Archived Events | Page 32 of 96 | Performance Space New York

Storm Still

Nonsense Image

The Nonsense Company
Storm Still

“After hearing what composer Rick Burkhardt can make from singing wineglasses and a scraping fork, we feel better prepared for the exquisite musicality of his text. Elegantly weird… virtuosic performers.”
– Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

“Thrilling performances… spiked with intense shots of satire. Through precise delivery and the sheer force of their concept and subject material, captivate their audience even as they disorient it.”
– Ronni Reich, Backstage New York

“Shows that expand the perspectives and materials of theater, twitching from one vantage point to another, from ghastly grandeur to snips of irony.”
– Scott Gordon, The Onion AV Club

Outside an abandoned school, a war rages. Inside, three kids have been performing an unsupervised rendition of King Lear for years. Further inside, the mad King debates the purpose of theater with his Fool, a licensed therapist.

The Nonsense Company, based in Brooklyn, NY performs new and innovative works of contemporary music and theater, with an emphasis on the musical use of speech in estranged contexts and the application in theater of techniques more commonly associated with music. The Company’s name is borrowed from Franz Schubert’s ensemble, die Unsinn Gesellschaft, who with radically spare resources spawned a revolution in the music and poetry of the nineteenth century.

The company’s current members, Rick Burkhardt (of Three Pianos), Andy Gricevich, and Ryan Higgins, have worked and studied with composers and performers such as Steve Schick, Chaya Czernowin, Red Fish Blue Fish, John Fonville, Herbert Bruen, The Performers’ Workshop Ensemble, Ed Harkins, and Brian Ferneyhough, as well as with theater directors Rachel Chaivkin, Matt Wilder, David Wheeler, and Stefan Novinski. Their programs emphasizing the works of startling emerging composers have received repeated invitations to theater and music festivals throughout the United States, Mexico, and Europe.

Made possible with commissioning support from Performance Space 122 and the Jerome Foundation.

NY PREMIERE | THEATRE
Saturday, February 19 – Sunday, March 6, 2011
Wednesday – Saturday 8PM
Sunday 6PM

Kim Noble Will Die

Kim Nobel Will Die

“Shocking, beautiful and profound. It will blow your mind.” – Time Out NY
“COMPLETELY STUNNING … honest and fearless.” – Time Out

Following extraordinary critical acclaim, five-star reviews and sell-out seasons at London’s Soho Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival, Kim Noble Will Die makes its US PREMIERE as part of Performance Space 122’s COIL Festival. Life is tough. Kim Noble will help you get through it whilst laying bare his plans for departing this world.

Forced to assess his meagre legacy as his contemporaries become more and more successful, what Kim Noble bequeaths to the world has become of utmost importance to him.

In a series of benevolent acts, audience members are written into Kim’s legally binding Last Will and
Testament, provided with guides to surviving terrorist plots on the underground, money is given away and, perhaps most touching of all, containers of Kim’s sperm will be available to female audience members in a bid to populate the world with genius once he is dead.

A ground-breaking new multi-media show, this is an absurd mix of comedy, video and avant-garde theatre from award-winning, BAFTA-nominated performance artist, video artist and comedian Kim Noble. Co-directed by Kim Noble, Gary Reich and Flick Fernando

mrkimnoble.com

PRESENTED AS PART OF COIL 2011
US PREMIERE | THEATRE | UPSTAIRS at PS122
Tue, Jan 11 5PM / Thu, Jan 13 10PM / Fri, Jan 14 7:30PM / Sat, Jan 15 10PM
Extended: Wed, Jan 19 & Fri, Jan 21 10PM
Thu, Jan 20 & Sat, Jan 22 7:30PM

A Disaster Begins

“Seeking order in a life, a war, and a deluge…(with) cleareyed passion.” – The New York Times

A lone woman’s unbreakable bond with the hurricane that devastated the Texas island of Galveston in 1900, taking 6,000 lives in a single night. With only a pitcher of water and drinking glass she unravels the shocking truth behind this disaster, weaving in tales of presidential corruption, pubescent despair, patriotic fervor, pre-marital passion and paralyzing writer’s block.

Ain Gordon is a three-time Obie winning writer/director/actor, a two-time NYFA recipient and a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting. Commissioned/produced/presented by NYTW, Soho Rep., The Public, 651 ARTS, DTW, PS122, Kitchen Theatre, and HERE, etc (all NY); Mark Taper (CA), George Street Playhouse (NJ), Krannert (IL), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), DiverseWorks (TX), Spirit Square (NC), North Fourth Arts Center (NM), LexArts (KY), etc. Core Writer at Playwrights’ Center and Co-Director of Pick Up Performance Co(s)

PRESENTED AS PART OF COIL 2011
Mon, Jan 10 2011

Symptom

“A stirring piece, viscerally, and you’ll be thinking about it afterwards, as I am now.” – TC Daily Planet

Join twins, dancer Otto Ramstad and visual artist Emmett Ramstad, as they examine the human body, investigate notions of social bodies versus biological bodies, and explore the gaps between seeing, knowing and empathy. Symptom inspects the slippage between subjective and objective understandings of the human body, where a symptom acts as an indicator, trait, feature, mark or sign that is open for interpretation. Sound composed by electro-acoustic instrumentalist Andrea Parkins.

Co-created by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, Composer Andrea Parkins, Researcher and theorist Aren Aizura , Performed by Otto Ramstad and Emmett Ramstad

Since 1998 The BodyCartography Project’s co-directors Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad have created numerous dance, film and installation works. Their work extends from intimate solos for the street or stage, to large community dance works in train stations, dance films in national parks, to highly complex works for site or stage amidst installations, video and sound. Their work has been produced across the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, Russia and South America. Recent highlights include a commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet and the premiere of their work 1/2 Life with a physicist, composer Zeena Parkins and visual artist Emmett Ramstad at Performance Space 122, NYC, the Southern Theater and Art of This Gallery in Minneapolis. They are featured artists in the first book about site dance in the USA published by University of Florida Press titled Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces and 2010 McKnight Fellows.

PRESENTED AS PART OF COIL 2011
NY PREMIERE | DANCE | DOWNSTAIRS at PS122
Fri, Jan 7 4:30PM / Sat, Jan 8 9:30PM / Sun, Jan 9 4:30PM / Mon, Jan 10 6:30PM

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your Symptom program online!

Hello Hi There

Annie Dorsen
Hello Hi There

Language is meaningless, thought is pointless, and we’re all gonna die. Hello, hi there!

New York director Annie Dorsen takes the famous television debate between the philosopher Michel Foucault and linguist and activist Noam Chomsky from the Seventies as inspiration and material for a dialogue between two specially developed chatbots: every evening, these computer programs designed to mimic human conversations perform a new – as it were, improvised – live text.

Hello Hi There is a performance without people – a literal expression of post-humanism, and simultaneously an examination of what it means to be human. The piece goes inside the question of human nature and intelligence, both the organic and the artificial.

Obie award-winning director and writer Annie Dorsen works in a variety of fields, including theatre, film, dance and, as of 2010, digital performance. Most recently, Hello Hi There premiered at the streirischer herbst festival, Graz, and will tour to Oslo, Bergen and Berlin before arriving in New York in January 2011. She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which she also directed. Spike Lee has since made a film of her production of the piece, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, subsequently screened at South by Southwest Film Festival and The Tribeca Film Festival, and was released theatrically by IFC in 2010 before being broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances. Also in 2010, she collaborated with choreographer Anne Juren on Magical (ImPulsTanz Festival) and with Ms. Juren and DD Dorviller on Piece Sans Paroles (brut Vienna and Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales Seine-St-Denis, Paris). In 2009 she created two music-theatre pieces, Ask Your Mama, a setting of Langston Hughes’ 1962 poem, composed by Laura Karpman and sung by Jessye Norman and The Roots (Carnegie Hall) and ETHEL’s Truckstop, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Her pop-political performance project Democracy in America was presented at Performance Space 122 (PS 122) in spring 2008. Her short film, I Miss, originally the centerpiece of Democracy in America, has screened at American Film Institute Festival (AFI Fest), SXSW Film Festival, The New York Film Festival’s “Views From the Avant-Garde” and the Nantucket Film Festival. Her work has been seen at numerous venues in the US, including the Public Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Soho Rep, Marfa Theatre (TX), NYStage and Film, Sundance Theatre Lab, Stanford University, Clubbed Thumb and Women’s Project. In addition to numerous awards for Passing Strange, Ms. Dorsen has received several fellowships, notably the Sir John Gielgud Fellowship from the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. She has taught at New York University, Fordham University, and Playwright’s Horizons, and is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Co-produced by steirischer herbst festival, Black Box Teater, BIT Teatergarasjen, Hebbel am Ufer and Performance Space 122. Additional touring support provided by Bundesministerium fur Unterricht, Kunst and Kultur (bmukk). Additional production support and residency provided by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer (EMPAC).

PRESENTED AS PART OF COIL 2011
US PREMIERE | UPSTAIRS at PS122

Jan 6-21, 2011
Thu, Jan 6 7:30PM / Sun, Jan 9 5PM / Mon, Jan 10 5PM / Tue, Jan 11 10PM / Thu, Jan 13 7:30PM / Fri, Jan 14 10PM
Extended: Wed, Jan 19 & Fri, Jan 21 7:30PM
Thu, Jan 20 & Sat, Jan 22 10PM.

Single Tickets:
$20, $15 (students/seniors)

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your Hello Hi There program online!