The Neta Dance Company’s upcoming performance, 2280 Pints! (at DTW, May 25-28; tickets $20/$15), is many things. Sparked from Pulvermacher’s response to an installation at the New Museum and borne out of a summer dance workshop at The University of Florida, the piece is a celebration of the company’s 25^th anniversary and a collaboration between dance students and a professional dance company. The hour long piece is comprised of individual sections developed by company members and workshop participants, which have accumulated over the past year from experimentation with buckets. In the performance, a cast of 20 dancers inhabits a playing space of 57 white, five-gallon buckets. I discussed the work with Neta Pulvermacher, founder of The Neta Dance Company, who has created over 75 works and is founder of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! and Dance Conversations @ The Flea.

How did you become a dancer?
I was born and raised on a kibbutz in Israel, a community based on communist ideals. My parents’ generation was amongst the founders. They themselves are from Germany but they immigrated right before World War II. We would work in our little zoo and feed animals, work the land, learn art, musical instruments, and learn to think. When I was 13 I went to a neighboring kibbutz to take a dance class and that’s when I met a wonderful teacher that I’m still friends with. She taught us to listen and choreograph to music and somehow dance stuck.

Why dance?
In some ways because you don’t speak with words. In my upbringing there were so many declarations of ideals that it was so refreshing to have something with very different rules, language which is not verbal. It made me feel that I could say or express things that are difficult to do with words. With music, the ear recognizes a pattern much faster than the eye. It takes a lot more to recognize a pattern in dance because the language is a lot more complex. Dance works with linguistic principles, but it does not have the same exactitude as music. It’s more like poetry. It affects you without having to go through your submission which is another reason why I love it. You could be extraordinarily intelligent or dumb and it affects you without you needing to understand.

What are the origins of 2280 Pints!?
Last May I traveled with 11 of my students who are college dance majors to Israel for a study abroad program. I am originally from Israel and seeing my home country through their eyes was like experiencing it anew for me. I realized how that vitality and intensity of living- both joy and sorrow- is intensified by the fact that there is always an impending sense of violence in that part of the world. Going there with them for three weeks made me aware all over again about the importance of joy and not in a hokey kind of way.  Coming back home to New York City for a short time, I was going to direct a summer dance intensive in Florida for two weeks. I was tired and I didn’t feel like revisiting anything and not sure what I would work on. I read in the New York Times a review of the Rivane Neuenschwander retrospective at the New Museum and saw a picture of her piece, “Rain Rains.” I had to go see it. I walked into this room and it looked like it was raining buckets but in each of those buckets she drilled a hole, so the bucket dripped into identical buckets underneath. It was both visual rain and the sound of rain drops- very beautiful and whimsical. Then on Saturday I flew to Florida and on Sunday I said, “I don’t know what’s with these buckets, but there’s something.” So I went to Walmart and bought 30 $5 plain white buckets. I spread it on the studio floor and not a minute passed and the ceiling began to leak. There was something wrong with the AC. It was very funny.

How does this piece relate to your previous work?
I always think of my work like I’m a scientist in that there is something I research. Being in the studio and investigating is my job. I deconstruct the thing to its smallest ingredient and set it up in a way where it begins to interact and play.  I let it start to happen and I lift my hands and that’s when I see what it is. Inspiration comes from causing and enabling interactions between people, space, matter, ideas, and feelings. Those interactions are always relational. If I’m trying to understand what we make, it’s about the power of the imagination to see things other than what they are in relationship to other things and make an action in relation to another action or object. I’ve made a lot of dances, but this is not me being smart, cool, hip, I don’t’ give a shit anymore. I just want to make something that is vital and open, without any fear. To release a smile in a person’s face, a real deep body smile is a big deal.

Is your ultimate hope for this piece to convey and inspire joy?
It’s much more than joy. It’s a bucket world. It’s a micro world created with buckets, activated by people and music. It’s not fancy. The fanciness of it comes from your ability as a viewer to go with the idea that the bucket will become anything you want it to be. It’s trying to strip human behavior and show it through buckets. The buckets become human and the dancers become more human because of their relationship to them. The imperfections become accentuated because the buckets are uniform. I wanted to make something that would be generous and open. It’s unapologetically accessible without trying hard to be that. To get to that simplicity is a long journey. Mostly I just want you to be enthralled by the end of it that you would join us in the dance party.

2280 Pints!
Performed by: The Neta Dance Company: Courtney Baron, Robin Brown, Karen Harvey, Colette Krogol-Reeves, Meghan Merrill, Lonnie Poupard, Matthew Reeves, Rebecca Warner; special guests; and students from the University of Florida MOD project – a student ensemble directed by Pulvermacher at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Wednesday – Saturday, May 25 – 28, 2011 at 7:30pm. Family matinee on Saturday, May 28 at 2pm.  Tickets are $20, or $15 for students, seniors and children.

Tickets are available by calling 212.924.0077 or online at www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/Neta_Dance

Popularity: 3% [?]

Credit: Hunter Canning

Tonight marks the opening night of Target Margin Theater’s production of The Tempest at HERE Arts Center (through May 27; tickets $25), the final show in their 20th anniversary season. Directed by Artistic Director, David Herskovits, The Tempest is a reflection on the passage of time and theater- two beautifully intertwined themes, appropriate for this anniversary season. I had conversations with David Herskovits and Steve Rattazzi, who plays Prosporo, to discuss the journey. In speaking to why he was drawn to The Tempest, Herskovits reflected on the scale:

I was interested in the way that the play is small. I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare where I’ve loved the sweep of it and there is sweep in this play too, but for some reason working in this physically contained way was exciting to me. It’s one of the few plays at the end of Shakespeare’s career that was written particularly for indoor chambers at court, as opposed to outdoor productions in the midday sun. I’m not doing an archaeological production, but that is all inspiration. In a way it’s also a big production for us. It’s more expensive than any other production we’ve done so it feels like a big deal, but artistically there’s something about the frame of it being very intimate that is wonderful for me.

With every production Target Margin reinvents itself. For example, the last Target Margin show I saw was Second Language, a devised piece about the limitations of language performed by Target Margin company members and ESL students at LaGuardia Community College at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. The creative through line consists of creating a unique language for each piece as Herskovits is interested in “developing multiple artistic impulses at the same time and challenging the actors to create a performance style that is particular to the project and different from past work.” Steve Ratazzi, who has worked with Target Margin for the past twenty years and was in its first production, Titus Andronicus, spoke about the process of creating a performance language for The Tempest, which was something completely new based on something old.

It’s based on ballet and old declamatory styles of theatrical presentation, but it isn’t those things. It’s a quirky thing. David wanted it so that at any moment you could look at it and it would be a beautiful painting/composition, but he didn’t want to choreograph each move. We created our own movement, interesting body positions informed and inspired loosely on paintings and sculpture we saw at the museum. We developed a movement style to interact in this new movement universe without too much self-consciousness.

I found the company’s ongoing reinvention and flexibility reminiscent of some reflections Rattazzi had of Prospero’s journey in the play:

It’s partially thrust upon him the events of his day, both astrologically and the fact that his enemies show up on the shore of this island. The issue of forgiveness is huge. It makes me think of the Rilke poem The Archaic Torso of Apollo, a beautiful poem that it ends with, “You must change your life.” That always stuck with me- the difficulty of forgiveness and the Herculean nature of that gesture to change your life.

The dialectic between the grandiose and intimate of this undertaking struck me as well as the culmination of the passage of time, change, forgiveness, beauty, and how “theater is life writ large,” in the words of Herskovits. As I waited to speak with him, in between tech and the first preview performance, I popped into the theater where crew members were making final tweaks to the intimate magic box set. David Birn, a set designer who specializes in old theaters and theatrical machinery, designed a set modeled after a 17th century theater with lots of visible machinations to create hand-crafted magic in plain sight. Herskovits came in from the rainy day having just picked up coffee for the crew after running an errand for his costume designer, Carol Bailey. We staked out a momentarily quiet, empty dressing room for our conversation, during which TMT company members would pop in and out as their call time approached. There was a wonderfully frenetic energy all around in anticipation of the first public performance. “I’m always conscious of the reality of the theatrical event. The making of the play is always the material of the play.” In this world, the magic is visible, not illusory.

To end the piece and start the week, I leave you with the poem that Rattazzi referenced:

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low;

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Credit: Hunter Canning

The Tempest
Directed by David  Herskovits
Set Design: David  Birn
Costume Design: Carol  Bailey
Lighting Design: Lenore  Doxsee
Sound Design: Kate  Marvin
Music Supervision: Thomas  Cabaniss
Music Direction: David  Rosenmeyer
Production Stage Manager: Joseph Fletcher.

Featuring: Clare  Barron as Miranda,  Purva  Bedi as  Sebastian,  James  Tigger!  Ferguson as  Antonio,  Yehuda  Hyman as  Gonzalo, Mia  Katigbak as  King  Alonso,  Meg  MacCary as  Stephano,  Nana  Mensah as  Ariel,  Mary Neufeld as  Caliban,  Hubert  Point­Du  Jour as  Ferdinand,  Steven  Rattazzi as  Prospero,  and J.H. Smith III as Trinculo.

Mondays,  Wednesdays -  Saturdays  at  8:30  p.m.,  and  Sundays at  4:00  p.m.    Dark  on  Tuesdays.  Tickets  are $20  for  performances  May  4  ­8,  &  $25  for  all  remaining  performances,  and  may  be  purchased  at  www.here.org,    or  by  calling  TheaterMania  at  (212)  352­3101.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Corpus Extremus (LIFE+)

February 28 April 18, 2009

Opening: Saturday February 28, 7-10pm

@ Exit Art 475 Tenth Ave NYC

EXHIBITION //

Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), the second exhibition of Exit Art’s Curatorial

Incubator Program, will present work by artists who are using bio- and

media- technologies to investigate questions of life and death.

Representative of a relatively new international trend, these artists are

uniting science and art to challenge conventional understanding of both

fields.

Prior to the eighteenth century, art and science were not separated as

distinct disciplines, and were often joined. Thus a hybrid bio-art

discipline is nothing radically new. Yet, the work in Corpus Extremus

(LIFE+) represents a revolution in interdisciplinary research and practices

and offers a critical evaluation of science and technology through art. This

direct involvement of artists in scientific research and lab practices aims

to demystify science through a cross-disciplinary approach; to provoke

discussion about art and science as creative stimuli to each other; and to

pose ethical questions to society.

The artworks in this exhibition deal with the transformation of our notions

of life and death due to the implementation of biotechnological advances in

everyday life. Recent innovations in science and technology are causing us

to confront and challenge our conventional understanding of the body. Trying

to reveal ³the secret of life,² and to retain health, we are finding new

ways to create living transplants and sustain life outside of the body. This

possibility gives ground for the design of new organisms hybrids, cyborgs

and extended human bodies that might be a new stage in an evolution with a

questionable future.

Artists: Suzanne Anker, Guy Ben-Ary and Philip Gamblen in collaboration with Dr. Steve Potter Lab (Dr. Steve Potter, Douglas Swehla, Stephen Bopic), BioKino

(Guy Ben-Ary and Tanya Visosevic), Dmitry Bulatov, Center for PostNatural

History, Kathy High, Soyo Lee, Yuri Leiderman and Andrei Silvestrov

Stelarc, The Tissue Culture and Art Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr),

ULTRAFUTURO (Oleg Mavromatti and Boryana Rossa) in collaboration with Chris Bjornsson and Kathy High, Paul Vanouse, Jennifer Willet, Adam Zaretsky and the pFARM Collective.

FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 6-9pm

Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) Explained and Expanded, Part 2

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of The Tissue Culture and Art Project discuss

their work, NoArk II, and semi living objects (partly alive and partly

constructed) as a new class of object beings. Adam Zaretsky does a

presentation on mutagenic arts related to his work pFARM :: Organic Fetish

Biotech, which is followed by a screening of the project¹s 60 minute film.

FREE. Cash bar.

Exit Art

475 Tenth Ave NYC

New York, NY 10018

T. 212 966 7745

F. 212 925 2928

E. info@exitart.org

Popularity: 1% [?]

TONIGHT!!! FRiDAY THE 13th!

LA MAMA E.T.C.

10PM

PERFORMANCES BY:

JOHN JESURUN with Black-Eyed Susan and Ben Forester

WU INGRID TSANG

BARB LANCIERS

THE NONSENSE COMPANY

RACHEL MASON

& A SPECIAL TEASER FROM DYKE DIVISION’S ROOM FOR CREAM

Bringing artists who have been working for 30-plus years into dialogue with those who have been working for two years and bringing works that are entertainment-based with those that specifically challenges the conventions of entertainment, Nostalgia Isn’t What it Used to Be, opens a space for theatrical and non-theatrical work to co-mingle and a space for works that address audiences in decidedly distinct ways to be in conversation with each other.

Curated and produced (I think) by Brooke O’Harra

Popularity: 1% [?]

Brian Feldman | Artistic Director

Popularity: 1% [?]

Your very own Culturebot (Andy) will be giving a short lecture/presentation at this conference on Monday, February 23rd at 3:30PM.  Come check it out.

An International Conference at The Jewish Theological Seminary February 22–24, 2009

Where else but in New York City can you find every conceivable performance style, in venues ranging from the Broadway stage to the smallest black box theater, and a discerning global audience?

As the capital of the theater world, and with questions of interculturality especially relevant in our multicultural and globalized world, The Jewish Theological Seminary, located on upper Broadway in New York City, will play host to Jews/Theatre/Performance in an Intercultural World, a historic three-day conference that will focus on drama, theater, and performance that are of Jewish interest by virtue of their themes, authors, artists, or audiences.

The conference, which is open to the public at no charge, also seeks to chart and understand the intercultural ties between the theater that Jews create for themselves and the wider theatrical culture, as well as the impact of Jewish artists on the theatrical culture of the societies in which they live.

Sixty scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States will participate in sessions devoted to a wide range of subjects and performance modes, both experimental and canonic. A sampling of sessions include Bible as Theater, Musical Theater, the Yiddish Stage, Theater of Jewish Communities in and of Muslim Countries, Israeli Drama, the American Mainstream, Jews and the German Stage, Experimental Theater, Jews on East European Stages, and Theater and the Holocaust. The conference will also host a number of performances and screenings. Jews/Theatre/Performance in an Intercultural World is being held February 22–24 at The Jewish Theological Seminary, 3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street), New York City.

The conference is supported by The Jewish Theological Seminary and the Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in New York.

Co-conveners are Dr. Edna Nahshon, associate professor of Hebrew at JTS and a specialist in Jewish theater and performance; Dr. Jeanette R. Malkin, senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and Dr. Peter Marx, associate professor of Theater at the University of Berne, Switzerland. The conference is open to the public, which may attend all or part of the conference. Admission is free; however, photo ID and reservations are required. For reservations, please call (212) 678-8972 or email Hebrew@jtsa.edu.

Full program can be found here: http://www.jtsa.edu/x11489.xml

Popularity: 1% [?]

Besides Rokia Traore, here are some games for early this week – and all at recession prices. Oh La La!

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Monday, Feb 9.

• Novice Theory at The Night Hotel – 132 W 45th St – $10. 9pm. In short, Novice Theory makes me a little crazy. Incredible each time I get to catch it. And at this venue, it should probably be some fancy-pants swanky-stuff.

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Tuesday, Feb 10.

• Bruce McClure at Light Industry – 220 36th Street in Building 2 of Industry City (new space). $7. 7:30pm. McClure projects abstract films, mic’s the projectors, and then creates sound collage. This should be pretty amazing.
• Chico Mann at Public Assembly – 70 N. 6th st (wburg) $8. doors at 9pm. It’s what’s really good.
• Fake Male Voice (Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio) just around the corner at Glasslands – 289 Kent Ave. (thx Ultra8201)

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Polish Cultural Institute in New York and 

The Performance Studies Department, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU 

present: 

TRACING GROTOWSKI’S PATH: 

YEAR OF GROTOWSKI IN NEW YORK 

FEBRUARY 6 – JULY 13, 2009 

Curator: Richard Schechner, NYU University Professor, TDR Editor Associate Curator: Dominika Bennacer 

Project Coordinator: Agata Grenda

Tracing Grotowski’s Path: Year of Grotowski in New York is the first in-depth presentation in the U.S. of the innovations and influence of revolutionary theatre director Jerzy Grotowski in all the phases of his artistic career. This broad spectrum of work is being presented through a variety of lectures, panels, films, and workshops. 

UNESCO has designated 2009 as “The Year of Grotowski” – 50 years after the founding of the Polish Laboratory Theatre and 10 after the death of the world-renowned theatre director, master teacher, and, for many, a spiritual leader. 

The program will involve several prestigious institutions throughout New York City: NYU Tisch School of the Arts; NYU Performance Studies Studio; Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center; John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Judson Memorial Church; La MaMa E.T.C.; Film Society of Lincoln Center; and Lincoln Center Festival. And it will bring together some of the most important contemporary performance practitioners. These include early Grotowski collaborators, former Polish Laboratory Theatre actors, as well as theatre and performance scholars from around the world. By attending to aspects of Grotowski’s work usually overlooked or misrepresented, Tracing Grotowski’s Path will contribute to popular and scholarly discourses on one of the greatest artists and innovators of the 20th century. 

Considered one of the most important and influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century, JERZY GROTOWSKI revolutionized contemporary theatre. Beginning in 1959 with his early experiments in the Polish town of Opole and later with the Polish Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw, Grotowski changed the way Western theatre practitioners and performance theorists conceive of the audience/actor relationship, theatre staging, and the craft of acting. This phase of his theatrical work, also called “poor theatre,” was the basis for one of the most influential theatre books of the 20th century:Towards a Poor Theatre (1968). After abandoning the “theatre of productions,” Grotowski continued to push the boundaries of conventional theatre, first in his paratheatrical work, and later in his performance research, which took him to India, Mexico, Haiti, and elsewhere, in search of the traditional performance practices of various cultures (Theatre of Sources, 1976-82). This work led Grotowski to his identification of particular abiding elements of ritual traditions (Objective Drama, 1983-86). In the final phase of his work Grotowski explored the far reaches of the performance continuum, which he traced from “Art as presentation” toward what has been called “Art as Vehicle.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

I don’t know whether this will be any good but it certainly sounds intriguing:

Broadway stars John Treacy Egan (“Little Mermaid”), Gregg Edelman (“Into the Woods,” “Passion”), Alison Fraser (“Gypsy”) and Kate Shindle (“Legally Blonde”) will be featured in the cast at a benefit concert performance of the new musical EINSTEIN’S DREAMS– based on Alan Lightman’s best-selling novel — for one performance only on Monday, February 23 at 7:30 p.m. at Symphony Space (2537 Broadway at 95th St.) in New York City. 


The concert will benefit The Harpswell Foundation, an organization created in 1999 to provide education, housing and leadership training to children and young women in the developing world, notably in Cambodia, where Harpswell provides schooling and a dormitory facility at a leadership center for college women in Phnom Penh in the effort to help restore the educational system that was destroyed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Harpswell has already purchased the land for a second educational facility in Cambodia. (www.harpswellfoundation.org)

EINSTEIN’S DREAMS is a new musical with book by Joanne Sydney Lessner, music by Joshua Rosenblum and lyrics by Joanne Sydney Lessner and Joshua Rosenblum. The February 23rd concert will be directed by Jen Bender. Musical director David Loud leads a six-piece chamber orchestra. 



The musical EINSTEIN’S DREAMS– based on Alan Lightman’s 1993 best-selling novel which imagines what the physicist may have been dreaming about prior to the publication of his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 — finds a young Albert Einstein trapped in an unhappy marriage and an unhappy job well-beneath his intellect. The musical, like the book, places Einstein in a dreamscape that conjures up an array of theoretical realms of time, all of them visions that probe the essence of time, the adventure of creativity, the glory of possibility — and the siren call of a beautiful, elusive woman named Josette. 


This musical adaptation of EINSTEIN’S DREAMS had its world-premiere in 2005 at Lisbon’s oldest, most respected theater, Teatro da Trindade. 



The Harpswell Foundation is an American-based 501c3 tax-exempt organization. In May of 2007, the Foundation became an officially registered Nongovernmental Organization (NG) in Cambodia.

Tickets to the benefit concert performance of EINSTEIN’S DREAMSare $101, $61 and $21 (includes a facility fee) and can be reserved by calling Box Office: 212-864-5400 or going online: http://www.symphonyspace.org/event/2823-einsteins-dreams-the-musical.

For more information about the musical, visit www.einsteinsdreamsthemusical.com

EINSTEIN’S DREAMS was originally commissioned by Brian Schwartz and Linda B. Merman on behalf of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of The Graudate Center of the City University of New York.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Maybe that was it!? Maybe that’s what I was doing on Monday, February 2nd?!

One way or another, Little Theatre is always a good time!

Now at the NEW Dixon Place!!! With twice as much betterness!

***************************************************************

Little Theatre, Vol IX, No. 3 – February, 2009

SEXPERT BETSY BIXBY WHEAT

a performance by Kate Valentine

CONGERIES I

music by Matthew Ostrowski

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME

a performance by Heidi Schreck

MGM GRAND

dance

RAMRODS OF THE ROARING NOUGHTS

a play by Gary Winter, directed by Alec Duffy

with Sarah Petersiel, Matthew Lewis, Arthur Aulisi, B. Brian Argotsinger and Loren Fenton

and live music by Dave Malloy

Monday, February 2, 2009 at 8:00 pm

The NEW Dixon Place

161 Chrystie btw. Delancey & Rivington

(F/V 2nd Ave; R/W Prince; 6 Bleecker, JMZ Bowery)

Tickets $15 @ the door or ;online

$12.00 w/ printout of this email

first come, first served, no reservations

Popularity: 1% [?]