Shows presented by Dixon Place in association with Performance Space 122 and the 8th Annual COIL festival.

at Dixon Place, 161-A Chrystie St. in Manhattan

7:30 PM Big Dance Theater & Sibyl Kempson

9:00 PMSonny’s Dream

7:30 PM James Godwin, Colin Self, Jeffrey-Elaine Shotzenberger

10:00 PMLumberob and James Bewley

Friday, January 11 at 7:30pm
Big Dance Theater’s ADAM SMITHEE (Work in Progress) and Sibyl Kempson’s ICH, KURBISGEIST (Performance Excerpt)

Collaborators:

Adam Smithee
Directed/Choreographed by Annie-B Parson
Performers Elizabeth DeMent and Chris Giarmo
Production Manager Brendan Regimbal
Produced by Aaron Rosenblum

Ich, Kurbisgeist
Directed by Paul Lazar
Co-Directed/Choreographed by Annie-B Parson
Written by Sibyl Kempson
Set Joanne Howard
Costumes Suzanne Bocanegra
Lights Joe Levasseur
Sound Jamie McElhinney and Ben Williams
Video Josh Higgason
Production Manager Brendan Regimbal
Produced by Aaron Rosenblum
Performers Paul Lazar, Tymberly Canale, Molly Hickok, Kourtney Rutherford

Adam Smithee
Adam Smithee was the pseudonym used by the Directors Guild of America when a director, dissatisfied with the final product, signaled to the Guild panel that he or she had not been able to exercise creative control over a film. In keeping with this idea of taking movies in the “wrong” direction, Big Dance Theater’s dance/theater triptych Adam Smithee mines three iconic films (Terms of Endearment, Le Cercle Rouge, and Doctor Zhivago) as adaptive frames, each departing from their original intent, and dissected as sources for movement scores, hyper narratives and abstracted text.

Ich, Kurbisgeist
A harsh, quasi-medieval locale facing destruction is populated by a community speaking a rigorous, specific, and completely invented language. Five absurdly fearful and doomed characters sing, dance,and harvest pumpkin seeds. Every word is semi-recognizable: an amalgam of English, Swedish, German – and Sid Ceasar. The language is as tough and unforgiving as the windswept, uncultivated landscape.

Bio:
Founded in 1991, Big Dance Theater, led by Co-Artistic Directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, has created over 15 dance/theater works using sources ranging from Euripides, Flaubert, and Twain, to the illicit tapes of Richard Nixon to Okinawan pop. Big Dance Theater received “Bessie” Awards in 2002 and 2010; the company was awarded an OBIE in 2000, and the first Jacob’s Pillow Award for Dance Festival in 2007. Big Dance is an inaugural member of the Hatchery Project, a residency consortium. Most recent commissions have been from BAM, Les Subsistances/ Lyon, The Anticodes Festival, and The Walker Art Center. Big Dance Theater has been presented nationally by: Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, On the Boards, UCLA Live, and The Spoleto Festival. Internationally, the company has performed at many festivals and theaters in France (Nantes, Rennes, Brest, Mulhouse, Paris, Lyon), Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Brazil and Germany. The Brooklyn Academy of Music and Les Subsistances will commission Adam Smithee, to premiere in Lyon, France in the spring of 2014 and the Harvey in 2014 Fall. Big Dance is creating Man in a Case (Chekhov) for Hartford Stage (2013), as well as a film version of Another Telepathic Thing with Jonathan Demme. http://bigdancetheater.org

Estimated runtime: 60 minutes

Price: $12 in advance, $15 at the door, $10 students / seniors

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Saturday, January 12 at 9:00pm
Sonny’s Dream

Collaborators:
Conceived and Created by Kobun Kaluza
Produced / Directed by Judith M. Smith
Choreographed by Mindy Rebman
Composed by Jen Rondeau

Where Our Town meets A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, a pastoral coming-of-age romance washes the grit from the faces of a struggling farm family. Below this layer of grit is the colorful world of a talking vegetable kingdom. And Crow welcomes Scarecrow home for another summer season. When walking drunkenly through the fields after a 4th of July fireworks display, Sonny dreams of what might have been had the cruel fates not stolen Donald and Suze’s little girl away from them. It’s the eleventh hour, and the Actor/Manager is calling forth his al dente players to the stage!

Bio:
Kobun handled the right arm of a pageant puppet in the 2001 Village Halloween Parade, and is now the perennial Captain of the Baby Moths. He adapted, and directed, a commedia-style production of Machiavelli’s, “Mandragola,” Under St. Marks; founded the small stage at Jimmy’s No. 43, and selected the resident artists; MFA Playwriting from Mac Wellman, at Brooklyn College, 2006; performed at PS122, and the Chocolate Factory, as Gordon Matta Clark, for Mile of String; started teaching at the St. Ann’s School; designed lights for Mostly Mozart, at Lincoln Center; premiered the Suitcase Theater at Dixon Place during Little Theater, November 2010.

Estimated time runtime: 50 minutes

Price: $12 in advance, $15 at the door, $10 students / seniors

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Friday, January 18 at 7:30pm
CHARM OFFENSIVE / LITURGY OF THE DIVINE FEMININE / THE VICTIM

Collaborators:
Charm Offensive: Created and performed by James Godwin
Liturgy of the Divine Feminine: Created and performed by Colin Self
The Victim: Created and performed by Jeffrey-Elaine Shotzenberger

Charm Offensive: A one man ritual performance with masks and puppetry. Simple stories. Weird images and ritual magick bring the trickster archetype to life in real time.

Liturgy of the Divine Feminine: Colin Self presents a dissertation on celebrating higher feminine power through corporeal inclinations of drag.

The Victim: Chicago based performance artist Jeffrey-Elaine Shotzenberger presents a slippery and darkly comic lampoon of a one woman show that addresses issues of gender fluidity, sexual power games, temporal subjectivity, failure and American Exceptionalism.

Estimated runtime: 60 mins (total)

Price: $12 in advance, $15 at the door, $10 students / seniors

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Saturday, January 19 at 10:00pm
Top Shelf Talent

Collaborators:
Created and performed by Lumberob and James Bewley

This is storytelling. This is a drainage ditch. This is an instructional opportunity. This is a display of fine, fine, top shelf talent. This is experimental sport. This is dance and this is music. This is an energetic melange of text and sound and movement written, directed, designed by James Bewley and Rob Erickson, and performed by their alter-egos, Dale Seever and Lumberob. This is an unfolding of an extraordinarily beautiful napkin. This is a graceful display. This is a subwoofer. These gentlemen are earnest entertainers running a variety show marathon straight into the ground, and it feels good.

Bios:
Lumberob is an odd vocal show – gagged, barked, and warbled by writer/performer Rob Erickson. Over the last twelve years, Erickson has performed solo as lumberob, and has collaborated with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Jad Fair, Leslie Strongwater, Joyce Cho, Kevin Blechdom, Laura Peterson, ToonBox. Rob teaches public school in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn. https://www.lumberob.com

Dale Radio is an ongoing performance and podcast project by writer/performer, James Bewley. Over the last ten years, Bewley has appeared as his alter ego, Dale Seever in venues across the country including local shows at Housingworks, KGB Bar, Brooklyn Lyceum, and Dixon Place. He lives in Brooklyn too. https://www.daleradio.com

Estimated runtime: 80 minutes

Price: $12 in advance, $15 at the door, $10 students / seniors

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Performance Space 122 & BOMB Magazine present four in-depth, interdisciplinary conversations between a COIL ’13 artist and a “non-performance” luminary. SPAN endeavors to reinsert performance into the cultural, economic, and environmental debates coursing through contemporary society, from which it is too often excluded.

12:00 PM Art & Ethics Tea Tupajic, Petra Zanki with Florian Malzachar and Joel Whitney

12:00 PM Place & Identity Emily Johnson with Jack Tchen

12:00 PM Algorithms, Art and Consequences Annie Dorsen with Kevin Slavin

12:00 PM “Real Time” vs “Performed Time” Brian Rogers with Pau Atela

60 minutes
Light refreshments will be served.
Extended dialogue beyond the conversation is encouraged online through twitter: @PS122 #SPAN #COIL13

Major support for SPAN is provided by the Albert & Anne Mansfield Foundation.

Tuesday, January 15th – 12pm
Art and Ethics
Tea Tupajic, Petra Zanki with Florian Malzachar and Joel Whitney

Tea Tupajic (check diacritics), Petra Zanki, artists from Croatia have been creating theatre, dance and performance that questions how art should or must function in relationship to social and political responsibility, ethics and the vexed intersection point between ideas of ‘art’ vs ‘culture’. Through his work at Steirischer Herbst (and now as incoming Artistic Director of the Impulse Festival), FLorian Malzacher has become a key curatorial voice in Europe. Most recently he created the Truth is Concrete program in Graz – a week-long marathon about political strategies in art, and artistic strategies in politics – inspired by various protest movements around the world in recent years. He is an outspoken voice on the questions artistic practice (for artists, curators, institutions) must deal with in a contemporary society. Joel Whitney co-founded a remarkable online magazine Guernica whose written work on national and global politics and arts has recently appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Daily Beast, and World Policy Journal. His reporting on the U.S. role in Burma has appeared in The New Republic and The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Other work appears in New York Magazine, Courrier International in France, The San Francisco Chronicle Books, NPR and The Village Voice.

Cultural Diplomacy. Soft Power. Social Impact. Ethics and Responsibility. Quoting the Truth Is Concrete description – “What is to be done?Can art help solve problems that politics and society themselves have ignored for so long? Should art be a social or political tool, can it be useful? And why should artists know what to do when nobody else does?”

As institutions we face a funding, audience and political climate that demands from us measurable social impact, benefit that historically was perceived to be something for which artistic and cultural activity was somehow exempt. Artistic ‘quality’ is measured in new ways, and is being deployed in new ways. Work is curated and created within a global system but delivered to very local audiences – can this continue? Business as usual for audiences, artists and those who support them both is no longer an option. THis conversation will examine these problems with key participants in this global dialogue currently occurring.

Wednesday, January 16th – 12pm
Place and Identity
Emily Johnson with Jack Tchen

Emily Johnson’s is an artist whose work considers and asks its audience to examine big ideas. Home, place, history. Names. Identity and memory. Here and now she brings a work that was created with multiple regions and communities across the US, but began as a question around her historic and contemporary identity as a Minneapolis based, Alaskan descended Yup’ik native american. Jack Tchen has become one of the US’s leading thinkers in how we consider contemporary cultural identity. He works on understanding the multiple presents, pasts, the futures of New York City, identity formations, trans-local cross-cultural communications, archives, epistemologies and decolonizing Eurocentric ideas, theories, and practices.

Questions of culture and ethnicity have bubbled to the surface of US national identity politics for decades. Here an artist at the cutting edge of her field but working from a place of deep history engages with a theorist of ephemeral, daily cultural change. Immigration, migration, connection to land, home. What is an American identity if it is permeable, in constant cultural flux – while also a signifier of profound connection to a history, location and resource. They both ask: Can America reckon with a past we, the people are “innocent” of?

Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen
Jack Tchen is a historian, curator, teacher, dumpster diver, and cultural activist. Professor Tchen is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific /American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University, NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America in 1979-80 where he continues to serve as senior historian. In 1991, he was awarded the Charles S. Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities (renamed The National Medal of Humanities). He is author of the award-winning books New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, 1895-1905. And he was a principle investigator of “Asian Americas and Pacific Islanders Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight” with The College Board (2008). Most recently, he co-curated MOCA’s core exhibition: “With a single step: stories in the making of America” in a new space designed by Maya Lin. Jack is now working on three projects: First, a critical archival study of images, excerpts and essays on the history and contemporary impact of “Yellow Peril” paranoia and xenophobia (Verso, 2013). He’s the senior historian for the upcoming New-York Historical Society 2014 travelling exhibit on the impact of Chinese Exclusion Laws (1882-1968) on America, grappling with the paradox of a nation innocent of its own past. And, his next book: The Chinese Question: Answered and Unresolved will be published when the NYHS exhibit opens.

Thursday, January 17th – 12pm
Algorithms, Art and Consequences
Annie Dorsen with Kevin Slavin

Computational algorithms increasingly shape how we live. Our behaviors and communications generate mountains of data which algorithms use to make critical decisions about our political, economic and social relations, often without our knowledge. As Kevin Slavin has demonstrated, this transformation isn’t just taking place in cyberspace; it is reconfiguring the material reality of our daily lives, the objects we use, and the physical landscapes in which we live.

The theoretical and artistic consequences of this new era of “big data” are just beginning to be explored. Annie Dorsen’s recent work uses algorithms to create theatre, talk philosophy, scramble narrative and even interpret Shakespeare. She challenges some of our most basic assumptions about live performance, about the connection between language and consciousness, and about what it means to be a human in a digital world.

Kevin Slavin is a pioneer in the comprehension of the impact of math and its algorithmic consequence in our behaviour. He is a successful entrepreneur, thinker, teacher in this field and fundamentally understands how this new mathematics shapes our environments – or the ‘physics of culture.’

As an entrepreneur, Kevin has successfully navigated and integrated the areas of gaming, new media, technology, and design. As Co-founder of Area/Code in 2005, Kevin was a pioneer in rethinking game design and development around new technologies (like GPS) and new platforms (like Facebook). Area/Code worked to develop next-generation game experiences not only for major consumer product groups like Nokia, Nike and Puma but for media giants such as MTV, Discovery Channel, CBS and Disney. Their Facebook game Parking Wars, commissioned by A&E Television to promote its show of the same name, served over 1 billion pages in 2008. The company was acquired by Zynga in 2011, becoming Zynga New York.

Friday, January 18th – 12pm
“Real Time” vs “Performed Time”
Brian Rogers with Pau Atela

Media/performance artist Brian Rogers and mathematician Pau Atela discuss the idea of “real time” vs “performed time” in relation to Rogers’s COIL performance Hot Box, and the ways in which participation in immersive performance situations can coax, alter, and perhaps obliterate our collective experience of the passage of time.

Pau Atela earned his Ph.D. from Boston University. Atela grew up in Mexico and earned a Licenciatura en Matemáticas at the University of Barcelona.

He spent 1989–91 as an instructor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a sabbatical in the spring of 1995 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.

Professor Atela’s interests include: dynamical systems, Hamiltonian mechanics, chaos, computer visualization in mathematics andphyllotaxis.

Pau Atela’s Website

Brian Rogers is a director, video artist, co-founder and artistic director of The Chocolate Factory Theater. Since 1997, Brian has conceived and/or directed numerous large scale theatrical performances at The Chocolate Factory and elsewhere including the Bessie-nominated Selective Memory (2010/11) redevelop (death valley) (2009), 2 Husbands (2007), and Gun Play (2006). His newest performance work Hot Box will premiere in September 2012 as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line festival; and he will show new video work at Ventana 244 Gallery in November 2012. In addition to his own work, Brian curates The Chocolate Factory’s Visiting Artist Program (now in its 7th year) which supports the work of more than 100 theater, dance, music and multimedia artists each year. As a video and performance artist, Brian has collaborated with numerous dance and theater artists including Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty (the horror the horror, Movement Research Festival 2010, Abrons Arts Center 2011), Aynsley Vandenbroucke (Danspace Project, March 2011) Tara O’Con (Danspace Project, January 2009), Jillian Sweeney (September 2009), and the Movement Research Spring 2008 Festival (24x4x4). Recent video works include The Borden Avenue Bridge Project, presented at NY Designs in May 2008. He is a graduate of Bennington College.