Theater | Performance Space New York

Hotel Savoy

A blendwerk production
Presented in association with the Goethe-Institut New York

“You are checking into an hour of existential angst, with only your spiritual baggage for company…Certainly my hour inside put me in the mood for Halloween.” – Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“The building exerts a strange pull over its visitors” – Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

“I don’t want to give anything away, on the off chance that you squeeze in…I’d recommend simply wandering until they come for you. And don’t worry, they’ll come for you. They always come for you.” – Scott Brown, NY Magazine

“There’s hardly a short age of Halloween attractions this time of year, but few are as haunting as Hotel Savoy“ – Frank Scheck, NY Post

“At only $25 per night, Hotel Savoy provides budget travelers with a distinct theatrical bargain” – Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice

CRITICS’ PICK – Backstage

With its overlapping of Joseph Roth’s novel, reality, and contemporary history, HOTEL SAVOY opens up a world between dream and reality in the history-laden and often unseen spaces of 1014 5th Avenue. Visitors become guests in the empty hotel and encounter past employees: an elevator operator, a young maid, the hotel barber, the concierge, and a barmaid. These gatekeepers lead us into remote corners of the building, into unreal hotel rooms and real salons still haunted by spirits of past occupants. Against the background of this surreal through-station for German exiles, visitors are faced with questions about their own heritage in these restless and unanchored times. Guests play the lead role in their brief stay at the Hotel Savoy.

Concept, Staging, Spaces: Dominic Huber
Artistic Collaboration, Dramaturgy: Anne Hoelck
Sound Design: Knut Jensen
Coaching, Collaboration Script: Lara Koerte

Fabian Offert (Assistant Director, Props and Set Dressing)
Paula Reissig (Assistant Director, Props and Set Dressing, Documentation)
Phillip Gulley (Assistant Cast)

With: Wickham Boyle, Howard des Chenes, Tom Gallucio, Léna Greenberg, Chandler Gregoire, Timothy Hospodar, Michael Simmons, Richard Stein, Issac Taylor, Heather Warner

Co-Producer blendwerk: Dominic Huber
Production Goethe Institut: Philipp Leist

Michael Sanabria (Technical Supervisor Goethe Institut)
Nick Bixby (Technical Producer)
Joe Cantalupo (Light Technician)
Brendan Regimbal (Sound Technician)
Ryan Holsopple (Sound Technician)
Brandon Morris (Construction)
Andrew Scoville (Construction)
Lisa Pfister (Construction)

Thanks to:
Claudia and Daniel Huber, Gian Manuel Rau, Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart

Dominic Huber began working in the theatre while studying architecture at ETH in Zürich. In 2000 he founded the company blendwerk with lighting designer Christa Wenger. In collaboration with the director Bernhard Mikeska, Huber conceptualized and produced a series of scenographically and technically complex performances (Rashomon, Ghosts, Marienbad) under the rubric mikeska:plus:blendwerk which were invited for guest performances by numerous theatrical venues, including Impulse and the Fajr Festival in Teheran. Along with his work as a set designer, Dominic has developed a series of installations and exhibitions. His first large projects took him from Zürich to Theater Basel, and then on to Berlin for numerous jobs at, among others, the Maxim Gorki Theater, where in 2002 he presented a piece he directed, Koppstoff, based on the book by Feridun Zaimoglu. Along with Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer, other venues included Theater Aachen, Theatre de Vidy-Lausanne, the Munich Kammerspiele and the Schauspielhaus in Zürich. He has created spaces for, among others, Susanne-Marie Wrage, Simone Aughterlony, and PeterLicht. Since 2008 he has worked in an ongoing collaboration with Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias. In 2008 he received a three-month stipend from the city of Zürich for a working stay in New York. Dominic Huber lives in Zürich and Berlin. https://www.blendwerk.ch/

Photo by Paula Reissig

WORLD PREMIERE | Live Art | Offsite

All performances at 1014 Fifth Avenue, NY

The uptown site of the Goethe-Institut New York
(opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
MAP

Thursday, September 30 –
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Wednesday – Sunday 5:30 – 9:45

Your personal journey through the hotel lasts approximately 1 hour*
Timed-entry tickets available for the following intervals: 5:30, 5:45, 6:00, 6:15, 6:30, 6:45, 7, 7:15, 8, 8:15, 8:30, 8:45, 9, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45

$25, $15 (student/senior)

Thursday Night Social: September 30
6:45pm – Midnight @ Orsay

*LIMITED ACCESS:
Only 1 audience member enters the Hotel Savoy at a time. Due to the precise nature of the performance schedule, you must arrive at 1014 5th Avenue no later than 10 minutes prior to your reservation time in order to check in and use your ticket. Please note that you may be asked to wait for up to 20 minutes in between arrival and entry. There is an indoor waiting area available.

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your Hotel Savoy program online!

Graham Frost

“A sharp, true and quite eviscerating new play from the young Irish writer, Belinda McKeon; Arthur Miller might have been happy to have orchestrated its humane and subtle ironies.” – Sebastian Barry, playwright & novelist

Friends, neighbors, countrymen….can they really co-exist?

Three men from very different walks of life set about reopening an abandoned restaurant in the old Italian section of Williamsburg. Each of these men has a stake in the old place, and each of them has something from which they want to hide. Behind the dusty storefront’s still-shuttered door, they will not allow one another to escape as they are forced to face the secrets and the fears which stalk them all.

Funny, poignant and cutting…….this is a story about the complexities of calling a place home.

Graham & Frost is a commission by The Sullivan Project to the award-winning Irish playwright Belinda McKeon who has been recognized with the prestigious RTE P.J. O’Connor Award in 2005 for Word of Mouth; the Irish Times Theatre Judge’s Special Award in 2007 for her play Drapes as part of Fishamble’s Whereabouts; and RTE Radio 1 Fringe Audience Choice Award in 2008 for Two Houses. She is currently under commission to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and recently workshopped a new play, Strut, at the Abbey. Her debut novel, Solace, will be published in 2011 by Scribner (US) and Picador (UK).

The Sullivan Project is an independent production company focused on developing film and theatre projects that reach right into the core of human nature and speak to a wide, cross-cultural audience. Recent projects include the award-winning feature film “Last Call” (distributed by Moving Pictures), and the American Premiere production of Thomas Kilroy’s play “The Shape of Metal” at 59E59 Theatres, starring Obie award winner Roberta Maxwell, and directed by Tony award nominee Brian Murray.

The world-premiere production is directed by celebrated director/actor Thomas G. Waites (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night/TGW Acting Studios) and stars Steven Randazzo* (The Sopranos, Law & Order), Enrico Ciotti (The Silver Rope/ Abu Dhabi, Nantes, Puchon’s PIFAN 2007) and Dan Shaked (Stone Cold Serious/Theatre Row-Clurman Theatre). The production features lighting and set design by Tsubasa Kemei and Jennifer Stimple; sound design by Jeremy Joyce; and costume design by Brian Einersen.

The Sullivan Project is proud to be part of 1st Irish 2010, New York’s annual
Festival of Irish theatre. The Festival runs from September 7th to October 3rd at venues across
New York. For a full list of events visit www.1stIrish.org

*Actor appears courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association. Equity approved Showcase.

Further information: www.thesullivanproject.com

Run Time: 50 min

Sept 17 – Oct 3 2010
Wed-Sat 7pm
Sat, Sun 1pm
$18, $15 (students/seniors)

The Octoroon

octoroon

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins tackles Dion Boucicault’s infamous melodrama about Americans. (And slavery.) A bombastic, super-theatrical, full-scale investigation of that classic intersection of theatre and identity politics, this play with “real” actors, “real” sets, “real” costumes – and what might turn out to be a “real” slave auction – seeks to get to the bottom of why New York audiences can’t seem to get enough of plays about and racism and America.

Written and Directed by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, in collaboration with Johnson Henshaw and Allison Lyman; Producer: Johnson Henshaw; Dramaturg: Allison Lyman; Costume Design: Abigail Hahn; Sound Design: Jesse Rudoy; Make Up Design: John Carter; Light Design: Kevin Hardy; Assistant Director: Lacy Warner

Featuring: Travis York*, Chris Manley, Gabe Levey*, Jake Hart*, Margaret Flanagan*, Amber Gray*, Mary Wiseman, LaToya Lewis, Kim Gainer*, Sasheer Zamata

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a former playwriting fellow at the New York Theatre Workshop, an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and the Public Theater’s Emerging Writing Group, and a member of the ArsNova Playgroup. He is the recipient of the 2009 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting and the 2009 Dorothy Strelsin Playwriting Fellowship. His full-length plays include Appropriate, The Change, and Neighbors, which was presented in Feb 2010 as apart of the Public Theater’s PublicLab.

More about Boucicault’s The Octoroon: After immigrating to the United States, Boucicault’s The Octoroon premiered at one of New York City’s premier theaters in 1859, while the country was on the brink of the Civil War. The Octoroon became immensely popular and created one of the earliest occurrences in American popular theatre where the use of a popular entertainment such as the melodrama, created dialogue and controversy about contemporary societal issues; abolition, African Americans, and slavery in America.

Support for THE OCTOROON: AN ADAPTATION OF THE OCTOROON BASED ON THE OCTOROON has been provided by a Commission Grant from the Jerome Foundation and the Axe-Houghton Foundation.
*Appears courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association. “The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on the Octoroon” is an AEA Approved Showcase.

Photo: © Liz Liguori

World Premiere
Theater

Updated Schedule:
Saturday, June 26 – Saturday, July 3, 2010
Wed – Sat at 8, Sun at 6
Thursday Night Social: July 1st
$18, $15 (students/seniors)

Strange Action

lewis forever

“Isabel Lewis is a fierce and fiercely smart choreographer and dancer.” – Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

“Lewis’s Untitled Solo (Sweet Exorcist) contains poetic, powerful imagery and energy.” – Eva Yaa Asantewaa

This piece is about the peculiar act of performing.
This piece is about the possibility of making a solo that is not a dead end to autobiography and identity politics.
This piece is about Mr. T, headbanging, and Nicole Kidman.

STRANGE ACTION: a solo in three seemingly unrelated parts

In Isabel Lewis’ premiere evening-length solo show she resurrects her depiction of Mr. T, using him and a few other icons as the unexpected reference points of a discussion by way of performance about the strange act of performing itself. Making minimal use of stage design and media elements Lewis tightens the focus around the presence of the performer in an anti-gesamtkunstwerk, using language and movement to frame her interplay of associations and disassociations. Drawing on a range of references from B.A. Baracus to Beckett, Lewis weaves a circuitous narrative about altered states, imagination, connectivity, process, and fiction.

Concept and Performance by Isabel Lewis
Dramaturgy and Performance by Josep Maynou

Isabel Lewis is a Brooklyn and Berlin-based dance artist and curator from the Dominican Republic. She is a graduate of Hollins University (USA) where she majored in both Dance and Literary Criticism. In 2004 Isabel formed The Labor Union along with Erika Hand and presented work at the Cunningham Studios, Dance New Amsterdam, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, PS 122, and The Kitchen amongst other venues in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. Isabel now creates solo work, performs with her family art collective LEWIS FOREVER and with Ann Liv Young. She has also had the honor of working with Miguel Gutierrez, David Neumann, Levi Gonzalez, and Crystal Brown. Isabel was a Movement Research Artist in Residence and a Fresh Tracks Residency Recipient in 2005-2006 and was selected to take part in the Meeting Points Artist Exchange in Budapest in the summer of 2008. She has worked as an editor and writer for the Movement Research Performance Journal and was the curator for the dance series, Body Blend, at Dixon Place from 2005-2009. As a curator Isabel has also worked on the Movement Research Festival 2004: Improvisation is Hard and the Movement Research Festival Spring 2007: Reverence (Irreverence) as well as Re-Imagining Utopia, an Austrian and NYC artist exchange, a project of Movement Research (NYC), the Austrian Cultural Forum (NYC), and Tanzquartier Wien (Austria).

Josep Maynou studied Fine Arts in Barcelona (UB), Porto (Facultade Belas Artes Porto) and London (Middlesex University). Maynou has shown his work all over Europe highlighting Getxo Arte in Bilbao, Strip Art and Sala Pares in Barcelona, Galerie Eva Bracke in Berlin and Maoshabitos in Oporto among others. He has been working in different artistic fields and is now focused on media art often collaborating with Berlin-based media artist Arturo Steele. Reusing images and giving them new meanings, he creates visual collages which function as a continuous whole, as complete films unto themselves. The visual and rhythmic coherence of his films, achieved through a process of careful editing, makes reference to the manipulative power of audio-visual media. This process of recycling also leads to installing his work in different contexts such as TV repair shops, warehouses, abandoned spaces and second-hand stores.

Photo by Arturo Martinez Steele

This performance was supported by a Commission Grant from the Jerome Foundation

World Premiere
June 3 – 6, 2010
Thu – Sat at 8PM, Sun at 6PM
Late Show: Sat, June 5 at 10PM
Thursday Night Social: June 3
$20, $15 (students/seniors)
ONLY $11 with a PS122 Passport
Find out more

Gin and It

“What beauty there is in Mr. Farrington’s work.” – Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

“The interplay between the live and film actors is an elegant kind of dance” “a marvelous technical feat” “VISUALLY ARRESTING, AESTHETICALLY COMPLEX” – Jason Zinoman, The New York Times

CRITICS’ PICK – Backstage

For his next work Reid Farrington’s principle source Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rope.’ Again Farrington collaborates with film historians and archivists to bring a classic film to the stage with his own boundary-pushing melding of projected imagery and live drama.

The original movie’s director attempted to transfer the compressed drama of a one-set play into a suspenseful film through the illusion of being shot in one uninterrupted film take. Farrington explores the making of this technical tour-de-force. His video theater work will mirror the technical feats of this daring film experiment.

Creative Director: Reid Farrington
Performers: Karl Allen, Keith Foster, Christopher Loar, Tim McDonough
Lead Editor: Paulina Jurzec
Set: Art Domantay
Costumers: Erin Elizabeth Murphy
Lights: Christopher Heilman
Sound: Connor Kalista
Stage Manager: Julia Funk
Dramaturgy: Peter C. von Salis
Script Supervisor: Sara Jeanne Asselin
Fight Choreography: Carrie Brewer
Research Assistant: Sarah Doyle
Best Boy Editor: Thomas Gonzalez
Editors: Celina Alarado, Jeanne Angel, Patrick Grizzard, Xue Hou, Connor Kalista, Alex Kowal, Zak Loyd, Chris Martinez, Luisa Morales, Vanessa Riegel, Matthew Swenson, Masha Vlasova, Hannah Wasileski

Also see: The Making of Gin and “It” video.

https://www.reidfarrington.com/

Gin & “It” is co-produced by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, Performance Space 122 and 3LD Art & Technology Center. It was developed through the creative residency programs at 3LD Art & Technology Center, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Reid Farrington is the recepient of the 2010 Wexner Center Residency Award. He is also 2009 fellow in Digital/ Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gin & “It” has also received generous support from New York State Council on the Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, and the Experimental Television Center, and a Commission Grant from the Jerome Foundation.
Research made possible by Sandra Joy Lee, Director of Warner Bros. Archives at The University of Southern California.

Co-presented as part of COIL 2010 with Under The Radar in association with 3LD Art & Technology Center

OFFICIAL NY PREMIERE

Saturday, April 24 – Sunday, May 9, 2010
Wed – Sat at 8PM, Sun at 6PM
Saturday Late Shows at 10:30PM: May 1 + 8
Thursday Night Social: April 29
Talkback with the artists: Wed, May 5

$20, $15 (students/seniors)
60 minutes

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your Gin & “It” Program online!