Music | 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

Ouverture Alcina

“This is a remarkable performance, the script superb, irreproachable” – Muriel Mingau, Le Populaire

Ouverture Alcina is a vocal performance based on the figure of the sorceress Alcina from Ludovico Ariosto’s renaissance poem Orlando furioso. It is a fight between the power of the voice and of music, a deep and surprising alchemy that draws the figure of the sorceress, wounded by love, in her iconic immobility. No action, no spectacle, just a ghost that howls an untreatable pain. A canto in Romagnol dialect (the dialect from Romagna, a region in the North of Italy), an “ultra-local” harsh and archaic language, that makes a strongpoint of its incommunicability, objective music.

The Teatro delle Albe was founded in 1983 by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari. The company has been interweaving the search for the “new” with the teachings of Traditional theatre, inventing a contemporary theatrical language. The Teatro delle Albe has become established as one of the most important realities on the national and international scene. For its activity received awards and acknowledgements in Italy and abroad, as nine Ubu Prize (like the Academy Award for Italian theatre), the Lo Straniero Prize dedicated to the memory of Carmelo Bene, and two Golden Laurel at MESS International Festival of Sarajevo. In 1991 the Albe created Ravenna Teatro, one of the more lively theatrical centres in Italy.

Alcina Ermanna Montanari / Music by Luigi Ceccarelli / Devised by Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli / Text Nevio Spadoni / Space, Lightings Marco Martinelli / Directed by Marco Martinelli / Technician Danilo Maniscalco / Production Teatro delle Albe – Ravenna Teatro

The program is presented in the frame of Italian Contemporary Art Scene
A program of ERT – Curated by Aldo Grompone – In collaboration with Regione Emilia Romagna with the support of Camera di Commercio Ravenna and Ravenna 2019 as well as the Italian Cultural Institute, New York

PRESENTED AS PART OF COIL 2011
US PREMIERE | CHAMBER OPERA / THEATRE | UPSTAIRS at PS122

Wed, Jan 5 10PM / Thu, Jan 6 10PM / Sun, Jan 9 10PM / Mon, Jan 10 7:30PM

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your Ouverture Alcina program online!

Symphony n.1

For Performa 2009, the Italian collective Alterazioni Video and Ragnar Kjartansson (currently representing Iceland at the Venice Biennale with “The End”, a non-stop performance which began on June 5th) will present “Symphony n.1”, a live and multimedia piece based on joy, infinite profound joy. With the structure of a symphony it is a set of actions repeated in loops mixed chaos, synchronicity and digital found material on one hand, and the theatricality and endurance aspect of performance on the other.

In 2007, Alterazioni Video held a solo show at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York and participated in “Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind”, at the 2007 Venice Biennial, curated by Robert Storr. In 2008, they took part to the European Biennial of Contemporary Arts Manifesta 7. They are represented in Italy by Prometeo Gallery.

Curated by Barbara Casavecchia and Caroline Corbetta. Co-presented by Performa and Performance Space 122. Produced by Performa. Supported by Luhring Augustine, New York and Prometeo Gallery, Milan.

Mon, November 2, 2009
8:00 pm
Free
On

Near Death

“One of the most adventurous and accomplished groups in new music”
– The New
York Times

“A powerhouse of new-music programming,”
– The New Yorker

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) returns to Performance Space 122 to offer the world premiere of THIRTEEN NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES, an art-pop song cycle by the sensational young New York composer-performer Corey Dargel. Dargel, who has been called a “baroquely unclassifiable artist” by The New Yorker, takes his inspiration for this genre-defying new chamber piece from a range of psychiatric delusions, with an emphasis on hypochondria. ICE will round out the program with the world premieres of three stunning new short works by the young New York composer-performers Nathan Davis, Mario Diaz de Leon and Stephen Lehman.

Corey Dargel: THIRTEEN NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES (2009)
For male vocalist (Dargel), flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, trombone, percussion piano/toy piano, violin, and cello/viola de gamba
WORLD PREMIERE, commissioned through the MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation

Also featured: New works by Nathan Davis, Mario Diaz de Leon and Stephen Lehman, commissioned by ICE

www.iceorg.org

Fri May 22 – Sat May 23, 2009
Friday + Saturday 8pm

Architecting

architecting

“Wake up in 2009 in the hands of a theater company who knows what it’s doing” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Architecting is an exhilarating saga that weaves through past and future to create a requiem for modern America. A collision of horses, sex and hoop skirts, burning plantations and nasty hurricanes, this musical, time-bending, multi-media epic rockets between reconstructions, real and imagined, of citizens and nations.

The TEAM is the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment, a theatre company dedicated to dissecting and celebrating the experience of living in America today. 3-time Edinburgh Fringe First Winners (2005 – 2008), 2008 Total Theatre Award, 2007 Best Production Dublin Fringe, and TimeOut New York’s Top Ten 2007. The TEAM’s work has been seen stateside, all over New York, including Performance Space 122; nationally, including the Walker Art Center and Vanderbilt University; internationally, including London’s Battersea Arts Centre, the Bristol Old Vic, Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, and the Galway Arts Festival.

Photos by Yi Zhao

Architecting was created with support from the National Theater of Scotland Workshop, the Greenwall Foundation, the Panta Rhea Foundation, the Battersea Arts Centre in London, and the Orchard Project.

Architecting was developed at the BAC (May 2007), the 2007 CUNY Prelude Festival (Sept 2007), 3LD Art & Technology Center, New York (May 2008), the Orchard Project (June 2008). Architecting (Part One) made its world premiere at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Presented by Performance Space 122 as part of COIL 09 and Under The Radar festivals

Extended at Performance Space 122:
Thu, Jan 22 – Sun, Feb 15, 2009
Tuesday – Saturday 7:30pm
Sunday 5pm
Tickets from $25