Culturemart 2012
ALEXANDRA BELLER/DANCES – other stories
other stories is a collection of interwoven movement events that highlight the friction between stories. When we are confronted, particularly within an intimate relationship, with a story that diverges from ours, how do we deal with that friction against our reality? Further, what does it mean to believe that there is no one reality, but to give our selves over wholly to our stories? Created in collaboration with legendary rock musician/composer Robert Poss and celebrated, dramaturg Katherine Profeta, other stories is a layered multimedia performance that triggers memory, emotion and heightened awareness through deeply personal and evocative movement.
A HARP Alum Presentation
HAI-TING CHINN – Science Fair
Science Fair is an opera singer’s love-song to the scientific worldview and the scientists who practice and promote it. Conceived and performed by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, Science Fair consists of actual scientific texts turned into art-songs by various new-music composers. Each song is sonically tied to a live scientific demonstration, and they are strung together as a staged cycle that uses both elegance and humor to illuminate the processes of science.
STEFAN WEISMAN + DAVID COTE – The Scarlet Ibis
When Doodle was born, no one expected him to live. But he did. He can’t walk, so his older brother has to lug him around in a wheelbarrow. One day, a scarlet ibis appears in the “bleeding tree” behind the house. Their fate is intertwined with this exotic bird, which has flown far off course. The Scarlet Ibis is an opera about nature, family and survival. David Cote’s libretto tackles the cruelty and wonder of childhood, set to lyrical and evocative music by composer Stefan Weisman. Director Mallory Catlett stages a scene with music and a libretto reading.
CHRISTINA CAMPANELLA & PETER NORRMAN – Parts Are Extra
Peter Norrman & HARP alumna Christina Campanella (the sound-video team behind Latitude 14’s Red Fly/Blue Bottle and Tinder) perform live music in concert with short, experimental films taken from their 12-part seriesParts Are Extra, an art platform with which to investigate the elusive language of cinema. Driven by a live score of deconstructed electronic art songs, the duo creates a starkly fantastical universe of dystopian landscapes and eerie, dreamlike worlds in which fractured narratives of uncharted journeys, spaces of transition, and the fragility of the natural world are subtly revealed.
A HARP Alum Presentation
SHAUN IRONS + LAUREN PETTY + MEI-YIN NG – Keep Your Electric Eye On Me
A solitary woman dwells in an otherworldly landscape — messianic rock star, space explorer, spectral guide – where she inhabits a defunct satellite adrift in a decaying technological oasis. In this hermetic dream world, quiet moments are punctuated with bursts of raucous energy as cryptic signals are transmitted via live feed cameras, projections and sound devices. Part video installation, interactive media lab and live performance, Keep Your Electric Eye On Me explores the malleable conception of the self in an era of cyber communication, engaging notions of loneliness, paranoia and the desire for the unattainable.
BETTY SNAMIEH – The Strangest
Midway through Camus’s classic “The Stranger,” an unnamed Arab is killed. Leaping from this moment and working backwards through possible histories of tangled romance, ethnic conflict and random violence, Betty Shamieh has crafted a new play inspired by this unknown character. The Strangest is an absurdist murder mystery about three Algerian brothers who vie for the love of the same woman, one of whom will be inexplicably gunned down by a French stranger. Infused with elements of Middle Eastern storytelling traditions, audience members enter into a simulation of an Algerian coffeehouse where masters of the oral tradition once told tales. A workshop production directed by May Adrales.
BORA YOON – Weights and Balances
Forces are at play– a constellation of sound-makers, stories, and poetic observations trace common laws of physics, cause and effect, and the zeitgeist of an ever-changing world; illuminating how the world may be held together by invisible knots.
Weights and Balances is a one-woman narrative musical event, performed by composer and live art chanteuse Bora Yoon. Artist and programmer Luke DuBois designs custom instrument The Body Electric using infrared technology to control audiovisual elements, illuminating the micro-world of personal experience, shifting importance, and the dreaming body.
LINDSAY ABROMAITIS-SMITH – Epyllion
Carnal and spiritual collide in this search for what nourishes the infinite possibilities of our hearts’ desires. In the world premiere of Epyllion, the story we are becoming unfolds through puppetry, movement, and song, developing new rituals that tap into the innate intelligence of the body and reawaken this understanding in those who bear witness to it. Through everyday practices we identify ourselves in the moment but also touch upon an ancient, visceral subconscious.
JAKE MARGOLIN + NICK VAUGHAN – A Marriage:1
A man and his husband sit in a motel room watching Fox News for 24 consecutive hours, repeating the newscast into clear plastic bags, creating a mountain of captured breath that ultimately engulfs the couple; the two walk into the sunrise in the high Nevada desert, gradually disappearing against the magnitude of the Silver Island Mountain Range; and then there’s the spray paint… A Marriage: 1 is an immersive mixed-media installation using performance, video, sculpture, text, and drawings to create a constantly evolving environment; a multifaceted double self-portrait of the artists.
JOE DIEBES – Botch
Botch is a hyper-administrated performance system made of bodies and voices. Multi-tasking with microphones, loudspeakers, paper, and charcoal, an agile ensemble of performers play with and against a matrix of procedures drawn from the field of corporate “performance management”. Someone draws a bold line to the rhythm of a metronome, another fast-forwards her partner’s live voice like a tape machine, a third sings a bureaucratic duet with a small loudspeaker. Botch lifts the lid off the apparatus to find a torrential sewer of sound and brain leaks that point up the power of human error.
AARON LANDSMAN – City Council Meeting
Come to the theatre and make a choice about whether and how to participate. Please base all judgments on empathy and listening; we may ask you to voice someone you’re not. City Council Meeting is performed participatory democracy, combining text from half-a-dozen cities where we sat in on government meetings, as well as original writing and testimony from you the viewer. Come early and you might end up in the Mayor’s chair. Come late and you might lose your voice. Directed and dramaturged by Mallory Catlett, designed by Jim Findlay.
CHRISTINE EVANS + JOSEPH MEGEL + JARED MEZZOCCHI – You Are Dead. You Are Here.
You Are Dead. You Are Here. is an interactive-media theatre work inspired by the convergence of video-game environments, virtual technologies and military research. It incorporates animated landscapes projected from “Virtual Iraq”, a virtual-reality program used in veterans’ P.T.S.D. therapy. You Are Dead. You Are Here. tells the charged story of a collision between an American soldier and an Iraqi girl blogger, through the lens of the technologies that aid and connect them.
other stories
other stories was commissioned by a Co Lab Production of The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) and SummerStages Dance at Concord Academy. Funding for the original score and live musical performance was provided by American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance Grant and Additional funding was received from The Joyce Foundation’s Rockefeller Grant. Private funding was provided by Ellen Poss, Janet Datema, and Ethan Ruby.
The Scarlet Ibis
A project with American Opera Projects
Parts Are Extra
With support from the New York State Council on the Arts Film, Media and New Technologies program 2011.
Weights And Balances
Weights and Balances is made possible with support from Harvestworks Digital Media & Art, The Hermitage Artist Center, the Ringling Museum of Art, the Sorel Organization for Women Composers, New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian American Arts Alliance, and the HERE Artist Residency Program.
A Marriage:1
With additional support from Experimental Television Center.
Created by: Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin
Text by: Jessica Almasy
Lighting by: Rie Ono
Sound by: Matthew Hubbs
Performers: Jess Barbagallo, Matthew Hancock & Hannah Heller
Video Supervisor: Kelly Colburn
Botch
With additional support from the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Residency. Project space is donated by Capstone Equities. A preliminary workshop was sponsored by STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam, funded by The Netherland-America Foundation.
City Council Meeting
With support from The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Pilot, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. City Council Meeting is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks Art Space, in partnership with HERE, Zspace and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).
You Are Dead, You Are Here
With additional support from The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project.