Multi-Media | Performance Space New York

Le Petit Mort

Palissimo

Zustiak’s world is full of “striving, sweating bodies, but beyond what they actually do lies another, more enigmatic kind of “doing.””
-Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

Choreographer Pavel Zustiak teams up with famed video artist Tal Yarden exposing postmortem ecstasy somewhere between a dream and a memory entitled Le Petit Mort. Raw, unsettling, emotionally charged images ask questions that are ultimately unanswerable – questions of the matters of the end. Scenes of disquieting stillness and agitation, haunting traces of life past living, will leave a residue that can’t be washed off.

Direction and Choreography by Pavel Zustiak
Created with Performers Benjamin Asriel, Gina Bashour, Ellen Cremer, Saar Harari, Marya Wethers and Pavel Zustiak
Video Design by Tal Yarden
Dramaturgy by Rachel Chavkin
Set and Costume Design by Nick Vaughn
Theatre Lobby Photo Installation and website photo by Jose Aragon

This work was commissioned by Performance Space 122 and was made possible in part by the Manhattan Community Arts Fund/New York City Department if Cultural Affairs, administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Click aboveto watch Le Petit Mort teaser video

World Premiere
Resceduled from December 2006
April 12 – 15, 2007
Thursday – Saturday at 8 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday at 4 p.m.
$20, $15 Student/Senior
($10 Members)

Absence and Presence

This acutely intimate work by internationally acclaimed Andrew Dawson, co-founder of the Mime Theatre Project, was honored with the Best of Edinburgh Award and the Herald award at the 2005 festival and makes its U.S. premiere at PS122.

Dawson’s father died in 1985 and his body lay undiscovered for ten days. The trauma compelled Dawson to craft this non-vocal dialogue with his grief, guilt and loss using sculpture, video, mime and the emotionally articulate movement for which he is known.

Click to read an interview with Andrew Dawson in this issue of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence by RoseAnne Spradlin.

Join us for a talkback with the artist after the performance Wednesday May 3

*Sunday April 30 at 2 p.m: Private Performance &Reception to Benefit Carol Tambor Theatrical Foundation. For more information and invitation, visit www.bestofedinburgh.org or email carol@caroltambor.com.
Best of Edinburg

On Wednesday, May 3 please join us immediately following the regularly scheduled performance of Absence &Presence for a very special presentation of Andrew Dawson’s Space Panorama – a sparkling recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Standing behind a large black clothed table, accompanied by a narrator and music from Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, we explore this surface and the spaces above it using only hands, arms and upper torso to create a constantly entrancing documentary of the entire mission. Andrew dextrously takes us from Houston to the Moon and back down to Earth again, conveying the colossal distances and risks involved simply through the arrangement of one hand in relation to the other, with the odd facial expression thrown in for good measure.

The moon landing was a tele-visual event. Space Panorama triggers the memories if those pictures, the massive rocket at launch, the moments before landing, the helicopters and aircraft carriers on their return to Earth. In Space Panorama we can also create the shots that no camera could ever see and together they convey a sense of the eternity of space, and the triviality of our exploration of it.

Created in 1998, Space Panorama was conceived as a miniature piece of theatre but over the last ten years it has toured worldwide.
Performed by Andrew Dawson
Narrated by Gavin Robertson
Directed by Jos Houben

April 27 – May 7, 2006

But, What’s It All About?

But, What's It All About?

Ole Mads Vevle is a controversial and award-winning artist working within the fields of art/performance/video/text and music. At the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, his short film, Love is the Law, was feted with not one but two awards during Critics Week. In But, What’s It All About? Vevle performs his own text accompanied by a video montage. A dialogue between a father and his son ensues. The son’s refrain of “But, what’s it all about?” elicits ever-more elaborate answers from his father. Vevle channels the language of the television, bombarding the audience with a continuous stream of information, mixing the high with the low, the comic and the tragic, the serious and nonsensical.

December 3 & 4, 2005

Part of PS122’s NORWAY Festival

The Itching of the Wings

Itching of the Wings

An “autopsy of our daydreams,” as conceived by Philippe Quesne, The Itching of the Wings (La Démangeaison des Ailes) explores the desire of men to become birds, flying and falling, desire and disillusion. Quesne, who has been designing projections for opera and theatre, concerts and performances, art exhibitions, music videos, runway shows since 1992, sets the multi-media piece in an artist’s loft replete with film, video projectors and recording booth. This interactive canvas animates a subjective miscellany of found sounds and images drawn from books, recordings, film, internet searches, radio, television, songs and dreams. With music by Stockhausen, Kid Koala, Raymond Scott, Aphex Twin, John Willams and Big Yum Yum, just for starters.
Performed by: Gaëtan Vourc’h, Sébastien Jacobs, Rodolphe Auté, Tristan Varlot, Zinn Atmane.

Performed in French and English.

“Plunk down $20 for Philippe Quesne’s show, which incorporates videos, movement and text, before the celebrated playwright’s work inevitably reappears at the Lincoln Center Festival – for five times as much.”
– Time Out New York

Plus two late night underground concerts.

Direct from France – you won’t believe your eyes – or ears!

Ideal Daim / Thomas Rannou +audio
Assume the attitude of a perfect stag. Ideal Daim, chanson pure, is a program of songs written, composed and performed by Thomas Rannou. The sound process is specific to this program – a dozen small speakers are deployed for the broadcast of the song, affording the listener intimacy and proximity to the words and the voice itself. The style is sober and conspiratorial, the tone off-handed and sincere.

Definitively Frenchy.
45 minutes – in French

Fuckin’ Dirty Birds / Alexia Monduit + Thomas Rannou

The song of Alexia Monduit is a battle of words. Her first English text is a poetic sound journey between a body, a speech, a breath, and image – that of Antigone. A lonely mythical recreation on a musical floor.

25-30 minutes – in English

Free for PS122 members, ticket holders to any performance dates of Push, Itching of the Wings, and Schoolhouse Roxx’s Suicide, The Musical – hold onto your stubs and fasten your seatbelts.

November 9-13, 2005

First performance WEDNESDAY November 9th
Thursday-Saturday at 9:00 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday at 5:30 p.m.
$20($10 Members)

From Dakota

Dakota Dakota

“…what’s on display here is tantalizing… and powerful in itself. And it augurs well for the mixed-genre performance forms in which Mr. Gantner seems to take a special interest.”
– John Rockwell, The New York Times

In an excerpt from the Shane Belles film Dakota, performer Colin Gee – a former principle clown for Cirque du Soleil – combines experiments in identity with deft physical characterization to recreate the film’s climactic scene as a riveting solo performance. The scene portrayed is the cathartic arrival of a father to negotiate the exchange of his abducted daughter from former associates, having failed all demands. Introduced by a video installation that provides narrative context and a synopsis of the film, from Dakota also features live vocal and electronic accompaniment from acclaimed composer Erin Gee.

PS122’s Sunday Afternoon Discovery takes back the talk-back and reinvigorates it with in-depth and engaging exchanges with the artists, from interactive lectures to full-on workshops.

On September 11, check your personality at the door and join Colin for “Transparent Portraits: Identity as a Function of Time Place and Learning,” free after the performance.

Click to read John Rockwell’s full review,
“A Movie’s Climactic Scene Reimagined for the Stage”(.pdf) in The New York Times.

September 7-11, 2005
Wednesday-Saturday at 8:30 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday at 5:30 p.m.
Sunday Afternoon Discovery:
September 11 5:30 p.m.
$20($10 Members)