Theater | Performance Space New York

Jerk

Jerk might be unbearable for some. But in our eyes, theater so wisely woven with reality, however violent, is wholesome.” – Les Inrockuptibles, France

Gisèle Vienne’s Jerk is based on the chilling text of Dennis Cooper, an author deemed “the most dangerous writer in America” by the Village Voice. It is a story told from the vantage point of David Brooks, the real life accomplice to Texas serial killer Dean Corll who was responsible for the deaths of more than 25 teenage boys in the early 1970s.

Jerk is theatre at its starkest, a harrowing journey into the most hidden corners of the human psyche.

Performed by and created in collaboration with Jonathan Capdevielle

FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY

Under The Radar Festival 2010 is a program of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, and is held in conjunction with APAP Conference NYC 2010. Major funding is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The Festival is produced by Mark Russell and The Public Theater. www.undertheradarfestival.com

Co-production of Le Quartz-Scene nationale de Brest, Centre Choregraphique National de Franche-Comte a Belfort in the frame of l’accueil-studio and Centro Paraga-Murcia. The company DACM is supported by the DRAC Rhone-Alpes / Ministere de la culture et de la communication, Region Rhone-Alpes, Conseil general de l’lsere, Ville de Grenoble. This project is supported by Etants Donnes: The French-American Fund for the Performing Arts, a program of FACE and Culturesfrance.

PRESENTED AS PART OF COIL 2010
In association with Under the Radar

60 minutes
Thu, January 7 – 17, 2010
$20, $15 (students/seniors)

The Archery Contest

“Dandy theatrical experimenteur…mind bending sex comedy.” – Time Out, New York

“…one of the highlights of the fall season at Performance Space 122.” – NY Times

Downtown’s enfant terrible delivers a frisky and hyper-stylized sex comedy that shoots straight into the heart of marriage in America. Behind this Technicolor Romantic Pastoral lies a glittering and scathing indictment of rules and regulations, rituals and rites of spring. A foursome and a sexton breach the boundaries of matrimonial shackles and dive headlong into a hedonistic lifestyle with complex consequences.

The Archery Contest sends up the tragic-comic foibles of human desire straight-jacketed by antiquated dogmas and outdated notions of marriage, ultimately asking: in a country steeped in tradition yet hungry for change, how can we escape our puritanical past and move into an unfettered future?

Hotel Savant, a theatre company based in New York City, explores the seminal ideologies of history and mythology and their impact on contemporary narrative. Utilizing a variety of performance techniques that include pageantry, dance and tableau, they create original works and revive obscure texts that correlate to present day topics.

Featuring: Richard Toth, Hillary Spector, Carey Urban, Alexander Borinsky, Jeff Worden
Playwright/Director: John Jahnke; sound designer Kristin Worrall; set designer Peter Ksander; lighting designer Miranda Hardy; video designer Andrew Schneider; and costume designer Carlos Soto.

Presented by Performance Space 122. Developed at 3LD Art & Technology Center; with additional support from Art International Radio (AIR), NYSCA, NY Department of Cultural Affairs and The MacDowell Colony and a Commission Grant from the Jerome Foundation. Photo (c) 2009 Josef Astor.

Running Time: 100 minutes

www.hotelsavant.com

WORLD PREMIERE
Jump to Conversation
Fri, October 2 – Sun, October 18, 2009
Wed – Sat 8pm, Sun 6pm
$20, $15 (students/seniors)

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your program online!

Human Company

company company

“Bold, disturbing and richly imaginative, a vision of otherworldly reckoning that careens with impressive fluidity between heaven and hell. A dense and dreamily luminous meditation.” – Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times. (In reference to HereAfter, created and directed by Royd Climenahaga)

Human Company presents a trio of one-woman shows exploring the shifting ground of identity and the social, personal and bodily creation of self.

I. Is It True What they Say About Dixie, created by Kelly Hanson and Beth Bradford, explores the meaning of truth in a wold of polite silence.
II. Fugue States: The 7 Successful Secrets to Cultivating an Unshakable Character, developed by Connor Kalista, Cara Francis and Susanna Gellert, carries us on an incantatory journney through media swamplands. Bring your boots.
III. Forceps Delivery, developed by Royd Climenhaga and Danielle Fink, follows a woman’s inner monolgue as she labors to deliver an impossible birth.

Human Company is a group of artists challenging the boundaries of performance experience, blurring the distinctions between theatre, dance, image, language, and sound to create a new theatre of engagement. Our pieces are developed in the rehearsal room through process and exploration to create work that is energetic, passionate and playful. We hope to stimulate a dialogue in the performance community about what theatre is and what it can be and make work that evokes what is unique and vital about the theatrical art form: its inherent demand that we bear witness through risk, investment and vulnerability. Human Company was founded in 2006 and has presented work at Chashama, HERE Arts Center, BAX and the Kitchen.
https://www.humancompany.org/

Running time: 75 minutes.

Thu, May 28 – Sun, May 31, 2009
Thursday – Saturday 7:30pm
Saturday – Sunday 4pm
Tickets from $20
$15 (students/seniors)
$10 (P.S. 122 members)

CHAUTAUQUA

ntusa

“One of the most exciting and eccentric young theater companies in town.”

-The New York Times

“The National Theater of the United States of America left me stunned and breathless and completely in awe.”
-Malcolm Gladwell (author)

“…an underground theatrical coup…a triumph of style and stagecraft.”
-Time Out New York

Winners of the 2007 Spalding Gray award honoring innovative theatrical vision, the National Theater of the United States of America explore the hotly debated relationship between High Culture and the Mass Mind. Channeling the form and style of the original Chautauqua Lectures through their own inimitable aesthetic and theatrical rhythm, NTUSA combines lecture, debate, scientific demonstration and tales of explorers with more traditional forms of entertainment such as dance, dramatic recital, feats of strength, and joke telling. The company examines their own role as “entertainers” as well as “artists” and question whether or not the convergence of art and commerce is possible, sustainable, or even good for either party.

Firmly establishing themselves in the New York theatre scene in 2000 with their launch of ‘Garvey and Superpant$: Episode #23, the NTUSA made their Performance Space 122 debut in 2006 with the premiere of Abacus Black Strikes Now: The Rampant Justic of Abacus Black and won a Village Voice OBIE for the production. The NTUSA was awarded Arts International’s DNA Project Grant in 2002 and remounted Episode #23 at the ESB – Dublin Fringe Festival. The NTUSA also offered a one night only special presentation of Jack Russell’s Superconfidence Seminar! at Galapagos in Brooklyn.

Special Nightly Guests (2009 Run):

Fri 2/27/09: Robert Zukerman, Sat 2/28/09 Rollo Romig, Sun 3/1/09: Samantha Hunt
Wed, 3/4/09 The Spalding Gray Award with Vallejo Gantner and Kathleen Russo: This evening’s ticket includes post-performance celebrations and libations
Thu, 3/5/09 Robert Zukerman, Fri 3/6/09 Rollo Romig (+ Claudia La Rocco’s performance club will be in the house); Sat 3/7/09: Greta Byrum
Sun 3/8/09 the NTUSA benefit; Wed, 3/11/09: Zoe Rosenfeld; Thurs 3/12/09 Greta Byrum; Fri, 3/13/09: Samantha Hunt; Sat 3/14/09: Juliana Francis Kelly
Sun 3/15/09: THE SECRET GUEST

Sunday, March 8 2009: Benefit performance + party for NTUSA.
Tickets are available for this date exclusively through the company via this link

Presented as part of COIL 2010

In association with Under the Radar

Thu, Jan 7 -17, 2010
*Offsite – Tickets available through The Public Theater as part of the Under The Radar Festival
CHAUTAUQUA was originally presented by PS122 as part of the ROOM project Feb 21-Mar 15, 2009

Whatever, Heaven Allows

WINNER OF THE 2009 SPALDING GRAY AWARD
NY PREMIERE | THEATRE

“INSPIRED” – NY Times
“OUTRAGEOUS” – The New Yorker
“MARVELOUS” – Voice
“BOISTEROUS” – Flavorpill

Excerpts from Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times:
“I enjoyed it“… “‘Whatever’ includes some funny video sequences (love that chain-smoking deer!), clunky karaoke-style musical numbers (the Jane Wyman stand-in sings ‘I Am Woman’) and one inspired routine involving haka, a traditional Maori dance form…

But you have to admit that Radiohole is a great leveler. It makes Milton sound like a Brill Building songwriter, and Sirk seem as on-the-surface as ‘Melrose Place.’ Culture don’t get no respect from Radiohole, which may not be enlightening, but for a generation that’s so over postmodernism, it is kind of liberating.”
Enjoy the full review

” turns out effervescent, anarchic work… cultivates an eccentric acting style and makes familiar text creepily bizarre.” -Time Out

Known for its radical and reckless theatricality, avant-garde New York troupe Radiohole’s newest work is a star-spangled American meta-melodrama inspired by film director Douglas Sirk’s 1950s potboilers and Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. Our heroine is an all- American “Eve” who must save her home from an evil-doer while struggling to find fulfillment in a lasting relationship with a supposedly good man who looks like god. Radiohole’s newest synthesis of cultural flotsam is sure to be bawdy, silly, possibly transcendent, and a touch disturbed.

The Spalding Gray Award supports gifted writer/performers who fully realize both aspects of Spalding’s legacy, who are fearless innovators of theatrical form, who reach into daily experience and create resonant, transcendent work that makes us all bigger, wider, wiser and, somehow, more than we were when we entered the theater. The award is a special commission created in Spalding Gray’s honor by Performance Space 122 in New York , UCLA Live, University of California, Los Angeles’ public performing arts program,The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

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

RADIOHOLE EXTENDED! Added shows!

Saturday, February 20 – Sunday, March 21
Thu – Sat at 8PM, Sun at 6PM
Late Shows: Saturdays at 10:30PM:
Feb 27/Mar 6/Mar 13/Mar 20
Spalding Gray Award Celebration + Thursday Night Social: Feb 25

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your Whatever, Heaven Allows Program online!