A Series of Landscapes
Missed the performance? Experience online by paying what you can here! This opportunity will expire on Oct 12.
A new online work of opera-theatre by thingNY
July 10 @ 1pm EDT
July 11 @ 1pm and 6pm EDT
Presented as part of HERE Arts Center’s #stillHERE
Presented as part of HERE Arts Center’s #stillHERE, A Series of Landscapes is a new online work of opera-theatre by thingNY set in the world of our dreams. Audiences are invited into a Zoom call where seven performers dive into the anxiety and serenity of this paradoxical moment, where yesterday’s action in the street, today’s paralyzing personal stasis, and tomorrow’s online wedding are all refracted through the bizarre filter of social and emotional distance. You’re outside of time and somehow you’re everyone. “Is that me? Is that you? What year is it?” We’re together with everyone we’ve ever known. Jeff’s dad shows up to get us out of there. We might be in Texas. There will be absurdity, severity, sweetness, and uncanniness amidst moments of interaction, deluge, and connection.
In April, thingNY was one of the early “adapters” of making work within and responding to quarantine culture, creating and performing a series of etudes which toyed with the shortcomings of virtual performance: SubtracTTTTTTTTT. Praised in the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wire, and Steve Smith’s Night After Night, the band returns with another chapter of socially distant live performance. A Series of Landscapes pushes our attention, our practice, and our technologies further.
Missed the performance? Experience online by paying what you can here! This opportunity will expire on Oct 12.
HERE and thingNY will donate half of all ticket revenue to Black Lives Matter and Communities United for Police Reform.
thingNY is a quirky collective of New York composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006, thingNY performs experimental works created by the core ensemble + past members – Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Jeffrey Young, Gelsey Bell, Dave Ruder, Andrew Livingston and Isabel Castellvi – and by adventurous composers such as Jennifer Walshe, Robert Ashley, Rick Burkhardt, Pauline Oliveros, Miguel Frasconi, Vinko Globokar, John Cage, Julius Eastman, and Jessie Marino. The musicians of thingNY have collaboratively created three concert-length operas: This Takes Place Close By, Time: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts (with Panoply Performance Lab), and ADDDDDDDDD (self-released as their first album, with accompanying comic book libretto). thingNY has also released minis/Trajectories (2016) and Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young (2018), both on Gold Bolus Recordings. In 2017, thingNY performed Paul Pinto’s Thomas Paine in Violence in association with HERE Arts Center and, in 2018, premiered Passover, a Chamber Music America commission by Obie-award winning composer/playwright Rick Burkhardt, alongside Kenneth Gaburo’s rarely performed Maledetto at Roulette in Brooklyn. thingNY has also collaborated with Latin synth-pop star Helado Negro for the Ecstatic Music Festival, the teenage contemporary music ensemble Face the Music at the Queens Museum, and in Varispeed’s day-long site-specific version of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives as part of Performa.