Woodshed Collective Hosts Launch Party for The Tenant

Woodshed Collective has announced that it will host a launch party for its upcoming production of The Tenant on Thursday, May 19 at Brooklyn's The Green Building, 452 Union Street, located just steps from the F Stop at Carroll Street. The evening will include performances by Gordon Voidwell and DJing by Smirk, as well as a performance by a very special, surprise guests. RSVP your attendance to rsvp@woodshedcollective.com to find out the identity of the guest and reserve a $10 dollar ticket.

A multi-instrumentalist, trained vocalist, and published fashion writer, Gordon Voidwell is the alter-ego of Bronx-born ex-chorister turned rap geek Will Johnson. Voidwell's music is subversive pop and funk, following in the tradition of Tom Tom Club, Madonna, Prince, David Bowie, and George Clinton. He uses analog synthesizers and chunky drum machines as the backdrop for silky, reverb-drenched vocals, reminiscent of Cameo, New Edition and other famed 80s R&B crooners. He has received some of the best music reviews of the past year:

"Might be the biggest break out of 2011 for any male solo artist."
- Huffington Post

#1 Critics Choice for Top 2010 holiday shows - Time Out New York

"A hard act to follow." - The New Yorker

"I love this....I play it on my radio show, in my house AND in my sets."
- Mark Ronson (Grammy Award-winning Producer Of The Year)

"Voidwell creates dance party music for precocious nerds everywhere."
- Nylon

Brandon Wolcott, aka Smirk, grew up in California and later Hong Kong, where he began DJing in 1997 (during the historic handover of the city back to China), before settling in Brooklyn. His work traverses funk, sould, techno, house, cheeky edits, vocals, and jazz/classical inflections. Smirk has performed his live sets all over the world, from Moscow to Montreal. Following releases on Wolf + Lamb, his debut full-length Even Beauty Gets Old was released last summer on the Archipel imprint. He continues to produce and perform with the Brooklyn based Wolf+Lamb family.

About The Tenant
Set in Paris and inspired by Roland Torpor's book, which was famously adapted into a film by Roman Polanski, The Tenant is a thrilling, haunting and grotesquely hilarious investigation into the relationship between who we are and where we live. When Monsieur Trelkovsky rents a room recently vacated by a woman who fell from her window, he soon finds his world changing in bizarre ways. Haunted by images of the previous Tenant's apparent suicide and terrorized by his new neighbors, Trelkovsky begins a slow descent into paranoia and delirium.

Installed by Woodshed Collective over five building stories in the historic West Park parish house on 86 Street and Amsterdam Avenue, The Tenant features a script by a team of New York's brightest up-and-coming playwrights-Steven Levenson (Roundabout's The Language of Trees, HERE's Seven Minutes in Heaven), Tommy Smith (P73, Williamstown), Dylan Dawson (Naked Angels, Ars Nova, 52nd Street Project), Sarah Burgess (Naked Angels), Paul Cohen (Woodshed's The Confidence Man), and Bekah Brunstetter (Atlantic Theater Co.'s Oohrah!). It will also feature an original score by Tony and Grammy award winner Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening). The Tenant explores the bubbling conflict between an uncanny mix of colorful characters to create a symphonic piece of powerful theater. Utilizing film, architecture, dance, video, and light, the show is a shifting, mirrored landscape designed to delight and unnerve while drawing our attention to those aspects of ourselves we hide just below the surface.

About Woodshed Collective
Woodshed Collective creates installation theater presented free of charge to the public. The company realizes handcrafted, visceral worlds in diverse locations for audiences to explore, athleticizing their senses, emotions, and minds. Inspiring spectators to claim a presence that helps author the experience itself, our productions aim to create a genuine sense of wonder.
Woodshed's productions of Twelve Ophelias, performed in Brooklyn's McCarren Park Pool, and The Confidence Man, performed aboard a decommissioned steam ship in the Hudson River, were hailed by critics:

Twelve Ophelias
"A spirited production." - Village Voice

"Svich has a lovely way with old stories-her looping, just-shy-of-purple poetry lets her remake the Greeks and Shakespeare with panache. And thematically, director Teddy Bergen's choice of the waterless, cracked McCarren Park Pool basin works: We're in a dry hole thirsty for language." - TimeOut NY

"Truly, genuinely, wonderfully theatrical." - nytheatre.com

"A deconstructed masterstroke." - New York Press

The Confidence Man

***** Time Out New York

"It's a wonder this tiny company is able to mount such a huge entertainment. And it's heartening that they've pulled it off." - Variety

Woodshed Collective is the most recent evolution of what began as a method of production. Founded at Vassar College in the spring of 2002 as the Woodshed Theater Ensemble, the company initially sought to deemphasize the traditional, hierarchical model of theatrical production. Growing out of an educational background that emphasized critical thinking and dialogue, the members of the Ensemble developed productions of known plays through collaborative, extended discussion and non-traditional rehearsal techniques.

When the company relocated to New York City, it soon became clear that the method needed to be re-imagined. What had made sense in an academic environment-producing canonical or established texts in new ways-now limited potential. New York inspired the company not only to produce in inventive ways, but to produce new texts in new ways; and, in a city bursting with new voices the company was anxious to collaborate with the wealth of exciting artists working within the greater theatrical community. Additionally, New York prompted a rethinking of the relationship between audience and performance. The goal became to create fully realized theatrical worlds for our audiences to explore from the ground up.

Over a period of four years Woodshed Collective has evolved from staging a proscenium production of Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding, in an established downtown theater, to conceiving, adapting, and producing a massive, multi-layered installation of Herman Melville's The Confidence Man on a decommissioned steamship in the Hudson River. The energy formerly spent on developing ideas for an already existing text moved into developing the text and production simultaneously.
Tickets for The Tenant launch party are $15 ($10 if purchased in advance). To purchase tickets and for more information, visit www.woodshedcollective.com.

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