LABA At The 14th Street Y Presents LABAlive WAR & PEACE: ONE

LABA presents LABAlive WAR & PEACE: ONE, an evening of theater works-in-progress by current fellows on March 22, 2018 at 7:30pm at The Theater at the 14th Street Y, 344 E. 14th Street, New York, NY 10003. Tickets are $20 and are available at www.14streety.org/labalive.

Each year, LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture brings together ten fellows to study classic Jewish texts in a non-religious, open-minded setting centered on a chosen theme - this year's is WAR+PEACE. Inspired by these ancient Jewish texts, three fellows will present new works in an evening of art, drinks, and text.

LABAlive War & Peace: ONE presents the work of Tal Beery, Brandon Woolf and Jess Hanovich, with teaching by Tablet Magazine's Liel Leibovitz.

Tal Beery // and those black braids // Theater

A performance by artist Tal Beery responding to the only item left of his estranged grandmother: her dubious 1949 account of surviving the Holocaust. Beery's impossible search for her real story tangles with a painful past that, like it or not, is gone forever.

Jess Honovich // SUPER PLAY // Theater

What is a superhero, and what exactly makes them "super?" Theater practitioner and playwright Jess Honovich seeks the answers to these questions by interviewing those who know and love them most: three- to five-year-old children. An evolving verbatim performance piece, THE UNTITLED SUPERHERO PROJECT investigates how we learn through play.

Brandon Woolf // M., or, 36 Righteous Coffee Machines // Theater

At the end of page 96b of tractate Sanhedrin, the editors of the Babylonian Talmud begin a lengthy discussion of the coming days of the Messiah. The texture of this Talmudic text-fragment is heterogeneous to say the least: dialogue, debate, parable, philosophical reflection, mathematical calculation, geopolitical commentary, prayer, and conspiracy theory. This work-in-progress performance, conceived by Brandon Woolf, is a meditation on the active, the passive, the apocalyptic, the redemptive, and - perhaps most centrally - the caffeinated qualities of waiting.

Liel Leibovitz // The Slaying of Sisera (Judges 4-5)

When Yael hammers a tent peg into Sisera's temple, it is one of the Bible's most triumphant acts of violence, a celebration of bravery by a heroic young warrior. But before we can rejoice in the killing of a bitter enemy, we are confronted by the palpable sorrow of his mother, who waits in vain for his return. LABA teacher Liel Leibovitz sings the blues for Sisera's mother, sharing how this unlikeliest of biblical figures came to shape our commemoration of Rosh Hashanah.

THE FELLOWS

Tal Beery is an artist and educator. Beery is co-founder of Arts and Ecology, a multidisciplinary institute committed to research, art, and education on radical environmental themes. He is founding faculty at School of Apocalypse, examining the connections between creative practice and notions of survival. Beery is also a core member of Occupy Museums, opposing the economic and social injustices propagated by institutions of art and culture. His written work and interviews have appeared in numerous publications, and his personal and collaborative works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US and Europe, including the Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, and Momenta Art.

Jess Honovich is a playwright, screenwriter and educator from Southern New Jersey. Her work has been produced and workshopped by Dezart Performs, Longwood University, New York University, the Paw Paw Village Players, Festival51, Project Y, and the Pittsburgh Opera. She is a 2017 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference Finalist for her play Giant Slalom, a 2017 Heideman Award finalist for her play Hardware, a recipient of the Mary Marlin Fisher Award for Excellence in Playwriting, and a 2016 Theatre Masters winner for her short play No More Monsters, which had productions in Aspen and New York City and is published by Samuel French. She holds a B.S. from New York University in Educational Theatre and a minor in Dramatic Literature and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University.

Brandon Woolf is a theater-maker and scholar of contemporary performance. Recently, he has worked at the Fulton Center, Uncanny Valley, NYUAD Arts Center, Barrow Group Theater, Dixon Place, the Connelly Theater, and the Kennedy Center. He is also the co-founder of two public performance ensembles - Shakespeare im Park Berlin and the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP). Between 2010 and 2014, Shake im Park, our playfully (ir)reverent take on the Papp model, created site-specific performances that drew audiences to Berlin's Görlitzer Park in order to rethink its dynamic spaces as sites of multi-lingual and inter-cultural performance, (post)dramatic experimentation, and participatory art. Between 2009 and 2011, UCMeP engaged performance as a tactical means of "creative protest" and mobilization against the austerity measures that beset public education in California. Currently, Brandon is developing projects that continue to probe theater's possibilities as a social and civic practice, including: a devised investigation of the five pages in the Talmud that tackle the "Messiah" (at LABA); a biographical reimagining of Brecht's Mother Courage as a site of the destruction of the American "home"; and an existential exploration and racial deconstruction of our "Golden Age" of television. Brandon received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley in 2014. He was a Fall Directing Fellow at the New York Drama League in 2015 as well as a "Next Stage" Artist-in-Residence there in 2017. In 2016, Brandon joined the English Department at NYU as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater. He currently serves as the Director of their Program in Dramatic Literature.

Though a few cheeseburgers removed from the faith of his fathers, Liel Leibovitz is the wayward son of a venerable rabbinic family that has spent centuries finding out new ways to fear God. He is the author or co-author of several books, including, most recently, A Broken Hallelujah: Rock n' Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen. A senior writer for Tablet Magazine, he is one of the hosts of Unorthodox, the magazine's popular podcast. He holds a PhD in communications from Columbia University, where he studied video games as religious pursuit. Before recovering from the travails of academia, he taught at Barnard and New York University. He is a fundamentalist when it comes to good coffee, and lives in Manhattan with his wife and children.

LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture is a program of the 14th Street Y that uses classic Jewish texts to inspire dialogue, study, and the creation of art.

About LABA

LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture is a program of The 14th Street Y. The goal is to support Jewish art and culture by providing the space, time, and resources needed to create new work. At the core of LABA's mission is the belief that classical Jewish text study can and should be a source of inspiration and creativity for contemporary culture-makers and thinkers. All of the public art created through LABA aims to transcend cultural and social borders by bringing to light the universal themes and questions that our artists encounter through their engagement with Jewish thought.

About The Theater at the 14th Street Y

The Theater at the 14th Street Y focuses on social awareness and change through big-picture narrative. We place artists from all backgrounds at the heart of our community and seek to create an inclusive and open cultural experience for all. One of our primary goals is to provide an incubation space for art.

About the 14th Street Y

The 14th Street Y's philosophy is grounded in the belief that contemporary Jewish sensibilities can be a source of inspiration, connection and learning. No matter what your background, we aim to inspire you to live your best life. We're committed to the development of the whole person, to strengthening family connections, and to building inclusive and sustainable communities. The 14thStreet Y serves more than 20,000 people annually with a variety of community programs and is proud to be a part of Educational Alliance, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a 128-year history of serving New Yorkers downtown.

Full Season Tickets and detailed information on shows available at: www.14streety.org/tickets.

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