Culturemart 2015

KRISTIN MARTING & ROBERT LYONS – IDIOT

Prince Myshkin squares-off with a notorious woman, a spoiled socialite, and a jealous rival in an intricate and violent quartet, as he dances the knife’s edge between torrid tragedy and mystical epiphany.

This hybrid response to The Idiot by Dostoevsky, features Marting’s gestural choreography, Lyons’ original text, and innovative video, invoking a complex and penetrating brain-scan of Prince Myshkin’s “truly beautiful soul”.

JESSICA SCOTT – Ship of Fools

Ship of Fools is a live concatenation of the past invoked by music, puppetry, and movement which seeks to illuminate the age-old practice of pathologizing women. The audience will travel with us as we weave re-imagined moments from history with found text from the lives of iconic and forgotten women towards one question: are the inmates running the asylum? Who is actually steering our ship: storyteller, politician or madman? What happens when this ship, sailing blind, finally runs aground?

ROBIN FROHARDT – Fitzcardboardaldo

Fitzcardboardaldo is an all cardboard tribute to the 1981 Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo. A second film, The Corrugation of Dreams, is a tribute to the Les Blank film Burden of Dreams, the making of Fitzcarraldo. These films were created at St. Ann’s Warehouse’s Puppet Lab in 2013. They were an official selection at the Telluride Film Festival in 2013 and were shown at the Les Blank Retrospective and were featured in the Puppets on Film Festival at BAM.

A HARP Alum Presentation

NICK BROOKE – Psychic Driving

Psychic Driving surrounds the audiences with a hallucinatory landscape of audio surveillance, hospital sonification, and clandestine broadcasts, based on the CIA brainwashing experiments of the 1950s, in which subjects were force-fed LSD then played looped audiotapes. Four performers chatter, yodel, and nosedive from desks, in an intricate physical and musical score that seamlessly combines musical samples with live performers. Brooke’s trademark physical mash-ups have been called “operatic in scope, unfolding in layers that constantly reveal new meanings” (Culturebot) and the “most exciting and innovative music theater I’ve seen in years” (Meredith Monk).

A HARP Alum Presentation

MATT MARKS & PAUL PEERS – Mata Hari

An interdisciplinary opera-theatre piece, Mata Hari is inspired by the life of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle a.k.a. Mata Hari, the mystic dancer who was executed for espionage during World War I. The story is set during the last months of her life while incarcerated in Paris’ notorious Saint Lazare prison. It centers on her fight to live and the five men who led to her death.

KAMALA SANKARAM, TIM MANER & PETE MCCABE – The Emperor and the Queen’s Parisian Weekend

Comedy, Violence, Sex, Tragedy; all in under 45 minutes. The Emperor and the Queen’s Parisian Weekend, a fantabulon of operatic ludicrousness, follows the eponymous tyrants through the temptations of revolutionary Paris. HARP alum composer Kamala Sankaram, drawing on a bouquet of musical styles, sets the dark farcical libretto by Resident Dramaturg Pete McCabe to an absurd comic romp through the nature of human want. Directed by HERE Co-Founder Tim Maner.

A HARP Alum Presentation

HAI-TING CHINN – Science Fair

Science Fair is an opera singer’s love-song to science. Conceived and performed by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, with composer Matthew Schickele and pianist Erika Switzer, Science Fair melds Science and Opera into a witty evening of songs, slides, and live experiments. The words of scientists, writers, and teachers become songs about the phases of the moon, the evolution of whales, the physics of the operatic voice, and, above all, the wonder of the scientific worldview.

AMANDA SZEGLOWSKI / cakeface – Stairway to Stardom

Stairway to Stardom is a mixed media dance-theatre tour of shattered dreams, from impractical to impossible. Inspired by and sourcing footage from the 1980s public-access television series by the same name, Stairway to Stardom rides the wave of the disenchanted. Synthesizing intricate choreography and original texts with the post-apocalyptic sound and visuals of Brooklyn’s Prism House (Matt O’Hare + Brian Wenner), cakeface honors the contributions of the wildly passionate but questionably talented through their powerful female voice and signature style of linguistic performance art.

SEAN DONOVAN & SEBASTIAN CALDERÓN BENTIN – Abaddon

Drawing inspiration from Alain Renais’ Last Year At Marienbad and Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Abaddon depicts a surreal social gathering that dissects the behavior, character, and class structure of a group of partygoers and traps them in a never-ending cycle of interactions. Working with a multi-generational cast of downtown performers, Abaddon explores the extrarational forces behind the precariousness of social life.

PAUL PINTO – Thomas Paine in Violence

Simultaneously set in and around the mind of the revolutionary activist, Thomas Paine in Violence is a text-dense psychedelic opera inspired by the final days of the American Founding Father’s life, the strange events of his “afterlife”, and the shock jock punditry of our contemporary media landscape. Its score is a combination of lightning quick speech and song, electronics, and a vocalizing chorus of instrumentalists. This is the first full-length theatre work by composer/librettist/performer Paul Pinto, in collaboration with co-librettist Rick Burkhardt, vocalist Joan La Barbara and the ensemble Ne(x)tworks.

CHRISTINA CAMPANELLA & JIM DAWSON – Lighthouse 40° N, 73° W

A sound installation where listeners drift through an aural estuary without leaving their seats. From a pared down palette of sampled recordings (shortwave dispatches, space and aquatic telemetry, obsolete communication devices), sound designer Jim Dawson & composer Christina Campanella spin a musical system of codes and cyphers, imagining a lush future landscape beyond the erasure of rising seas. Lighthouse 40° N, 73° W is a sonic remapping of an unrecognizable New York charted from beneath its flooded streets. This version will be broadcast live through headphones; audiences are free to settle in and listen from a fixed position or move about the space.

A HARP Alum Presentation

SARA FARRINGTON & REID FARRINGTON – CasablancaBox

CasablancaBox is a completely true exploration of the making of America’s favorite movie. It is an original play inspired by recently unearthed and never before heard archival material, combined with an intricate video design through which Casablanca’s iconic characters are projected onstage, interacting with live actors. Casablanca serves as the spine, from which stories of risk, sacrifice, brilliance and accidents branch off, all told by six performers who jump in and out of time, character, gender, style, tone, aesthetic and, most importantly, Casablanca—all in the pursuit of one answer: What makes a great work of art? Far from a bio-pic, CasablancaBox is an immersion into 1940s Hollywood—glamour, war, censorship, rampant sexism, racism, addiction and violence. And cigarettes.