As part of our commitment to promoting excellence in the arts in New York City, P.S. 122 partners with esteemed arts organizations from all over the city to present B.O.B., a new and super-charged celebration that takes place at P.S. 122 while taking you on tour of the brightest local theatre, dance and performance.
Staten Island
Brooklyn
Queens
Bronx
Manhattan
Peripherally Yours . . . With Love, Staten Island
Little Miss Big Mouth / Sara Valentine
Sara Valentine focuses her live-action, thriller talk show on Staten Island and exposes another side of what she calls, “New York’s forgotten borough – the one that gets a bad rap” But as Sara will show you, S.I. is a most fascinating place with a history of embracing iconoclasts, nurturing uniqueness, and celebrating the divine. Together with her co-hosts, Jenny Tango (octogenarian visual artist whose work is currently featured in a retrospective at the Staten Island Museum), Maureen Seaberg (Staten Island-based journalist for The New York Times, Radar, and MSNBC) plus The Little Miss Big Mouth House Band, with special guest bassist and S.I. resident Mary Feaster, of the Circus Amok Band, Sara gets up close and curious – and curiouser.
Both nights include a featured video interview with Staten Island Chuck, S.I.’s resident groundhog, and his handler Doug Schwartz, an outsider sculptural artist who over the past ten years has created a “miniature sacred city,” 150 feet high, out of prehistoric rock on the island’s south shore. Friday’s guests include Men Dancing, with Jesse Tigner and Hayden McCrary Jr. – S.I.’s resident naturist (e.g. nudist) performs an original pas de deux; plus Trish + Christoph, a multimedia duo covering S.I.’s North Shore songs, a la the Trachtenburgs-cum-Simon & Garfunkle. Saturday’s line-up includes: the Staten Island Paranormal Society, who will undertake a paranormal investigation of P.S. 122 (SIPS have been advised not to pester P.S. 122’s resident ghost Ethyl Eichelberger); Reverend Adele from Mystikal Wonders – the owner of this popular Wiccan-Pagan boutique explains why S.I. is home to more magic practitioners than any other borough; plus, multi-hyphenated Gabri Christa, (Caribbean-born dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and Princeton professor) who will discuss her work while performing an automatic dance.
Listen to an interview with Sara Valentine on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, featuring a different Best of Boroughs artist each day this week.
Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7 at 8:00 PM
Partner: Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island
Pent-up: a Revenge Dance
Okwui Okpokwasili
In this work in progress, Bessie Award-winner and beloved downtown actress Okwui Okpokwasili spins a modern multi-character folktale. In it, she portrays a woman in exile who sees and seeks revenge as a way of reconciling her present impoverished condition with the belief that she’s a direct descendant of the sun. Interweaving legacy and the loss of old tongues, rituals and original songs, and a good old attempt to get a grip, the story sheds new light on traditional spells and third world brothels, and transforms every scratch & win ticket into a lucky one. Pent Up: A Revenge Dance, was presented as a work-in-progress in 2006 by 651 ARTS as part of their annual Salon 651 series.
Okwui’s numerous credits include recent appearances P.S. 122, in You Belong to Me (Int’l WOW) and as Kundry in John Jahnke’s A Parsifal by Susan Sontag; as well as Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Plays, Ralph Lemon’s geography trilogy Come Home, Charley Patton (2005 Bessie Award for Performance), The Foundry Theatre’s The Roaring Girle, Richard Foreman’s Maria Del Bosco, and Richard Maxwell’s Cowboys and Indians. Films include Tour Guide in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter and Malika Vanderkamps in Lasse Hallstrom’s The Hoax.
Listen to an interview with Okwui Okpokwasili on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, featuring a different Best of Boroughs artist each day this week.
Feb 8-22, 2009
Also played: April 11-22, 2007
Partner: 651 Arts, Brooklyn
Momma
Edith L. Freni
Momma is a new play about making sorry excuses for bad behavior. He was adopted; she developed young. Her mom was a yo-yo dieter; his dad cheated. Now they’re all grown-up, married and want kids of their own. It’s all fun and games until someone gets shot. Two couples-mirror images of each other-explore the effects of genetics, sexual dysfunction and recreational drug use in this darkly comic, totally non-linear take on American family life.
Edith Freni’s plays include Waterborn, Things Rank, A Body Drops, The Workaround, Baby Girl, and Soft in the Belly. Her work has been staged at venues such as E.S.T., Center Stage New York, The Producer’s Club, The Present Company Theatorium, The Tank, The Brick Theatre, The Kraine Theatre, Collective Unconscious, and C.S.V.. Currently pursuing her M.F.A. in playwriting at Tisch, Edith is also an active member of Youngblood and Partial Comfort Productions, for whom she co-created and co-executive produced the original Battle of the Bards; in 2006, PCP was named a NYTheatre.com “Person of the Year.”
Listen to an interview with Edith L. Freni on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, featuring a different Best of Boroughs artist each day this week.
Thursday, April 12 at 8 PM; Saturday, April 14 at 8 PM; Sunday, April 15 at 3 PM; Wednesday, April 18 at 8 PM;
Friday, April 20 at 8 PM; Saturday, April 21 at 3 PM; Sunday, April 22 at 8 PM.
Partner: Queens Theater in the Park, Queens
Hip-hop to da Head
Full Circle Productions
In celebration of its tenth year anniversary, Full Circle presents “Hip-hop to da Head,” a fusion of dance, song, rhyme and monologues emotionally driven by the multi-ethnic cast offering a unique palate of new and old school themes of urban theater. The work “…manages to educate and raise spirits sky high” – NY Times (4/10/06 Jennifer Dunning) and delivers a festival within the B.O.B. festival.
Artistic Directors Kwikstep and Rokafella are street dance veterans who have built a worldwide reputation for straddling the two worlds of commercial and community hip-hop expression. As a husband and wife team they represent each side of the gender tug of war, yet as passionate dancers they prove that music is a universal language healing all wounds. In 1992, Kwikstep performed at P.S. 122 in the critically acclaimed “So What Happens Now?,” considered to be the very first hip-hop theatre production. This April will mark the 15th anniversary of the return of Kwikstep to the P.S. 122 stage. Short film clippings will be shown to highlight his career by his street dance mentors and peers. Rokafella is widely known as among the pre-eminent B-Girlz in the world, and was recently a featured contributor to the first ever female break dance photo book by Martha Cooper entitled “We B *Girlz” published by powerHouse books. She is working on her docu-film of a six city tour of panel discussions entitled the “B Girl Sitdowns” – excerpts of which will also be screened during B.O.B.. Full Circle will also show excerpts of their work in progress “Shine,” in development at P.S. 122 and premiering at Dance Theater Workshop in the Fall of 2007.
Listen to an interview with Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, featuring a different Best of Boroughs artist each day this week.
Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7 at 8:00 PM
Partner: Full Circle Productions, Bronx
Thursday, April 19 at 7 PM; Friday, April 20 at 9:30 PM; Saturday, April 21 at 7 PM; Sunday, April 22 at 5 PM
Let the Eagle Scream!
Nia Love / Blacksmith’s Daughter Dance Theatre
An ugly history of lynching becomes a powerful story of resilience. Nia Love looks squarely at lynching and the damage it causes. Her latest choreography, as well as her ongoing research into “body memory” and “genetic withholdings,” scrutinizes privilege, superiority, dominion and conspiracy, and in turn, their affect on the American psyche.
An American Fulbright Fellow, Nia has worked in Guinea, Gambia, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Mali, Japan, France, Colombia, Cuba and throughout the USA, collaborating with some of the most distinguished musicians in the world-Ornette Coleman, Geri Allen, Wallace Roney, Antoine Roney, Buster Williams-to further develop the interplay of improvisational music and dance. Nia has created over fifteen dance works, which have been presented in varied venues: the Royce Hall Theater, in Los Angeles; Theater Artaus, in San Francisco; the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, in Washington, DC; and throughout New York City- Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dance Theater Workshop, Symphony Space, Dancing in the Streets, Aaron Davis Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 651 Arts, Judson Church, and Wave Hill. She founded Blacksmith’s Daughter in 1999 after the passing of her father, renowned visual artist Ed Love; using his traditions as a starting point, the company has, since its inception, performed dance-, music-, and art-based stories about diversity, life and death, and the power of communication through contemporary dance.
Listen to an interview with Nia Love on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, featuring a different Best of Boroughs artist each day this week.
Thursday, April 19 at 9:30 PM; Friday, April 20 at 7:00 PM; Saturday, April 21 at 9:30 PM; Sunday, April 22 at 7:30 PM
Partner: Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall, Inc.,
Manhattan
April 6-22, 2007
ALL PERFORMANCES TAKE PLACE
AT PS122, 1ST AVE & 9TH STREET
