Archived Events | Page 24 of 96 | Performance Space New York Spring Gala

Habit

David Levine
Habit

The Real World meets No Exit: audiences circulate around the exterior of a fully functional house, watching the ever-changing action through the windows, and coming and going as they please.

Habit is a durational installation created by provocateur David Levine (previously at PS122: Anger at the Movies, Venice Saved), with a commissioned text by playwright Jason Grote (Smash, Mad Men) and environment by Marsha Ginsberg (Telephone, Map of Virtue). All day long, within the four walls, actors re-complete the drama, on an endless loop, making up staging to suit their needs. When they’re hungry, they eat; when they’re dirty, they wash.

“Enraging, engaging.. Levine a savvy rascal who makes theater pieces that bleed into Conceptual art” – Time Out

Co-presented by Performance Space 122 & FIAF’s Crossing the Line

Sept 21 – 30 / 1 – 9pm daily
at Essex Street Market, Building B; 130-144 Essex Street (btw. Rivington & Stanton Streets)

Free and open to the public. No reservations required.

@alldayhabit #CTL12

“After the fourth iteration of the day – I’d been running around the house, chasing the meaning I was helping to create, for seven hours, constantly afraid I’d miss something, exhilarated by the prospect of being surprised by the next turn…”

-Read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ essay ‘Over and Over’ (The Threepenny Review, 2012) on his experience with Habit at the Luminato Festival in Toronto

David Levine has successfully bridged the worlds of contemporary theater and visual art with a body of work that examines the conditions of spectacle and spectatorship across a range of media. His work has been performed and/or exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Documenta XII, the Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), HAU 2 (Berlin), Matadero Madrid, and Blum & Poe (Los Angeles). He has directed theatrical premieres at the Vineyard Theatre, Primary Stages, and the Atlantic Theater, alongside workshops at The Public Theater and the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab.

Read an interview excerpt with Levine in The Believer

Habit takes place in a disused building, once a bustling part of The Essex Street Market. This magnificently decayed warehouse has been closed to the public since 1994. The market complex turned 70 this year; it was created by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and has a rich history on the Lower East Side. Learn more about Essex Street Market’s History

PS122 has partnered with Crossing the Line since the festival’s inception in 2007.

Crossing the Line is the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s annual fall festival presenting interdisciplinary works and performances created by artists from around the world in New York. The festival provides opportunities for New Yorkers to explore the dialogue between artist and participant, examine how artists help re-imagine the world, and engage in the vital role artists play as critical thinkers and catalysts for social evolution. Crossing the Line is initiated and produced by FIAF in partnership with leading cultural institutions and takes place this year from September 14 – October 14, 2012.

Conversation with David Levine
David Levine (Habit creator/director), Eliza Baldi and Brian Bickerstaff (Habit performers) in conversation with Gideon Lester, co-curator of Crossing the Line.
Saturday, September 29 12pm immediately preceding Habit

Essex Street Market, Building B; 130-144 Essex Street, btw. Rivington & Stanton Streets
Free – Reservations suggested

Created & directed David Levine
Environment & clothes Marsha Ginsberg
Text Jason Grote
Produced Maria Luisa Gambale
Production Manager Chris Batstone
Assistant Directors David Conison & Kristin Meyer

Dedicated to Tom Murrin, friend
Co-commissioned by Luminato Festival in Toronto, and Mass MoCA, with support from The Watermill Center.

There There

There There
Kristen Kosmas (USA)

“Nobody, and I mean nobody, holds a candle to writing. No gimmicks, no flash just sheer poetic brilliance” – Andy Horwitz, Culturebot

Christopher Walken, on tour in Russia with a solo show inspired by everyone’s favorite Chekhovian sociopath, mysteriously falls off a ladder and is unable to perform. Karen, who apparently proofread the script once, is asked to go on in Walken’s place. A precarious bilingual performance duet ensues between Karen and her Russian interpreter, Leo. There There is a wildly unpredictable theatrical roller coaster about being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time doing all the most wrong things. Directed by Paul Willis, performed by Kristen Kosmas & Larissa Tokmakova, design by Peter Ksander, translation by Matvei Yankelevich.

TRANSPORTATION NOTE: 7 trains from Manhattan are NOT running this weekend. As an alternate, take the N, Q train to Queensboro Plaza and then the free shuttle bus to Vernon Blvd-Jackson Ave. You can also find more alternate routes here: www.mta.info

Co-commissioned & presented by Performance Space 122
& The Chocolate Factory

Dec 18 – 22 8pm
Jan 3 – 5 8pm
Jan 9 – 11 8pm
Jan 12 at 6pm
PERFORMANCES ADDED!
Jan 10 at 10pm
Jan 11 at 10pm

$20 / $15 students, seniors (at door)
Purchase Tickets
Chocolatefactorytheater.org

#COIL13

▸▸ Pass Holders Log in to redeem

Playwright and performer Kristen Kosmas and director Paul Willis have collaborated on numerous projects over the last 15 years, including her solo performance play The Scandal!, which received critical acclaim in Seattle and was nominated for a New York Independent Theater Award for Best Short Script in 2009. Kosmas’ plays and solo performances have been produced in Seattle, Austin, Boston, Chicago, and in numerous venues in New York. Kosmas is a founding member of the OBIE Award-winning performance series Little Theater; the Brooklyn-based experimental writer’s collective Machiqq/The Ladies’ Auxiliary Playwriting Team; and The Twenty-Five Cent Opera of San Francisco, a monthly event for the enactment of texts and theatricals.

The Chocolate Factory is Long Island City based incubator for new developments in experimental performance. The work of founding artists Brian Rogers & Sheila Lewandowski emphasizes collaboration combining movement, music, video and text to devise a means of storytelling that is immediate, collage-like, highly visual, and dependent on new technologies. These curatorial values tend to lead to work that is not easily categorized and requires new methods, more time, and a new kind of audience.

“It feels a little bit like the first New York I knew in the ’70s and ’80s. Not in a retro way at all, but art and residence and commerce were in a more balanced relationship than they are now. It’s not a reference to that time, just a little place where that is occurring again.” – Tere O’Connor, in a New York Times profile of the Chocolate Factory

The Chocolate Factory is located in Long Island City, at the first stop on both the 7 and G trains into Queens. L.I.C. is a waterfront neighborhood which in recent years has become known for its thriving arts community, and has among the highest concentration of art galleries, art institutions (among them MOMA’s PS1, the Institute of the Moving Image, Socrates Sculpture Park, Isamu Noguchi Museum) and studio space of any neighborhood in New York City.

Playwright/Performer Kristen Kosmas
Director Paul Willis
Translator Matvei Yankelevich
Designer Peter Ksander
Performer Larissa Tokmakova

Made possible with commissioning support from PS122, The Chocolate Factory, and the Jerome Foundation. Developed in residencies at NACL Theater and Abrons Art Center.

Ich, Kürbisgeist

Big Dance Theater & Sibyl Kempson
Ich, Kürbisgeist

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. At its heart Ich, Kürbisgeist is an olde-tyme agricultural vengeance play installed in a crypt-like basement for just 30 people a night.

“It’s hard to do justice to the freewheeling brilliance of Big Dance Theater’s combination of dance, theater, video and idiosyncratic imagination; suffice it to say you should see the work of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar whenever possible.” – The New York Times

Co-commissioned & presented by Performance Space 122
& The Chocolate Factory

Oct 25 – 27 at 8pm

Oct 31 – Nov 3 at 8pm

Nov 7 – 10 at 8pm

Added Late Nights:

Nov 2, 3, 10 at 10pm

at The Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

@PS122 #Kurbisgeist

Big Dance Theater is an OBIE and Bessie award winning company known for its inspired use of dance, music, text and visual design to expand and refract literary texts, weaving disparate sources and forms into seamless theatrical wholes. Under the co-direction of Annie-B Parson & Paul Lazar, BDT has created 15 dance/theater works, generating each piece over months of collaboration with a long-standing, ever-evolving group of actors, dancers, composers and designers.

Sibyl Kempson (at PS122: Crime or Emergency)
“… one of the most radical, transgressive, and hilarious playwright/performers out there. She has a singular theatrical imagination, a searing stage presence, a ferocious intellect …” – BOMB Magazine

“Anarchic talent …” “… a playwright of terrifying gifts … frighteningly in command of devastating linguistic weapons” – Time Out New York

Director Paul Lazar
Co-director / choreographer Annie-B Parson
Writer Sibyl Kempson
Performers Tymberly Canale, Eric Dyer, Molly Hickok, Paul Lazar, Kourtney Rutherford
Set Joanne Howard
Video Josh Higgason, Karinne Keithley, Jeff Larson
Music Karinne Keithley, Ben Williams
Lights Joe Levasseur
Sound Jamie McElhinney
Costumes Suzanne Bocanegra
Production Manager Brendan Regimbal
Produced by Aaron Rosenblum

Ich, Kürbisgeist was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Additional support was provided by the Starry Night Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New York Theater Program, the Distracted Globe Foundation and King’s Fountain. Production design support was provided by The Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund, a program of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./New York). General operating support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Ich, Kürbisgeist was developed, in part, through generous space grants from the Abron Arts Center’s AIRspace residency program, and the Process Space Residency at Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island.

Season Launch Party 2012

“In previous episodes of this annual event, we’ve seen Dynasty Handbag, failed to see Praxis’s invisible tea, wounds, and substances (legal and illicit), we’ve had our portraits taken by Mark Mann, been heckled by neighbours and lauded by all. This year we’ll dwarf the Olympic opening in its ambition – and solemnly swear to under deliver on our over promises.” – Vallejo Gantner, PS122 Artistic Director

From start to finish the evening’s social convergence of artists, PS122 staff, and friends will be infused by singular performative and non-performative events of the unexpected, absurd, and often coy nature curated and featuring Get Modern on Me aka GMOM aka Neal Medlyn, Adrienne Truscott + friends.

PS122’s Season Launch Party
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
atop the Gawker Media Roof in SoHo

$35 at the door
All tickets include open bar + hors d’oeuvres

Special thanks to our Season Launch Committee:
Kate Bornstein, Enrico Ciotti, Sherry Dobbin, Michelle Stern, Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, Philip Alnswick-Tobias + artist tickets sponsor William Lynch

Performances made possible in part with support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Food generously provided by Vbar, wine tasting with Terra Fossil, and beer lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery.

Post Plastica

Carmelita Tropicana & Ela Troyano (NYC)
Post Plastica
“Carmelita Tropicana lights up New York’s performance venues with colorful, hilarious, and brain-twisting narratives.” -Time Out New York

Part live performance, part video installation, this piece offers a glimpse into a future in which celebrity culture has pitched a battle between the primacy of virtual and artistic lives; in which revolutionaries keep bees in a secret underground; and in which a half-woman, half-bear scientist has gained the upper hand…

Featuring Becca Blackwell, Erin Markey, and Carmelita Tropicana. Production design by Aliza Shvarts, costumes by Yali Romagoza, and lights by Chris Hudacs. Film photography by Uzi Parnes.

Each evening will be begin at 6pm in El Museo’s El Cafe with complimentary pre-show talks featuring guest experts, curated by the artists. Performances begin in El Museo’s El Teatro at 7:30pm.

May 31 in the lobby Exhibit of Stereoscopic Images by Richard Pell from the Center for PostNatural History
June 1 in El cafe Meet the Celebrity: Fufurufu (a brown and black toy poodle) & Nao Bustamante give a lecture/demo
June 2 in El cafe Urban Beekeeping with Guillermo Fernandez, of NYC Beekeeping / BIRD BRAIN with Jennifer Monson, choreographer & artistic director of interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance (iLAND )
June 3 in El cafe Normal Is Good: Aliza Shvarts interviews Yali Romagoza, an artist who has recently arrived from Havana, Cuba

“Carmelita Tropicana has been lighting up New York performance venues with colorful, hilarious, and brain twisting narratives.” -Time Out

“… this Cuban spitfire cheerfully sticks her spike heels into both Cuban and American eyeballs.” – The Post

“Carmelita Tropicana is a great improviser; that persona always hold the chaos together.” – Village Voice

“This woman is funny… irreverent, spicy… and brilliant” -The Miami Herald

Carmelita Tropicana (a.k.a. Alina Troyano) is a performance artist, playwright, and actor. Troyano burst on New York’s downtown performing arts scene in the eighties with her alter ego, the spitfire Carmelita Tropicana and her counterpart, the irresistible archetypal Latin macho Pingalito Betancourt, followed by performances as Hernando Cortez’s horse and la Cucaracha Martina from her childhood fairytales in Cuba.
In Tropicana’s work, humor and fantasy become subversive tools to rewrite history. Tropicana’s performances plays and videos have been presented at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea in Barcelona, the Berlin International Film Festival, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Dance Theater Workshop, the Mark Taper Forum’s Kirk Douglas Theatre and the Studio Museum of Harlem. Her work has received funding support from the Independent Television Service, the Jerome Foundation, and the Rockefeller Suitcase Fund. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, the Teddy Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and an Obie for sustained excellence in performance. In 2011 Performance Space 122 honored Carmelita Tropicana for her artistic contributions at its 30th Anniversary Gala.

Ela Troyano is a Cuban-born writer and director based in New York City. Her films, theater and performances have been shown at international venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, INTAR Theater, the Arsenal in Berlin, and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville. Her half-hour ITVS short, Carmelita Tropicana, won the coveted Teddy Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival as well as the Audience and Critics Award at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Her debut feature film, Latin Boys Go To Hell, remains an online cult hit and was recently broadcasted on Showtime. Both of these films were screened theatrically in the U.S. and at festivals in Europe, Australia and Japan. Troyano has also directed episodic action television for the drama series Reyes y Rey, produced by Stu Segall for Telemundo/Sony, and most recently the documentary La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul for PBS. She has also worked as a theater director on the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway production of A to B by Ricardo Bracho. Select awards include a United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship, funding from the Ford Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, the New York State Council on the Arts and a Screenwriting workshop at Sundance with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The Cast

Carmelita Tropicana See above for bio

Becca Blackwell recently seen in Young Jean Lee’s UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW as part of COIL ’12, Becca is a NYC performer known for pushing gender boundaries in their work. Recently worked with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok, Theater of the Two-Headed Calf, Sharon Hayes, Michelle Handelman, and Erin Markey. They are also regulars on the web series JACK IN A BOX and GAY’S ANATOMY.

Erin Markey is a Brooklyn-based writer/performer. She recently starred in the NYC premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes at the Hudson Hotel in NYC, and at the Ames Hotel in Boston. She is a series regular on LOGO’s Jeffery and Cole CasseroleTV show. Her solo musical, Puppy Love: A Stripper’s Tail played and extended as part of the SoloNova Festival. She is a company member of Half Straddle and her work in FAMILY was heralded as “the scariest performance of the year” in 2009 by Time Out NY. As a playwright, she was invited to the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and recently developed her newest work, The Dardy Family Home Movies by Stephen Sondheim by Erin Markey, which premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Kinotek Series in the Fall of 2011. As a cabaret and performance artist, she regularly presents work at Our Hit Parade with Kenny Mellman, Bridget Everett and Neal Medlyn at Joe’s Pub (The Public).

Photos by Ves Pitts and Uzi Parnes.

PS122 is proud to present our first production in partnership with El Museo del Barrio, New York’s leading Latino cultural institution. A dynamic artistic, cultural, and community gathering place, El Museo is a center of cultural pride on New York’s Museum Mile.

Post Plastica was made possible with commissioning support from Performance Space 122.

WORLD PREMIERE
May 31 – June 3, 2012
Co-presented by Performance Space 122
& El Museo del Barrio

5th Avenue at 104th Street, Manhattan, NY