Theater | Performance Space New York

Half Life

guruguru

Artist of the Year 2007, Minneapolis-St.Paul City Pages

“The pleasure of viewing is so intense here, so fun as to be nearly guilty.” – Lightsey Darst, MSP magazine 2008

“We are treated to unobstructed views of a cast of extraordinary movers.” – Mary Hodges, Brooklyn Rail, 2009

“Visually stunning, intricately choreographed…scenes of tense calm and silent impact.” – Justin Schell, mnartists.org, 2008

“A concentrated sense of emotional truth.” – Roslyn Suclas, New York Times 2009

1/2 Life investigates the survival of the body amidst a world of scientific research, data, and control. The performance hovers geographically at the edges of the Pacific Ocean – connecting nuclear super power USA, atomic survivor Japan and nuclear free New Zealand. A contemporary ritual to address our dormant nuclear nightmares. Dance and video artists Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad bring together an extraordinary collaborative team including composer and harpist Zeena Parkins, visual artist Emmett Ramstad, physicist Bryce Beverlin II, performer Takemi Kitamura and a critical mass of twelve including Sinan Goknur, Becky Olson, Taja Will, Jennifer Arave, Kimberly Lesik, Emma Rainwater, Melissa Birch, Laressa Dickey, Melissa Guerrero, Sharon Mansur, Laura Grant and Nick LeMere.

1/2 Life was made possible with support from the Rockefeller MAP Fund, the Jerome Foundation, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the Archibald Bush Foundation, Arts International, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Moore Family Fund

More about 1/2 Life can be found at https://www.bodycartography.org/

NY PREMIERE
February 10 – 14, 2009

Wed – Sat at 8PM, Sun 6PM
Thursday Night Social Feb 11
Talkback with Clarinda Mac Low
Friday February 12

70 minutes

$20, $15 (students/seniors)

Help PS122 Go Green by viewing your 1/2 Life Program online!

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

Eight

architecting

“One of the most self-assured, startlingly well-written and moving pieces of theatre around.”
– The Herald

“Stunningly well performed…this is a truly impressive and exciting hour of theatre”
– The Scotsman

Winner of the 2008 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award and Fringe First Award Winner, EIGHT is a collection of extraordinary tales of remarkably self-aware young adults smartly crafted by breakout playwright Ella Hickson.

From high-class hookers to those who make friends in morgues, to single mothers and bereaved gallery owners, Eight gives all of these otherwise neglected characters center-stage, including the moving, politically punchy portrait of a man who has lost everything except his memories of the 7/7 London bombings. Marginal behavior is integrated into the mainstream and apathy blazes across it all. ‘Eight’ works to find the glimmers of faith in a world of wholesale cynicism. Incisively witty yet touching and potent, these eight monologues present what those reaching adulthood in The Naughties would be saying – if they could be bothered.

Writer Ella Hickson has written and published poetry since her late teens and completed her first novel in 2004. In addition she has worked as a producer for BBC comedy troupe The Penny Dreadfuls, Offstage Theatre, The Edinburgh Film Festival and in 2006 established her own production company, Escape Artist.

Photo credit: Tom Bishop

best of edinburgh

Presented as part of COIL 09 January 6 – 13, 2009
Extended: Wed, January 14 – Sun, January 25
Wednesday – Saturday 8pm
Sunday 5pm
Tickets from $25
$15 (students/seniors)
$10 (P.S. 122 members)

Guruguru

guruguru

By Ant Hampton, with Joji Koyama and Isambard Khroustaliov

“Hugely entertaining… This smart, mysterious exercise in programmed thinking and collective chaos is strange but exhilarating.” – The Times

“You may find yourself frantically looking for yourself again in the moments after the performance has finished.” – The Guardian

You have been told what to do every moment of the day, for years on end. The voice in your headphones has understood who you are and gives instructions which mirror what you’d be doing anyway. A life free of dither and uncertainty! In your job, this voice is a career-saver… but the day has come when you need to come ‘off the headphones’. You need help.

Five participants enter a brightly lit room, there are five chairs positioned around a TV. A session begins, and as each audience member follows different instructions via headphones, they begin to understand ‘who they are’. Proceedings are led by an on-screen, animated character – whose twin roles of marketing and spiritual Guru are confused by his reliance on untested and accident-prone technologies. The overproduced, digital sheen of our focus-group world cracks open into a colourful volcano of boiling absurdity. A hilarious chaos develops, exposing today’s consumer-mad inability to distinguish between what we want, and what we need.

A Rotozaza Production By Ant Hampton, with Joji Koyama and Isambard Khroustaliov

Commissioned by Fusebox Festival, Texas
Produced by ArtsAgenda

Presented as part of COIL 2010

Supported by the British Council.

50 minutes
January 6-12, 2010
Jan 6 – 8, Jan 11 – 12:
Performances daily 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, 8pm, 9pm, 10pm
Sat, Jan 9: Performances 3pm, 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, 8pm, 9pm, 10pm
Sun, Jan 10: Performances 3pm, 4pm, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, 10pm
$10

Cape Disappointment

“The Debate Society’s theatrical brilliance can’t be argued with.”
-John Del Signore, Gothamist

The Debate Society’s 4th full-length play transforms the upstairs space at P.S. 122 into their own version of a Drive-In theater to present an intimate and absurd perspective of classic Americana. The Brooklyn based play-makers invite audiences to experience the Feature Presentation from the comfort of their own private 4-seater, equipped with a cooler, speaker box, and a close-up view of the action. Like an evening at the Drive-In, Cape Disappointment starts with a “cartoon” and proceeds to the feature: a road-trip epic populated by characters racing across the crumbling landscapes of bygone hey-days. There’s even an intermission tossed in just long enough to grab some popcorn.

The Debate Society is a Brooklyn based company that creates new plays through the collaboration of Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen, and Oliver Butler. Joining co-writers Bos (Gothamist Best Actress of 2007) and Thureen (Hostage Song) onstage is actor Michael Cyril Creighton (The Vietnamization of New Jersey) and acclaimed NY actress, Drama Desk and two-time Obie Award winner and Emmy nominee Pamela Payton-Wright, who is also the mother of Cape Disappointment director Oliver Butler.

Saturday, Nov 22 – Sunday, Dec 7, 2008
Mon – Saturday at 8:00pm