The Brick to Present sound scape, 6/7-29

In the modern theater, unsung artists called Sound Designers are quietly engaged to flesh out theatrical productions with recordings of crickets, doorbells and phone rings. They fill your Tempests with winds, your Streetcars with street noise and your Vanyas with gunshots. They mix your incidental music with your offstage voices and invisibly support the director's vision. If they're doing their job correctly, you won't even notice their contribution.

Introducing a theater festival where Sound Designers are the primary artists! Employing The Brick's new surround sound system, New York's most talented sound designers are invited to create theatrical experiences that foreground their art and re- establish the theater as a new type of auditorium for the 21st century stage. For four weeks this June, The Brick says this to the modern theater: no more crickets.

This sound barrier breaking festival will play at The Brick (579 Metropolitan Ave at Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn) July 7-29. Tickets ($15)may be purchased online at www.bricktheater.com or by calling 866-811-4111. Performance schedule to be announced soon.

Beckett's Shorts, from Cliff House's "Consortium of Shorts" series, features a collection of individual companies, directors, and multimedia artists who each offer their own interpretation in a collection of Samuel Beckett's alternate medium works. Titles include: "Act Without Words 1," "Act Without Words 2," "...but the clouds...," "Eh Joe," "Nacht und Traüme," "Words and Music," and "Quad."

Commotion Collage is an exploration into our mundane everyday existence: using elements from the Dadaist Simultaneous Poem (or "Sound Poem") and ubiquitous sounds that we sometimes take for granted, to help illustrate the stories of individuals who are at a point of confusion in their lives.

A sound and music driven adaptation of Dante's Inferno, using live foley sound and electronic manipulations to tell the story of through darkness into light. This highly relevant story of the darker side of human nature is told using movement, masks and bunraku puppetry as well as back wall projections to create the worlds of the different circles of hell. This piece is a total merging of immersive sound design with movement based performance techniques to illuminate the classical text.

Through immersive sound design and music, ELE↓↑TOR will transform the stage of The Brick into a dangerously malfunctioning elevator making its way to the 80th floor of the Empire State Building. Coinciding with the centenary of the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo's unveiling of his "intonarumori" noise generators at Modena's Teatro Storchi in June 1913-a signal event in the history of experimental music and sound design-it follows three hapless passengers on a vertiginous and bewildering journey in which soporific Muzak, Industrial Age machinery, and the ominous echoes of the elevator shaft all vie for dominance of the sonic space. The result is a disturbing reminder of both our dependence on and our incomprehension of the technologies that drive the modern world.

Alvin Lucier's minimalist 1969 recording exploration is performed in the brick walled room of The Brick. Live text dissolves into its resonant frequencies creating a hypnotic drone that is mesmerizing and haunting. 31 Down's use of interactive lighting and surround soundscapes emphasizes the visceral and disintegrating nature of sound.

He fights a giant, he fights a warzone, he fights a spoon, he fights until the end of time. With music and sound as his counterparts and companions he will take you thru a world where at any given time the situation can change. "Never a dull moment." A mimicry maniac takes to the stage. Come and see this living cartoon figure in the hit show directly form Holland, Belgium and Germany. This humorous show is a cross between music, mime, film, dance and theatre.

Lameness of a Horse is an aural and gestural catalog of dying horses, told through theater, live sound art, and movement. We witness performed episodes of individual horses who have been diagnosed "lame": their gait is stilted, they hobble along, the horse owners' finances insist that life is too costly. One by one, another horse falls as each of the six composer/performers will at one time emerge as horse and human working through each injury or condition in full medical detail.

Lighthouse Triptych is a dance-music-theater performance inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse. Seeking to interweave choreography, text, music, and sound, the show addresses the passage of time and our perceptions of chaos versus control. Sound design, in particular, plays a vital role in shaping the world of the piece by creating rich aural environments and communicating complex ideas non-verbally.

A presentation and demonstration of the audio application Verser with a performance, which uses the human voice to control sound interactively. It was developed specifically for use in theatrical sound design and plays that focus on speech and dialogue in particular.

A sonic retelling of drugged seduction in Homer's The Odyssey - filtered through the lens of Internet fetish, Native-American menstrual cycles, and Icelandic volcano rituals for disposing of the elderly - the audio-fueled "extended play" Tangerine EP de-stimulates of the audience's perception through visual and auditory manipulation.

The Theoretical Physics of Procrastination is a solo performance that explores the relationship between procrastination, creativity and global warming. Using lip-syncing from a live soundscape sequenced / created in real time and video the show will create a unified field and parallel theatrical universes on stage and off, bending time and space to construct a landscape where the performer is both 'here' and 'not actually here.' As the show unfolds, the performer is simultaneously writing the play and not writing the play as the piece reveals itself to be a talent show submission (judged by each night's audience) to earn future safe passage away from a likely burned up Earth to a colony on Kepler 22b.

Performed entirely in the dark, Shaun Prendergast's play tells the entirely true story of sideshow freak Julia Pastrana, who toured the world both in life and in death as "The Ugliest Woman in the World."

Plus a soon-to-be announced Q-Lab for Theatermakers Workshop and a Sound Design Panel Discussion!

THE BRICK THEATER, INC. is a not-for-profit company dedicated to nurturing the work of emerging artists at its performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn - The Brick. The Brick presents world premieres, monthly performance series, and seasonal festivals, expanding Williamsburg's profile as a destination for cutting-edge art and entertainment. The Brick continues to seek new artists and projects, to provide them with a creative home and to serve as Williamsburg's primary incubator of innovative theater arts.