Following in the grand Montreal dance tradition of La La La Human Steps and Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Frédérick Gravel and his hot-blooded team of dancers/musicians mix genres in a performance where philosophy meets the dancefloor. Unstoppable physicality, live music and a pop-culture aesthetic work to create a profound rumination on sex and love.
Christopher Walken falls off a ladder in Russia and is unable to perform his Chekhov-inspired solo show. Karen, who apparently proofread the script once, is asked to go on in Walken’s place. A precarious bilingual performance duet ensues between Karen and her Russian interpreter, Leo. There There is a wildly unpredictable theatrical roller coaster about being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time saying and doing all the most wrong things.
Electric Midwife plays on symmetry and illusion as the performers pull the intimate audience into a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of movement and color weaving throughout the space with highly structured, minimalist dance. Beth Gill is a Queens-based artist, making work in New York City. She critically examines issues relating to the fields of contemporary dance and performance studies, through an ongoing exploration of aesthetics and perception.
Writer/director Tina Satter draws on Chekhov’s letters, translations, and perverse sense of comedy to consider anew the darkness, beauty, and history of Chekhov’s iconic play The Seagull and its resonances with her Half Straddle ensemble. Seagull (Thinking of you) is a personal look at performance, failure, and attempted love — ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. With a Russian folk metal-influenced score.
Haunting images interface with a cast of three, juxtaposing the past and present, real and virtual, as a constant shifting illusion at the intersection of dance, visual art, and live music. The audiovisual elements engulf the audience, who is invited to make their own choices about where to experience the work. Blurred lines of presence and absence, memory and disappearance cannot possibly all be consumed. The Painted Bird fittingly focuses on nostalgia as a place of entrapment on a journey “home.”
A man departs for the US–Mexican border and vanishes before reaching his destination: Amarillo, Texas. Through stunning projected images, bilingual monologues and a sea of displaced objects and natural elements, this renowned company reconstructs his journey in a multimedia performance that travels imagined landscapes of both geography and cultural identity.
As the visual and performance worlds continue to collide, Kyle Loven is a difficult artist to categorize. An object maker with theatrical designs, his Rube Goldberg-esque Loss Machine unearths a world of lost items, misplaced thoughts and fractured journeys all housed within an intricately detailed set. Digging through the layers of the everyday and the fantastical, this piece poignantly displays a narrative of discovery and loss from the drama of imagery.
In 1960s Mexico, young revolutionaries took up arms in a desperate attempt to change society. A few decades later, the children of those guerilleros retrace the struggles of their elders, revealing this shadowed chapter of Mexican history through the personal experiences of one woman, Margarita Urías. El Rumor del Incendio blends witness accounts, archive film, and scale models as the actors unearth the artifacts of recent history.
Noted video and performing artist Michelle Ellsworth unleashes a one woman, multimedia portrayal of Clytemnestra, the woman left behind as her husband Agamemnon serves as leader of the Greeks in Troy. In Phone Homer she uses series of instructional videos, Skype calls with characters from The Iliad, a kinetic alphabet modeled after the Kinect, hamburger sacrifices, and an entire internet constructed specifically for this show to interpret this mythic character.
“Antarctica is the last place where you may drop down, when you shake the earth and can’t stay put anywhere else.”
Inspired by this quote from the documentary Encouters at the End of the World by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, Wunderbaum and Touki Delphine will cooperate for a second time, six years after Lost Chord Radio. Wunderbaum, a Dutch-Flemish group of actors/musicians performs a high-energy concert spectacle about dreams, choices and possibilities set in Antartica.
