Mabou Mines and Trick Saddle Stage IMAGINING THE IMAGINARY INVALID at La MaMa Tonight

A classic Mabou Mines feat is to take a theatrical classic, reimagine it from top to bottom, then turn it inside out; the result is a production so spanking new that the original gleams with fresh and unexpected relevance. The tradition continues in a collaboration with Trick Saddle and the 45-year old company. The two companies combine forces in the world premiere of "Imagining the Imaginary Invalid," inspired by "The Imaginary Invalid," Moliere's piercing satiric take on the pretension, gullibility and vulnerability of we poor mortals. Presented by La MaMa, a production of Mabou Mines and Trick Saddle, the play runs tonight, January 21, through February 7 at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre.

Conceived in 2012 by the beloved late actress/director Ruth Maleczech, one of the cofounders of the tradition-bending troupe, and her daughter Clove Galilee, Trick Saddle Co-Artistic Director and a Mabou Mines Associate Artist , who serves as the show's director and choreographer, the radically reimagined and reworked classic has original text by Valeria Vasilevski and is adapted by Trick Saddle Co-Artistic Director Jenny Rogers.

Adhering to the spirit of Trick Saddle's use of unconventional settings , the play takes place backstage where the actors are preparing for their performance. Using the perils of modern medicine as the thematic backdrop, the performers discuss and argue about money, medicine, politics, loss and inspiration with great wit and fervor. In the spirit of a Molière play, music and ballet interludes interrupt the goings on.

Drama Desk and OBIE award winning actor Marylouise Burke plays the leading role, originally written for the late Ruth Maleczech. The cast also includes Clove Galilee, Brian McManamon, LA MAMA PRESENTS WORLD PREMIERE OF 'IMAGINING THE IMAGINARY INVALID,' A MABOU MINES AND TRICK SADDLE PRODUCTION BASED ON MOLIERE'S 'THE IMAGINARY INVALID,' JANUARY 21-FEBRUARY 7 AT LA MAMA'S ELLEN STEWART THEATRE For Immediate Release photo by Alex Fabozzi IMAGINING THE IMAGINARY INVALID Christianna Nelson, Joe Tapper, Julia Izumi, Jake Lasser, Sr. Pedro J. Rosado Jr., and Bernadette Flynn. The dancers, members of the New York Theatre Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, are Stephen Campanella, Carmella Lauer, Steven Melendez, Melissa Sadler, Amanda Treiber-Scales and Elena Zahlmann. The musicians are Marni Rice and Michael Scales. The original 17th century production, Molière's last play, starred the writer in the role of the invalid. Moliere died after the fourth performance.

The music is by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Belinda Reynolds and Marni Rice. Lee Savage is the set designer; Burke Brown the lighting designer. The costumes are by Liene Dobraja. Michael Scales is the music director.

SHOW TIMES:

Thursday, January 21 at 8pm
Friday, January 22 at 8pm
Saturday, January 23 at 8pm
Sunday, January 24 at 4pm
Monday, January 25 at 8pm - Press opening
Thursday, January 28 at 8pm
Friday, January 29 at 8pm
Saturday, January 30 at 8pm
Sunday, January 31 at 4pm
Tuesday, February 2 at 8pm
Wednesday, February 3 at 8pm
Thursday, February 4 at 8pm
Friday, February 5 at 8pm
Saturday, February 6 at 8pm
Sunday, February 7 at 4pm

Tickets: $30 Adults; $25 Students/Seniors; Ten tickets priced at $10 are available for every performance as part of La MaMa's 10@$10 ticketing initiative (advance sales only). For tickets go to www.lamama.org or call 646-430-5374. The Ellen Stewart Theatre is located at 66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue) New York, NY 10003.

In the summer of 1970, a group of artists that included British actor David Warrilow, American actors/directors Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, and composer Philip Glass retreated from New York City to Philip's summer house near Mabou Mines, Nova Scotia in Canada to create their first theater piece, Red Horse Animation. The company took the name "Mabou Mines" and has since become not only a collective of artists, but of ideas and approaches.

The company was born out of the influences and inspirations of Europe's seminal avant-garde theater collectives. Before arriving in New York in 1970, the would-be ensemble of Mabou Mines spent five years in Europe observing and studying the working methods of the Berliner Ensemble, the politics of the exiled Living Theater, and the demands of physical training with Jerzy Grotowski. Since that time, the company has created more than 100 works, toured to more than 1000 cities worldwide, and won more than 100 major awards.

Today the Company includes four Artistic Directors: Founding Artistic Director Lee Breuer; Producing Artistic Director Sharon Ann Fogarty; co-Artistic Directors Karen Evans Kandel and Terry O'Reilly; three Artistic Associates: Clove Galilee, David Neumann, and Maude Mitchell and many, many collaborators who work to tap into the mystery of language, the expressiveness of physical performance, and the abstraction of visual arts/media. The work is created collaboratively in an extended development process and with the intention of challenging "traditions" of conventional theater by applying formal and experimental concepts to performance.

Forty-five years after its founding, Mabou Mines is an established artist-driven experimental collective developing original works and re-imagined adaptations of classics through multi-disciplinary, technologically inventive collaborations among its members and a wide world of contemporary composers, writers, musicians, choreographers, puppeteers, visual artists and filmmakers. Using its signature long-term development process, artists have the time to create rich and complex productions that often include a conceptual underpinning and rely on a wide variety of performance styles - can be seen as a marriage between formalism and motivational acting. The result is that Mabou Mines' work embodies a ground breaking, cutting-edge aesthetic seeking to consistently surprise, challenge, engage and entertain. www.maboumines.org

Led by the artistic team of Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers, Trick Saddle, started in 2003, is a collaborative company working within the realms of theatre, dance, film and visual art. The company's work is equally at home in museums, galleries, theaters and site-specific venues.

The company's inaugural production, TRICK SADDLE, was developed, choreographed and produced at PS 122 and as a site-specific piece at a Drive-In Movie Theater in Central Pennsylvania. The following piece, WICKETS, a radical adaptation of Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends, set in an airplane at 30,000 feet and performed by 1970's stewardesses, played to sold-out crowds at 3LD Technology Center in 2009. The immersive environment placed the audience in the plane as passengers with the action taking place around them. Their newest project, PERFECT SURF, takes place in the largest wind tunnel in the world in Bedford, England and is performed by the world's top free-fly athletes from 7 countries and three continents. PERFECT SURF received a Film & Media, New Technology grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.

Trick Saddle productions have also appeared in numerous museums and galleries throughout the world including the P.S. 1 / MoMA (Greater New York 2005) and The Whitney Museum (Whitney Biennial 2014) in New York City, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, and Mass MoCA. www.tricksaddle.com

An integral part of New York City's cultural landscape, La MaMa has a worldwide reputation for producing daring work in theatre, dance, performance art, and music that defies form and transcends boundaries of language, race, and culture. Founded in 1961 by theatre pioneer and legend Ellen Stewart, La MaMa is a global organization with creative partners and dedicated audiences around the world. La MaMa presents an average of 60-70 productions annually, most of which are world premieres. To date, over 3,500 productions have been presented at La MaMa with artists from more than 70 nations. www.lamama.org

Clove Galilee is Co-Artistic Director of her theater company, Trick Saddle and an Associate Artist with Mabou Mines. Her work has been presented in New York at P.S. 122, the Public Theater, The Performing Garage, Arts at Saint Ann's, the Flea, P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art / MOMA, the Skirball Center, HERE Center for the Arts, and St. Ann's Warehouse. She has been an artist-in-residence at U.C. Santa Cruz, BARD College, Voice and Vision, Mabou Mines/Suite RAP, and HERE Art Center. Clove is a TCG New Generations Fellow, a Princess Grace Foundation-USA Fellowship recipient, a Princess Grace Special Projects award recipient, and a Jerome Robbins Grant recipient.

Performance credits include The Tempest at the Delacorte in Central Park, Alice Tuan's, The Roaring Girle with Foundry Theater, Lear, Ecco Porco, Animal Magnetism (Cherie Obey) and Young Lucia Joyce in Cara Lucia with Mabou Mines. Film credits include Contemplating Emily (as Emily Dickinson), Clifford Odets, Dead End Kids, and In Love Again.

In September 2005 Clove completed her collaboration with Basil Twist, Ushio Torikai, and Lee Breuer on Red Beads at the Skirball Center in NYC. She developed the choreography for the production during two artist-in-residencies at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She completed the choreography in Tokyo Japan with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council. There she worked with Master Kabuki teacher, Hanayagi Sumi on the Ningyo-buri solo sections, a Japanese dance form in which the dancer performs as a bunraku puppet, complete with puppet handlers. In 2008 Clove was commissioned to create a new ballet for New York Theater Ballet. Her ballet, Duties and Affections, inspired by James Joyce's The Dead, premiered at Florence Gould Hall in New York City. Clove also choreographed The Libation Bearers in collaboration with Jenny Rogers, Lee Breuer and Theater Armadillo in Athens, Greece for the Patras Festival. The cast of 27 performed and danced the play on a huge sand painting designed and developed by Ms. Rogers. Clove was the assistant director and producer for Jenny Rogers' PERFECT SURF (2012), a dance film which takes place in the largest wind tunnel in the world. Presently Clove is part of the ATLAS program with Theater Bay Area in San Francisco and plays the title character, Henrietta Swan Leavitt in Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson in the San Francisco Bay Area. RUTH IS HER FUSE.

2014 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Broadway: FISH IN THE DARK, INTO THE WOODS, IS HE DEAD? Off- and Off-Off-Broadway credits include: RIPCORD (MTC), FUDDY MEERS (Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress, MTC and Minetta Lane), KIMBERLY AKIMBO (Drama Desk Nomination for Outstanding Leading Actress, MTC), WINTERTIME (Second Stage), A DEVIL INSIDE and DARK RIDE revival (Soho Rep), Rx (Primary Stages), THE SAVANNAH DISPUTATION (Playwrights Horizons), THE OLDEST PROFESSION (Signature), AMERICAN SLIGO (Rattlestick), CREATURE (Page 73, New Georges), CABIN FEVER (Theatre for the New City), LOWLIFE (The Belt), APOCALYPTIC BUTTERFLIES (New Arts at Clurman), CASANOVA (Public Theater), THE CHAIRS(Pearl), ROBERTO ZUCCO (Cucaracha), Jeff Weiss's AND THAT'S HOW THE RENT GETS PAID (Performing Garage) and HOT KEYS(Naked Angels), SHEPARD ONE-ACTS (ATA), THE DAY ROOSEVELT DIED (Theatre Genesis). Regional work includes productions at Long Wharf, La Jolla Playhouse, NY Stage & Film, Yale Rep, Berkshire Theatre Festival, McCarter Theatre, South Coast Rep, Geffen Playhouse, Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Steppenwolf, and Hartford Stage (including SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER directed by Joanne Akalaitis). Television: 30 ROCK, FRINGE, HUNG (recurring), LAW & ORDER (and SVU), DELOCATED, BABY DADDY, FLESH AND BONE, ALPHA HOUSE (recurring). Film: SIDEWAYS, A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, SERIES 7, MUST LOVE DOGS, MONA LISA SMILE, MEET JOE BLACK, IRA AND ABBY, THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID, THE BAXTER, WILD CANARIES, SLEEPWALK WITH ME.

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