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Problem Radicals

“Problem Radical(s) is an experimental theatricalist opera just the way such things should be and rarely are. Creators Kara Feely and Travis Just have created a sophisticated collision between elegant formal considerations and the disruptive garbage of a world going down the drain that is exciting and exhilarating. The spectator is swept away in its delirious mix and emerges clear and emotionally refreshed.”
– Richard Foreman

“Rich imagery” and “Dreamlike intimacy”
– NYTheater.com

“Contemplative…highly conceptual”
– Vital Weekly

An experimental opera, Problem Radical(s) mixes everyday radical acts, a sprawling sculpture, massive inflating tarps, industrious performers, and hardcore noise. Performers navigate an ever-expanding, unstable installation. Musicians and singers reassemble the modular electronic and instrumental score, evoking American radical thinkers, civic activists, and maneuverable personal blimps.

Personnel:
writer and director: Kara Feely
composer: Travis Just
installation: Hannah Dougherty
video: Daniel Kötter
costume designer: Peter Ksander
lighting designer: Miranda Hardy
stage manager: Sarah Nerboso
associate producer: Morgan von Prelle Pecelli

performed by Karl Allen, Sarah Dahlen, Francesco Gagliardi, Caitlin McDonough Thayer
musicians: Kevin Farrell, James Moore

production assistants: Peiyi Wong, Stacey Berman, Sara Patterson

Excerpts from Problem Radical(s) have been presented at KuLe (Berlin, August 2007), Experimental Intermedia (New York, December 2007), and Loopline (Tokyo, May 2008). In June-July 2008, Object Collection developed the piece further during month-long artist residency at Abrons Arts Center/Henry Street Settlement.

You can preview the sounds of Problem Radical(s) on WFMU’s
Acousmatic Theater Hour.

Read the Feature about Problem Radicals in Magazine.

Fri, April 24 – Sun, May 10, 2009
Wed – Sat 7:30p
Sun 5:30p

Beowulf

Flawed heroes, sympathetic monsters and haughty professors collide as this hefty
poem is rescued from the grasp of 1,000 years of highbrow analysis and
transformed into a defiantly raucous musical. Presented by San Francisco’s
infamous Shotgun Players and New York’s infectious Banana Bag & Bodice, this new
SongPlay is an irreverent dissertation on art versus criticism in blood soaked
Scandinavia! Written by Jason Craig, music by Dave Malloy, directed by Rod
Hipskind

Presented in association with The Abrons Arts Center and Performance Space 122

For more information visit beowulfnyc.com.

March 31 – April 18, 2009
ALL PERFORMANCES TAKE PLACE AT
THE ABRONS ARTS CENTER
466 Grand St. at Pitt

Semiospectacle

“A performance artist of underground legend.”
– Guy Trebay, New York Times

Lord Whimsy authors “a rallying cry for the return of the dandy.” – Liesl Schillinger, New York Times

“Fishnet stockings and feather boas aren’t usually the subject of a lecture but today students are taken back to the turn of the twentieth century and topless showgirls .” – Judith Kampfner, NPR

This verbal varieté strategizes the explicitly semiotic spectacle in a multimedia showcase of live art representing an encounter between the academic lecture hall, the poet’s theater, and the vaudeville house. Its players cut across the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, pedagogy, cabaret, poetics, and performance in an investigation of linguistic mechanisms of spectacular identity formation. Linguistic illusionists expose the parlor trick of transparent speech, conjuring floating signifiers that levitate forty-four feet above the floor. Costumes sewn from three million majuscules burst at the semes. The auditorium oscillates between reading room and performatorium. The linguistic turn transmogrifies into a shimmy.

Semiospectacle is curated by Mashinka Firunts and will feature performances by Vaginal Davis, Lord Whimsy, Dr. Lucky, Jeremy J F Thompson, Paolo Javier, Daniel Scott Snelson, and Shonni Enelow. Musical accompaniment by Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators, intertitular tap by The Minsky Sisters, and one-minute curatorial micro-lectures by Mashinka Firunts. The evening commences with Steno Pool, an interactive performance, and Codexkammer: a functional lending library installed in Performance Space 122.

Reception to follow.
www.semiospectacle.com

Monday March 22, 2009
8PM
ADDED 10PM SHOW
FREE – Reservations Required

Co-Sponsors:

yessified

“One of the most beloved of downtown choreographers.”
– Joan Acocella,, The New Yorker

” Bewitching … One of today’s most alive, sensitive performers.”
– Claudia LaRocca, New York Times, 2008

Iconoclassical choreographer Sally Silvers returns to Performance Space 122 with her first new group dance since 2005’s Puppy Skills.

Whiteness is on the hook and down for the hybrid. Silvers answers the seductive call of a stable/single racial life by outing and othering it. Whiteness as symbiotic, open face Blackness. Sudden turns and shocks, bleed-throughs and angularity, pivoting centers, conflict embrace — a new world is ever unexplored and the night’s secret is to make the day swing blue. Jutting and swerving, Yessified is a hyperactivating dance of quirky, fun wired physicality and imagery, a provocative text by Bruce Andrews, electronica star-crossed with sweet soul music and 10 duper super dancers: Javier Cardona, Alan Good, Sara Beth Higgins, Takemi Kitamura, Alejandra Martorell, Miriam Parker, Julia Planine-Troiani, Keith Sabado, and Sally Silvers

Sally Silvers & Dancers has performed nationally and internationally in South Korea, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Europe, the American Dance Festival, and many other locations. Artistic Director Sally Silvers has an on-going fascination with the poetic as well as the social meanings of movement — to offer a no-holds-barred exploration of movement possibilities often wittily tilted toward the eccentric, awkward, and unexpected. Resonating from the movement are the motifs of risk, vulnerability, playfulness, and extremity. Often operating in areas between idiomatic dance and unconventional movement, the work keep its focus on clearly defined, if unusual structures for the articulated body. Her meticulously madcap dances engage experimentation at the edges of drama, fierceness and hope.

Photo by Jenny Woodward

Sun, Mar 22 – Sun, Mar 29, 2009
Tuesday – Saturday 8pm
Sunday 6:30pm
Tickets from $20

Venice Saved

venice

A performance piece that takes theater as its topic. Truly interactive theater (ugh). Performance as education. A performance about the nature of performance (ugh). Potential topics include: theater,performance art, torture, outsourcing, anorexia, Israel, Palestine, Blackwater, the TCG, Charismatic Leadership, the Shock Doctrine, theater vs. performance, the exhibition as school, theanyspacewhatever, learning vs. “learning,” talking vs. “talking”, performing vs. acting, democracy vs. Authenticity. Totally Bitchen. Simone Weil (100 years). Seminar format. Participatory. On the 100th anniversary of Simone Weil’s birth, CiNE takes the philosopher’s unfinished play and asks American Theater, “What were you thinking?”

Adaptor: Gordon Dahlquist. Performers: Jeff Biehl, James Hannaham, Jon Krupp, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Christianna Nelson, Colleen Werthmann, and David Levine.

David Levine’s work fuses performance, theater, and visual art. His performance work has appeared in Europe and the USA at Documenta XII, Galerie Magnus Muller (Berlin), Gavin Brown@Passerby (New York), HAU2 (Berlin), and Galerie Feinkost Berlin), Prelude ’07, as well as appearing in Cabinet Magazine, the New York Times, Art Review, BOMB Theater, and Theater der Zeit. He is the recipient of a Kulturstiftung Des Bundes grant for BAUERNTHEATER, and a NYFA award for Cross- Disciplinary/Performative work. He lives in New York and Berlin, where he is the Director of
Performing Arts at the European College of Liberal Arts.

CiNE is an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to examining the conditions of spectacle and spectatorship across a range of media. Previous initiatives include BABYLON IS EVERYWHERE; RE-PUBLIC (design portfolio, Theater 34:2); ACTORS AT WORK (Cabinet Magazine), and Messalina (SPF Festival)

Image courtesy of Annerose Schulze

Made possible with the support of Etant Donnés,the French-American Fund for the Performing Arts

Sat, Mar 21 – Sun, Apr 5, 2009
Wednesday – Saturday 7:30pm
Sunday 6pm
Tickets from $20
$15 (students/seniors)
$10 (P.S. 122 members)

You can follow live blogging for the show at www.venicesaved.wordpress.com. Every night is different – see what people are talking about the nights you can’t be there. For you Twitterers out there, you can post about the show using the group name #venicesaved and read any postings about the show by searching venicesaved at twitter.com.