Culturemart 2013

KRISTIN MARTING & DAVID MORRIS – Trade Practices

Trade Practices is an interactive live art event, created by Kristin Marting and David Morris, which drops audiences into a living market in the trade of short, serialized performances wherein they examine the means by which they determine value and become actors—rational or otherwise—on an economic stage. Collaborators include Oana Botez Ban, Erin Courtney, Eisa Davis, Xander Duell, Chris Kuhl, Robert Lyons, Jared Mezzocchi, Qui Nguyen, KJ Sanchez, Jane Shaw, and Chris Wells.

DAVID T. LITTLE – Artaud in the Black Lodge

Artaud in the Black Lodge is a contemporary work of opera-theatre by David T. Little, with a libretto by poet Anne Waldman, exploring the imagined psychic connections between Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs and David Lynch. Existing in a Bardo-like place where dreams and reality intersect and the individual is confronted by demons of their own making, it is a work about the suspension of time, communication across realms, and the altering of sublunary experience.

STEIN | HOLUM PROJECTS – The Wholehearted

Deborah Stein and Suli Holum (CHIMERA, NY Times Critics’ Pick) turn the confessional memoir inside out in their newest work in progress. THE WHOLEHEARTED is the story of a proud but unreliable former champion who relives her glory days in a rundown boxing gym, dreaming of a comeback. Drawing on sources as diverse as dubstep and Appalachian murder ballads, THE WHOLEHEARTED uses text, choreography, and live-feed projection to explore the contradictory nature of truth and the uneasy interplay of love and violence, sex and boxing.

BORA YOON – Weights and Balances

Weights and Balances is a new music opera by sonic surrealist Bora Yoon, that is part radio-theater, sound-cinema, and musical performance art. Featuring video design by Adam Larsen and interactive performance design by R. Luke DuBois, the work creates a virtual journey through a metaphorical house, pairing music with moving images to create “rooms” and sonic “spaces” that excavate memories and evoke different subconscious spaces to reflect the cyclical nature of our lives.

ROBIN FROHARDT – The Pigeoning

The Pigeoning is an original puppet piece by Robin Frohardt about obsessive compulsion, pigeons, and the end of the world. The piece is performed by five puppeteers with live original music by composer Freddi Price. The Pigeoning has no dialogue and uses music and precise and articulate puppetry to convey this dark and humorous story.

JOSEPH SILOVSKY – Send for the Million Men

Send for the Million Men is a gallery exhibition and solo stage performance about the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of a payroll robbery in Massachusetts. Using his unique blend of robotics, puppets, and hand made projectors, Silovsky paints the story of these two men and their effect on the world during the turbulent 1920s.

HAI-TING CHINN – Science Fair

Science Fair is an opera singer’s love-song to the scientific worldview. Conceived and performed by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, Science Fair consists of excerpts from scientific studies, articles, and interviews, turned into art-songs by various new-music composers, and performed with live illustrations, demonstrations, and experiments. Texts from astronomy and astrophysics, zoology and evolutionary biology, classroom chemistry, and quantum physics are strung together into a choreographed song-cycle that uses elegance and humor to illuminate the processes of science.

MEI-YIN NG/ MEI-BE WHATever – Lost Property Unit

A woman living in seclusion has a frenemy. Her sole link to society and the controller of her own private world is a cyborg pet. In Lost Property Unit, elements of Alfred Hitchcock suspense-thrillers, Wong Kar-wai nostalgic romances, and TwilightZone science fiction–fantasies converge to form an otherworldly digital landscape. Inspired by Chinese mythology, surveillance, and the power, seduction and limitations of contemporary technology, Ng employs dance, live and pre-recorded video, and robotic sculpture to examine levels of solitude and the propensity for what lies beyond our reach

SOOMI KIM – Chang(e)

Chang(e) is based on the life and work of Philadelphia-based Asian American performance artist and activist Kathy Change. She is infamously remembered for her last “performance” in which she set herself on fire and danced in protest to the political apathy of elite students of UPenn. This new work will incorporate site-specific video, movement, original music and portions of a transcribed interview between Kathy and U Penn sophomore Brendan McGeever recorded in 1995, one year before Change’s self immolation. Chang(e) peers into the life of a woman whose mission was to save the world.

JEFF MOUSSEAU + BARBARA WIECHMANN + LISA DOVE – The Snow Queen

An innovative re-telling for adults and older kids of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story. This episodic tale of a girl who travels barefoot through the world in search of her childhood friend, abducted by the Snow Queen, is structured as seven self-contained stories within a larger story; a staged cycle of songs and striking visuals. Written by Barbara Wiechmann and directed by Jeffrey Mousseau (creators of Aunt Leaf, developed through HARP and premiering at HERE in 2010) with music composed by Lisa Dove.

A HARP Alum and startHERE Presentation.

SHAUN IRONS + LAUREN PETTY – Keep Your Electric Eye On Me

A curtain is pulled back and a woman is thrust through The Color Room. As the lights intensify, she slowly removes a small candy from her mouth, which she drops into a jar filled with similar candies … a disembodied voice commands “sit down please” … As cryptic signals are transmitted, fragments of text and spectral images meld, collide and shimmer. Part video installation, interactive media lab and live performance, Keep Your Electric Eye On Me conjures notions of transformation, dual realities, hysteria and the desire for the unattainable.

REBECCA DAVIS – Restless Nest

Created by choreographer and installation artist Rebecca Davis, Restless Nest combines dance, sculpture and ecological tactics to explore concepts of stability and mutability. Over the course of an hour, the piece’s five performers molt and mutate, communicating with objects made from discarded utilitarian materials in scenes that unfold with dream-like logic. Testing the mutability of performance–each of Restless Nest’s sections function as a new skin, with a different aesthetic and set of questions.

YOAV GAL – SPHINX

A loving mother or cruel tyrant? Ethiopian-born monster, SPHINX, with a lioness’ might, a woman’s wisdom, a serpent’s cunning and transcendent wings, terrorizes the city under her charge, until she meets her match in Oedipus. Blind to his own motivation, is he a saviour or a conqueror? What happens when the two enemies connect in a deathly embrace? An emerging voice of “indie” opera, Yoav Gal teams up with macabre playwright Pete McCabe as lyricist, to create a beautiful and violent opera. Directed by Ronit Muszkatblit, and performed by Dana Muszkatblit, Yegor Shevtsov and Nadav Lev.

LEYNA MARIKA PAPACH – Glass Mouth

Glass Mouth is inspired by the idea that words have a spirit to them after they are spoken out loud, changing the possibility and outcome of future events. Working together with performers Mariko Endo Reynolds, Christian Dautresme, and visual artist Jerry Smith Jr, Leyna Marika Papach creates an opera-theatre work where sound, music, dance and chance are woven together in a story of characters lost in a labyrinth of unresolved thoughts, wishes and regrets.

YVAN GREENBERG/LABORATORY THEATER – GENET PORNO

GENET PORNO is based on Jean Genet’s 1943 novel, “Our Lady of the Flowers”, and follows the loves and betrayals of a transvestite prostitute named Divine. Divine’s story is staged within the production of a present-day gay porn video, incorporating narrative elements from the confessional videoblog of a real-life porn star. Their stories merge in an “impossible ballet” as GENET PORNO explores our contemporary culture of narcissism and the consequences that result from blurring our public and private lives. Performed by Corey Dargel, Oleg Dubson, and Wil Smith.