Theater artists and longtime friends Marcus Youssef and James Long sit at a table and play an invented game called winners and losers. In it, they name people, places or things— Pamela Anderson, microwave ovens, their fathers, Goldman Sachs, Mexico — pronouncing each one winner or loser. Their game turns personal as they mercilessly dissect each other's families, privileges and class backgrounds. The competition quickly heats up, resulting in an intimate and blisteringly honest performance.
Enter a surreal fever dream in this psycho-erotic tale from modern Japan. Overworked and undersexed, a fatigued student’s brain conjures the bizarre tale of two brothers and their un-nameable erotic fantasies. Their comically claustrophobic world plays out on a candy-colored, meticulously constructed miniature set replete with pig faces, giant phalluses and secret compartments.
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.
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.
