuring: Modesto "Flako" Jimenez
Associate Directors: Claire Moodey & Jenny Snyder
Sound Designer: Stowe Nelson
Video Designer: Robert Wuss
Production Stage Manger: Geoff Maus

Blue Wizard/Black Wizard
Eliza Bent and Dave Malloy
January 9-14 // $18 general

Ancient ideals and modern musings rub up against each other in Blue Wizard/Black Wizard, a philosophical musical fantasia. Two referees adjudicate the proceedings as the Black and Blue Wizards battle to save themselves and humanity from the mundane. Warping the conventions of musical theater and classical art song to intersect with the sensibilities of electronic music, Blue Wizard/Black Wizard is a pop culture smashup of fantasy language and contemporary parlance. What unfolds is a ritualistic sporting event, the likes of which audiences have never seen.

Eliza Bent (Writer/Performer) is a performer, playwright, and journalist. Recent plays include The Hotel Colors (Bushwick Starr), Karma Kharms (or yarns by Kharms) (Target Margin Lab series at the Bushwick Starr), Toilet Time with Eliza Bent (various) and Pen Pals Meet (Iranian Theatre Festival at The Brick). Bent is a MacDowell Colony fellow, a Bay Area Playwrights Finalist and a New Georges affiliated artist. She is a company member of the Obie-award winning theatre ensemble Half Straddle and a senior editor at American Theatre Magazine. MFA in playwriting, Brooklyn College; BA in philosophy, Boston College.

Dave Malloy (Composer/Performer/Sound Designer) is a composer/performer/sound designer. Shows include Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812; All Hands; Three Pianos; Beardo; Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage; The Sewers; Sandwich; Clown Bible; and (The 99-cent) Miss Saigon. He lives in Brooklyn.

Dan Safer (Director and Choreographer) directs and choreographs plays and other things and is the Artistic Director of the dance/theater company Witness Relocation, with whom his work has been performed in NY, across the US, in Europe, and Southeast Asia. His choreography has been seen in venues like BAM and in The Rite of Spring with The Philadelphia Orchestra. He is the Head of Movement Training at NYU/Playwrights Horizons Theater School and has recently taught at Princeton University and The Norwegian Theatre Academy. He used to be a go-go dancer and once choreographed the Queen of Thailand's Birthday Party.

Text by Eliza Bent (and Dave Malloy)
Music by Dave Malloy (and Eliza Bent)
Directed and Choreographed by Dan Safer

Performed by Eliza Bent, Nikki Calonge, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Dave Malloy & Andy Strain on trombone

CORE: Hollis Beck, Siena D'Addario, Diana Egizi, Philip Gates, Victoria Giler, Tori Khalil, Amy King, Vanessa Koppel, Teri Madonna, Kris Opperman, Mark Taylor, Eleanor Hall Watson

Set Design by Mimi Lien
Lighting Design by Yi Zhao
Video Design by Michael De Angelis
Costume Design by Oana Botez
Stage Management by Maurina Lioce
Assistant Stage Management by Eh-den Dinah Perlove

Live Sound by Joshua Chang

Executive Producer - John Logan
Producers - Samara Naeymi; Markus Potter/NewYorkRep; Polly, David and Olivia D'Addario; Randy & Indra

She Is King
Laryssa Husiak
January 10-26 // $18 general

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the historic "Battle of the Sexes", SHE IS KING is a live performance that uses archival footage to reenact three interviews at pivotal moments in the career of tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King. SHE IS KING captures the legend's big personality and subtle maneuvers as King manages the pressure of her success and being a woman in a field long dominated by men. The use of interactive media via nine old TV screens magnifies the life of King as a public and private figure, and examines the impact of media on gender, sexuality and celebrity.

Laryssa Husiak (Creator/Performer) is an actor, writer and performance artist currently living in Des Moines, Iowa with her roots in New York City. She is a grantee of the Iowa Arts Council, Art Matters and Yip Harburg Foundations and looks forward to being in residence at Yaddo February 2014. Laryssa is a member of the Obie award-winning theater company Two-Headed Calf and a founding member of their Dyke Division. She has also been a featured actor in the works of video artist Sunita Prasad and durational performances of painter/sculptor Jonathan Van Dyke. Laryssa is a graduate of NYU's Experimental Theater Wing and holds a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University.

Katherine Brook (Director) most recently directed Gertrude Stein's Pink Melon Joy at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival and Prelude '13, and Acting at New York University. With her company, Tele-Violet, Brook also presented a new interpretation of a Noh play called Lady Han at Incubator Arts Project this year, and American Realism, part of the Transcripts project last year (The Invisible Dog, the San Diego Museum of Art and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). Brook is a member of the New Georges JAM and is the producing manager of New York City Players. She received her BFA from New York University and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

http://laryssahusiak.com/she-is-king

Created and Performed by Laryssa Husiak
Directed by Katherine Brook
Sound Design by Chris Giarmo
Set and Lighting Design by Josh Smith
Performed by Laryssa Husiak, Louisa Bradshaw, Joshua William Gelb & six middle school students (to be announced)

I am an Opera
Joseph Keckler
January 11-25 // $18 general

Employing a powerful, classically trained voice, Keckler presents a quadrilingual collection of arias and recitatives that often sound vaguely familiar, as though they might belong to the Bel Canto repertoire. But rather than prayers to the gods or suicidal swansongs, these laments and buffo showpieces tell minor stories from Keckler's own life: a trip on hallucinogens, an expedition to the bondage store, and the time he fell asleep in the stairwell at a day job. Treating the show as a "trip" itself, Keckler also invokes a hallucinatory world in which he is possessed by taunting demons and visited by a persnickety voice teacher who emanates from an atmospheric silent film.

Singer, writer, and interdisciplinary artist Joseph Keckler is known for his wide vocal range and dreamlike texts and performances. In the past Keckler has presented work at the New Museum, Issue Project Room, BAM Fischer Center, SXSW, Afterglow Festival, La MaMa ETC, Performa, and many other venues in the U.S and Europe. He has received residencies from MacDowell and Yaddo and has been awarded a Franklin Furnace grant and a NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work. The Village Voice has named him Best Downtown Performance Artist, 2013

Uwe Mengel (Director) began creating interactive cross-media projects in East Germany, among them the performance Association for the Dissemination of the Notion that the Earth is Flat, which was banned after its first showing. He has since been invited to create works in cities around the world-Melbourne, Zürich, Berlin, and San Antonio, to name a few. He has taught at the National Theater of Greece, Athens, made numerous award-winning radio plays and TV documentaries in Germany, and created performances all over NYC, from empty storefronts up in the South Bronx, to a landfill on the Hudson River, all the way to Battery Park. He was the first German artist to produce a performance for the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Written and Performed by Joseph Keckler
Directed by Uwe Mengel

#aspellforfainting
WaxFactory
January 14-19 // $18 general

Using Charcot's Tuesday night lectures at the Salpêtrière and his instigation of hysterical performance as a leaping-off point, WaxFactory traces the lines of fainting, hallucination, delusion, and love letters that run through the source material. #aspellforfainting vividly celebrates the live, raw neurosis of being a performer: the crippling of an artistic block, unforeseen circumstances, nightmares, getting out of one's own way... and what happens when one confronts the reality of what was created, exposed, capsized, deconstructed, demolished, and uprooted.

A brand new ensemble work for a solo performer/PJ, a sound artist/DJ and a video artist/VJ, #aspellforfainting is an improvisational piece, created anew for each performance by using disparate textual sources (The Seagull, Macbeth, Hamlet, Streetcar Named Desire, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, YouTube instructional videos, etc.), an array of musical selections and sounds, and a multitude of objects as an investigation in the chaos of creation.

WaxFactory is an ensemble of interdisciplinary artists dedicated to exploring a multiplicity of theatrical visions. The company focuses on original works devised by its founders, along with innovative adaptations of literary and cinematic works. WaxFactory's productions are characterized by unconventional narrative styles, visual and physical rigor, integrated use of new media and technologies, and site-specific work. The company is committed to ensemble work and international exchange through co-productions, educational projects, and touring. WaxFactory's founders and current artistic co-directors are Ivan Talijancic and Erika Latta.

Founded in 1998, WaxFactory has established itself as one of the most internationally active performing arts groups to emerge from the New York downtown community, creating new theatre, installation, and film/video works. Producing both in unconventional sites and experimental venues in NYC (PS122, Soho Rep, Segal Center, NY Theatre Workshop, Incubator Arts Project, PRELUDE festival, etc), WaxFactory also presented worldwide at ICA/Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon, Portugal), SommerSzene (Salzburg, Austria), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), FIT/International Theatre Festival (Caracas, Venezuela), I LOVE MZ festival (Mendoza, Argentina), MES festival (Sarajevo, Bosnia), Cankarjev Dom (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Zürcher Theaterspektakel (Switzerland), Sonar (Barcelona, Spain), Adelaide festival (Australia) and many others.

Gillian Chadsey is a performer, author, producer, and teacher. Her work has run the gamut from Butoh dance to Tennessee Williams from Michlowice, Poland to Middle America Repertory Theater. As an artistic associate of two international theater companies, WaxFactory and The South Wing, she has danced through Barcelona, Brussels, Perugia, Ljubljana, and New York and has been a resident artist at The Watermill Center, Nacl, and HERE Arts Center.

Ivan Talijancic is a multidisciplinary artist: director, choreographer, visual and graphic designer, video- and film-maker, curator and journalist. As a co-founder of WaxFactory, his directing credits include BLIND.NESS, ...SHE SAID, QUARTET v4.0, X, and LADYFROMTHESEA, among others. Currently, he is working on 416 MINUTES, a cross-platform developed as a feature film and a live performance. He is a 2013-2015 artist in residence at the Hermitage Artist Retreat (Florida) and a 2014 fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy).

Shige Moriya is a Japanese-born video and installation artist. He studied architecture at Kinki University in Osaka. In 1996 he co-founded CAVE as a space for the development of experimental and interdisciplinary art in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His solo work has been presented in Japan, Finland, Vietnam, Spain, Germany, France, Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico and the US. Shige received the 2009 Armani Design Award through the Robert Wilson Watermill Center. He has received fellowships, grants and residencies from the Ford Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Watermill Center, HERE Art Center and the Hanoi Contemporary Art Center.

Solo Performer: Gillian Chadsey
Sound Artist: Ivan Talijancic
Video Artist: Shige Moriya

Tickets can be purchased in advance at incubatorarts.org or by calling TheaterMania at 212-352-3101.

Blue Wizard/Black Wizard, She Is King and I am an Opera are performed at Incubator Arts Project (located inside St. Mark's Church) • 131 East 10th Street (at 2nd Ave.) • L to First or Third Ave; R, W to Broadway/8th St.; 6 to Astor Place; N,Q, 4, 5 to Union Sq.

Take Me Home is performed in a moving taxi cab. Passengers will receive secret pick up location details via email after they purchase tickets.

#aspellforfainting's will be performed at 440 Studios, at 440 Lafayette Street, Robert Moss Theatre (3rd Floor).

Incubator Arts Project cultivates and presents a multi-generational community of artists who challenge the conventions of live performance by producing original work at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. IAP programs provide access to a fully equipped venue along with personalized career support and strategic investment of resources individually tailored to the needs of each artist.

By providing production opportunities for emerging to mid-career artists, Incubator Arts Project functions as a training ground where formative repertoire is conceived and new work can be constructed as each participant's artistic voice develops a distinct style. In addition to offering artists exclusive access to a theater, technical assistance and administrative support, staff provides professional mentoring and advisement to assist in the process of making well-considered choices in support of artists' long-term stability and success during all stages of their careers.

Core programs include the New Performance Series, Other Forces, Music and Short Form. Incubator Arts Project is fiscally managed by Performing Artservices Inc., a New York based non-profit arts organization, and is artistically led by a team of curators who collectively make programmatic, artistic and organizational decisions: Travis Just, Samara Naeymi, Daniel Nelson, Brendan Regimbal and Shannon Sindelar.

Incubator Arts Project was originally known as the Incubator and began in 2006 as a program of Richard Foreman's legendary Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Since then, it has presented award-winning work by artists including: Alec Duffy, Banana Bag & Bodice, Debate Society, 31 Down, Daniel Fish, Half-Straddle, Karinne Keithley, Object Collection, Vampire Cowboys, and Witness Relocation. Incubator artists have seen their work tour nationally and internationally and go on to Off-Broadway runs.

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