Archives: Archived Events

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble
Multimedia, Performance

Residency dates: June 16 – 29
Public Showings: June 27 & 28, 6pm
at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway, Manhattan

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) is a musical priesthood that explores the metaphysics and mythologies of love, desire and courtship at the end of the 20th century. Appropriating strategies of installation art, opera, and theater, ROKE creates multimedia performances with original music to create modern-day rituals from found text and video sources.

In Starbucks Infinity, the Ensemble finds themselves inside of a trans-dimensional space made from images of Starbucks as featured in popular romantic comedies and YouTube videos. By rebuilding the popular retail store with digital tools, the Ensemble will create an ever-shifting psychedelic wormhole in which characters from different films and commercials interact over a cup of coffee. By appropriating the most generic of meeting-places, the Ensemble will reconstitute the psychic landscape of the Experience Economy and confront the question of what it means to be truly #basic.

 
Click here for full RAMP 2015 artists and details.
 

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (Tei Blow and Sean McElroy) is a musical priesthood that explores the metaphysics and mythologies of love, desire and courtship at the end of the 20th century. By appropriating strategies of installation art, opera, and theater, ROKE creates multimedia installation- performances with original music to create modern-day rituals from found text and video sources.
 
ROKE was formed when Brown hosted Oberlin for the 2001 Liberal Arts Spring Fling. They went on to cement their partnership a year later when they both enrolled in the low-residency Masters program in Women’s Studies at Stanford-Hofstra-University of Phoenix-Online. All of their performance work is a development of their collaborative thesis project, Isis As-Is: Du Darwinisme Féminin au Post-Humanisme. ROKE was awarded Best Original Song Not Written by Thoth in 2561 by the Horus Council, and nominated for Best Underwater Spectacle in 2057 for their performance He is I, A Man’s Story, which premiered at the annual Opening of the Mouth Ceremony at the Temple of Khonsu in Thebes.
 
ROKE has also performed rituals at FringeArts (Philadelphia), Under the Radar Festival’s Incoming! Series, Gibney Dance Center, Kate Werble Gallery, Special Effects Festival/Participant Inc., Prelude Festival, AUNTS Arts@Renaissance, and JACK. ROKE has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fund grant (2013) and a BAX Space Grant (2014). They are part of the Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group and PS122’s RAMP residency program. They spent the summer of 2014 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. ROKE’s next projects include a Steve Reich/Wilhelm Reich tribute album produced in collaboration with Kanye West.

The RAMP residency will be used to re-envision the architecture of a white-walled gallery space as a diagram of a wormhole and project a simulation of the Starbucks environment into it, mapping scenes from popular films in which the Starbucks brand features prominently. We plan to use the space to devise a scenic construction and projection-mapping scenario that works to create a seamless or non-seamless projection and video compositing system. We will also plan to devise a method of music spatialization drawing from our earlier experiments in surround-sound psychedelia.

About Gibney Dance
Gibney Dance brings the possibility of movement where it otherwise would not exist. Through three interrelated fields of action—Center, Company, and Community Action—Gibney Dance is “Making Space for Dance” in studios, on stages, and in underserved shelters and schools.
 
Center
Gibney Dance Centers are a powerhouse of cultural support for the performing arts community and the City itself. In 1991, Gibney Dance began leasing a studio in the historic 890 Broadway building to house Company rehearsals, and by 2011 the organization’s presence at that location had expanded to comprise an expansive eight-studio creative center. Today, with the addition of 280 Broadway, the organization directs a performing arts complex with two facilities: the Choreographic Center at 890 Broadway and Performing Arts Center at 280 Broadway. These remarkable spaces enable a robust roster of events designed to meet the needs of the dance field by fostering the creative process, encouraging dialogue, and providing professional development opportunities.
 
Company
Gibney Dance Company is the Centers’ acclaimed resident dance ensemble, led by choreographer Gina Gibney. Since its founding in 1991, the Company has developed a repertory of over thirty works that have been performed throughout the US and abroad. Gibney is known for using weighted, spiraling phrases to craft interpersonal dynamics between the dancers. These carefully calibrated relationships reflect the dancers’ experiences as community activists. As observed by writer Deborah Jowitt: “(t)hat Gibney’s troupe has long worked for the empowerment of battered women is reflected in the dancers’ struggles, their uncommon resilience, the support one readily offers another.” Highly sought-after by a wide range of performing arts institutions, the Company has been featured in recent years at Danspace Project (New York), White Bird (Oregon) the Yale Repertory Theater (Connecticut), L’Agora de la Danse (Montreal, Canada), and Internationale Tanzmesse (Dusseldorf, Germany).
 
Community Action
Gibney Dance Community Action provides New York City domestic violence shelters with over 500 free movement workshops each year. At these workshops Company members share activities that draw from artistic practices to address issues of choice and self-expression. Community Action was initiated in 2000 in collaboration with Sanctuary for Families and Safe Horizon, two of the country’s most prominent domestic violence organizations. Widely regarded as a model in the field, Community Action’s methods for integrating arts and social action are distributed nationally—via our Institute for Community Action intensive that annually hosts dancers from across the US—and internationally—through Global Community Action Residencies, most recently in Cape Town, South Africa.

RAMP artists are commissioned by Performance Space 122 with support from the Jerome Foundation. RAMP 2015 is supported by Gibney Dance.

RAMP is PS122’s annual residency program designed to bolster the career of New York City-based emerging artists through offering time, space and resources to create ambitious, new work. RAMP is unique in not only providing space but also invaluable technical assistance, commissioning fees, marketing support and a commitment to fully realize the work from conception through presentation. PS122 is a bellwether for contemporary culture: a place where many artists carve out their style, practice and hone their distinct artistic voice.
 
Residencies take place at
Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway, Manhattan

Click artist name for details on their residency.
 
Jillian Peña
dance, multimedia
Residency Dates: June 2 – 15
Public Showing: June 14
 
Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble
multimedia, performance
Residency Dates: June 16 – 29
Public Showings: June 27 & 28

RAMP artists are commissioned by Performance Space 122 with support from the Jerome Foundation. Dance programming support provided by Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance and Jerome Robbins Foundation. RAMP 2015 is supported by Gibney Dance.

The Evening
Richard Maxwell / New York City Players (NYC)

The New York premiere by celebrated playwright-director Richard Maxwell, The Evening is the first installment of a Divine Comedy-inspired triptych that charts a journey across landscapes, toward redemption. This elegiac and musical work concerns three archetypes: a fighter, a corrupt manager, and a prostitute, as they clash and reckon with one another in a remote dive bar:

“I like this place, I’m not going to lie. Can’t really think of any better place to be. Where can you go when you want to get away? The city doesn’t let you run away to just anywhere so go where you need to be when you just want to hang out…”

 
 
 
March 12–28, 8pm
at The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, Manhattan

$25 General Admission
Tickets on sale Jan 26th
▸▸ Pass Holders Log in to redeem

Co-presented with The Kitchen
 
Richard Maxwell is the recipient of the 2014 Spalding Gray Award from the commissioning consortium of the Walker Art Center, On The Boards, Performance Space 122 and The Andy Warhol Museum.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sunday, March 15th’s performance will be followed by a talk back with Richard Maxwell moderated by artist Malik Gaines (of My Barbarian).
 
Wednesday, March 25th features a talk back with Richard Maxwell moderated by Jay Sanders, Performing Arts Curator at The Whitney, with introduction by Tim Griffin, The Kitchen’s Executive Director and Chief Curator.

New York City Players is a theater company founded by Artistic Director Richard Maxwell in 1999. NYCP has been presented in New York and in over twenty countries and has received national and international recognition, including five Obie Awards. www.nycplayers.org
 
Richard Maxwell (Playwright/Director) is the recipient of the 2014 Spalding Gray Award from the commissioning consortium of Performance Space 122, the Andy Warhol Museum, On the Boards, and the Walker Art Center. He is a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist and has received a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, and was an invited artist in the Whitney Biennial (2012). Recent projects include Maxwell’s play Neutral Hero; Devotion, a dance by Sarah Michelson with text by Maxwell; Ads, a video play conceived by Maxwell; House of Dance, a play written and directed by Tina Satter; and two sections of the 24-hour, site-specific adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in Berlin. His book, Theater for Beginners, was published in January by TCG.

The Kitchen is a non-profit, interdisciplinary organization that provides innovative artists working in the media, literary, and performing arts with exhibition and performance opportunities to create and present new work. Using its own extensive history as a resource, the organization identifies, supports, and presents emerging and under-recognized artists who are making significant contributions to their respective fields as well as serves as a safe space for more established artists to take unusual creative risks.
 

Richard Maxwell/New York City Players: The Evening is co-presented by The Kitchen and Performance Space 122 and was commissioned by the 2014 Spalding Gray Award (Walker Art Center, On The Boards, Performance Space 122 and The Andy Warhol Museum), supported in part by an award through the National Endowment for the Arts. The Evening is a co-production of Kunsten FESTIVAL des Arts, with additional generous support provided by Greene Naftali Gallery and The Kitchen. This presentation is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the city council and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and with additional support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation.