Theater | 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

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!

Green Eyes

Travis Chamberlain
Green Eyes

“The play is gorgeous: a short, eloquent evening that feels complete, complex, and entirely satisfying. Williams’s dialogue flows with uncanny surprise, catching in its resonance all the psychosexual tension in the alchemy of desire” – The New Yorker, January 2011

“Green Eyes is a tiny, pitch-perfect triumph” – Erik Haagensen, Backstage

“Packs a wallop” – Elisabeth Vincentelli, NY Post

Travis Chamberlain unleashes the newly discovered Tennessee Williams erotic thriller transforming a honeymoon suite into a psychosexual battleground. Erin Markey stars as a ravenous Southern woman determined to satisfy the darkest recesses of her most deviant desires. Canadian heartthrob Adam Couperthwaite costars. This site-adaptive event delves into the disturbing subjectivities that exist in the grey areas where sadomasochistic desire and domestic violence overlap.

Produced by: Carleigh Welsh, Chris Keegan, and Travis Chamberlain

NYC PREMIERE | THEATRE | OFFSITE at The Hudson Hotel (356 West 58th St.)
January 5-30, 2010
Wed, Jan 5 – Sat, Jan 8 8PM & 9:30PM / Sun, Jan 9 5PM & 7PM / Mon, Jan 10 2PM & 4:30PM / Wed, Jan 12 – Sat, Jan 15 8PM & 9:30PM
Extends beyond COIL through January 30.

Holiday

Ranters

Ranters Theater
Holiday

“An extraordinary piece of theatre, a subsuming into another place that send the audience into the night refreshed an afloat on a sea of calm.” – Emer O’Kelly, Irish Independent

Holiday is a gentle provocation. In a moment of relaxation and quite reflection two men unwittingly engage. Spontaneous, unaffected and thrillingly real, innocent discussion becomes an exploration of private fantasy, hidden anxiety, personal mythology, and the most inexplicable behavior. From the bar to the chaise lounge, Holiday is the journey of man’s simple complexities, set within a sparingly elegant design, complimented a contemporary baroque musical score sampling Vivaldi, Corelli and Albinoni.

Concept and Direction by Adriano Cortese. Text by Raimondo Cortese. Sound Design & Operation by David Franzke. Lighting Design by Niklas Pajanti. Set (adapted from original design) by Anna Tregloan
Performed and Co-devised by Paul Lum and Patrick Moffatt. Company Manager Alison Halit.

Established in 1994, Ranters consists of a writer, director, general manager and ensemble of actors committed to creating original, contemporary, theatre that is raw and immediate. Ranters is a small, artistically driven theatre company that makes highly distinctive original work. Ranters is one of only a few companies world wide that works in a minimalist, non representational theatre genre, creating work that is finely crafted through extensive rehearsal processes. The company has a highly successful production and on-selling history.

Over the past 16 years Ranters has consistently received critical acclaim in Australia and abroad. At the company’s core is an uncompromised commitment to Ranters’ artistic vision. The company has twelve productions in repertoire, has been programmed in twelve international arts festivals and has toured seven countries worldwide.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria and by Arts House through the City of Melbourne and Arts Victoria.

PRESENTED AS PART OF COIL 2011

US PREMIERE | THEATRE | DOWNSTAIRS at PS122
January 6-15, 2011
Thu, Jan 6 9:30PM / Fri, Jan 9:30PM / Sat, Jan 8 6:30PM / Mon, Jan 10 9:30PM / Tue, Jan 11 9:30PM / Thu, Jan 13 9:30PM / Fri, Jan 14 9:30PM / Sat, Jan 15 6:30PM

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

Them

Presented in association with the New Museum and tbspMGMT

“One of the most genial survivors of the eighties avant-garde” – The New Yorker

“Mr. Houston-Jones clearly has a strong, sure sense of theater.” – Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

“There’s no knowing if the upper hand is what either really wants.” – Burt Supree, The Village Voice (on Them)

Ishmael Houston-Jones, whose intensely physical improvisations have been a staple of New York’s contemporary dance scene for over three decades, sparked controversy in 1986 at Performance Space 122 with THEM. Made in collaboration with Dennis Cooper (text) and Chris Cochrane (music), this incendiary work addressed some of the many ways men could be with men. After a successful run of the work-in-progress at PS122 in 1985 the creators of THEM felt that the urgency of the AIDS epidemic demanded a presence in this piece about men with men. In the 1986 premier of the full-length version for six male dancers at PS122 Cooper read his own provocative words, and Cochrane played cacophonous electric guitar live; frequently violent and exhausting dance sequences, culminated in a horrific duet between Houston-Jones and an animal carcass on a dusty mattress. The production almost got PS122 shut down.

Through a reconstruction residency at The New Museum, the three creators have recast THEM with a new generation of male performers. Rehearsals of THEM at the New Museum culminate in a series of programs collectively titled THEM AND NOW, exploring the artistic impulses that propelled the creation of this “aggressive and vital” (Village Voice) performance work and its reconstruction 25 years later.

As part of PS122’s 30th Anniversary Season, this ground-breaking piece is back and investigating its continuing relevance to dance and to social discourse in 2010.

2010 Cast: Joey Cannizzaro, Felix Cruz, Jeremy Pheiffer, Niall Noel, Jacob Slominski, Arturo Vidich, Enrico D. Wey
Lighting designer: Joe Levasseur

‘Them’ is supported in part by TestPerformanceTest and developed through the RE:NEW RE:PLAY residency series at the New Museum

325 Bowery, New York, NY

Photo courtesy of Dona Ann McAdams

ORIGINAL PREMIERE:
Performance Space 122, 1986
Dance, Theatre | Upstairs

Thursday, October 21 – Saturday, October 30, 2010
Wednesday – Saturday at 8PM,
LATE SHOWS: Saturdays at 10PM
Thursday Night Social: October 21
$20, $15 (students/seniors)

THEM AND NOW
4 special events at the New Museum
leading up to the 2010 premiere of Them

Friday, September 24 at 7
“WINGING IT” IN HIGH HEELS AND A BLINDFOLD

Friday, October 1 at 7
US V THEM: A Showcase of Young Improvisers

Friday, October 8 at 7
SOUND CHECK ’86

Thursday, October 14 at 7
DENNIS AND THE BOYS

THEM TODAY
Open rehearsals of Them
September 22 – October 5
Free with New Museum entry

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your THEM program online!