For three days only, experience bold new work from visionary artists redefining what’s possible on stage. Back from touring east Asia, Official Puppet Business presents their international sensation Bill’s 44th, described by the NYTimes as “buoyant, mesmerizing, joy-inducing.” And after a sold-out run at HERE this Fall, visionary Romanian choreographer and transmedia artist Kat Mustatea presents a special showcase from The Mutables, featuring a demo of the BodyMouth instrument.
Both projects are available for touring!
Bill’s 44th
Friday, Jan 9 @ 2
Friday, Jan 9 @ 6:30
Saturday, Jan 10 @ 11
Saturday, Jan 10 @ 8
About Bill’s 44th
Bill’s 44th, the Drama Desk-nominated, two-time Edinburgh Fringe sellout, and New York Times Critic’s Pick, is BACK for a few more hometown birthday parties!
The streamers are hung, the punch has been poured, and the cake is just begging to be eaten! Our anxious host Bill has planned his party to the last detail—now all that remains is for his guests to arrive. Desperate to fill his apartment with camaraderie and celebration, Bill’s imagination runs wild. Many styles of puppetry, raucous balloons, and a cheeky piece of crudité all collide to examine the pitfalls of impatience, the wonder of loneliness, and the universal passage of time.
Bill’s 44th is a full-length wordless puppet show for grown-ups created by Dorothy James & Andy Manjuck.
About The Mutables
What is said cannot be unsaid. What is unspoken is alluded to, wrapped in metaphor, layered in allegory, gestured at. What is gestured at, is not silence.
THE MUTABLES weaves cutting edge technology for speech production with mythographies of the feminine monstrous to expand and reorient our intuitions for what can be put into words. Using a unique sensor-based instrument for embodied speech called BodyMouth, this eerie performance intertwines bodies and vocals as dancers sound out words phoneme-by-phoneme by enacting specific gestures in sequence, turning the body quite literally into a mouth. Situated at the edge of experimental opera and dance, the piece is inspired by female forest creatures in Balkan folklore called ielele whose voices were said to lead men astray and who could render listeners instantly mute. The project is a meditation on the question What does it mean to have a voice?—a provocation to the bleak histories of totalitarian rule where alternate modes of speech became an urgent form of survival and resistance.