Visual/Theater and Film Artist Janie Geiser Set for Arts Learning Residency at FirstWorks, Now thru 4/12

FirstWorks brings internationally recognized visual/theater artist and experimental filmmaker Janie Geiser to Providence April 6-12 for a week-long FirstWorks Arts Learning residency to include a series of workshops, artist talks and screenings designed to engage Providence-area K-12 and university students. As part of a FirstWorks co-commissioned project, Geiser and a cross-disciplinary group of students from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) will combine puppetry and video during a week-long developmental workshop for Geiser's new multidisciplinary work "Fugitive Time".

Events open to the public include:

"The Nervous Films" screening and Artist-Up-Close conversation: Thursday, April 10, 7:00pm at RISD Chace Center, Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium, 20 North Main Street, Providence, RI. Tickets are $5 in advance and $10 at the door. Reserve online at www.first-works.org or call 401-421-4281.

A free public showing of short scenes from "Fugitive Time", a new work-in-progress co-commissioned by FirstWorks and the Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara. Saturday, April 12, 7:30pm at Brown University Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell Street, Providence, RI.

One of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde object performance, the Los Angeles-based artist Janie Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic works that merge puppetry, film/video and performance. Geiser's work is known for its strength of design and its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects. Geiser has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Henson Foundation, Creative Capital, the Center for Cultural Innovation and others. Geiser's films have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art (where they are a part of the Museum's permanent collection).

Janie Geiser's newest work-in-progress, "Fugitive Time", is a multidisciplinary performance that integrates performed objects and puppetry with live-feed video manipulations of found, constructed, and collaged elements to form an integrated live "film-performance". Using bunraku-inspired puppets, cutouts, shadow puppets, and video, the work will explore the tension between the miniature and the magnified, the landscape and the body. Drawing from stories of Los Angeles city planning, TB (Tuberculosis) patient narratives, and medical illustrations, "Fugitive Time" centers on landscape and the body-both become the location of narrative, memory, erasure, history and loss.

Janie Geiser conducts workshops in puppetry and object theatre for students who have participated in FirstWorks' year-long Arts Learning programs on Wednesday, April 9 from 9:45-11:10am at Hope High School and on Friday April 11 from 9:00-10:30am at Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts.

FirstWorks partners with over 30 schools statewide to provide students with unprecedented creative opportunities, challenges and possibilities - including performances and interactions with high-caliber artists. Annually, FirstWorks helps over 2,500 low-income students to build connections between art, academic subjects and their lives, fostering critical thinking, imaginationand collaborative learning.

FirstWorks is a non-profit arts organization that builds the cultural, educational, and economic vitality of our community through world-class performing arts and education programs. Since 2004, FirstWorks has offered Rhode Islanders access to some of the most exciting artists of our time including Yo-Yo Ma & the Silk Road Ensemble, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Wynton Marsalis, Joffrey Ballet, and the master artists of Pakistan through the Caravanserai project (2011-12). Beginning 10 years ago with an unprecedented collaboration with Providence's Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, FirstWorks has produced 22 groundbreaking arts festivals, attracted more than 160,000 participants, presented over 361 international artists and innovators, engaged more than 100 nonprofit community organizations and schools, and grown into a multidimensional arts organization recognized with 17 National Endowment for the Arts grants. In fall 2012, FirstWorks partnered with the City of Providence to present the inaugural FirstWorks Festival: On the Plaza, leading a consortium of 18 organizations to create an event that drew 40,000 people into downtown Providence. In July 2013, the City of Providence and FirstWorks were named recipients of a second NEA Our Town grant to support a community design effort to create a cultural corridor in downtown Providence along Washington Street, and to establish the FirstWorks Festival: On the Plaza as a biennial signature event in Providence. Visit www.first-works.org to learn more.

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