We all scream for "Screamers."

Molly Lieber in Screamers,

a film by Brian Rogers, screening now at Abrons Arts Center
(photo: Brian Rogers)

More squirmer than screamer, Screamers--a feature film written and directed by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory Theater--situates a vulnerable woman (Molly Lieber) inside a deconsecrated Catholic church that will now be her home in a small town where, we're told, "there's little to see and even less to do." You might as well ignore the dreary man moving into it with her (Andrew Dinwiddie) because this is Lieber's film. She is the dark matter at the center, the magnetic force, and she is magnificent in her role--visually, symbolically, emotionally. Everyone else seems like hallucinatory debris in orbit--from the smirky, smarmy priest (Jay Wegman) who used to celebrate mass there to the annoyingly inaudible handyman (Jon Kinzel) who leaves an oily black smear on Lieber's lips. And what's with the scenes of a hulking Jim Finlay punching out a hooded captive?

I appreciated the framing of Lieber by her haunted visual environment, but the sonic environment most captured my attention and imagination. Aside from Lieber, the stars of this show are the crisp sounds--everything from a creaking stained glass window to couch cushions that complain when compressed and released--amplified to an unnatural degree. Sounds with heft, with personality. It is as if we all had taken drugs, and the noises ordinary things make--usually in the background of awareness--are now sharing stories and opinions.

Rogers spent time alone in artistic residency at puppeteer Dan Hurlin's upstate house, a deconsecrated church, an experience that, he says, worked some strange changes. So Screamers and probably Lieber's character, to a degree I won't speculate about, contains a fair amount of Rogers. But, for me always, any American ghost story raises useful parallels to those ghastly ghosts of American history we try to avoid and which now are popping up all over the place.

Starring: Andrew Dinwiddie, Jim Findlay, Daniel Fish, Vallejo Gantner, Keely Garfield, Jon Kinzel, Quinn Larson, Molly Lieber, Jay Wegman

Writer/Director/Editor: Brian Rogers
Producer: Madeline Best
Director of Photography: Jeff Larson
Production design: Sara C. Walsh
Lighting: Jon Harper
Location Sound: Stephen Bruckert
Dramaturgy and Directorial Consultation: Madeline Best
Music by Brian Roger
Sound Design, Mix and Mastering: Jim Dawson
2nd Unit Director of Photography: Stephen Bruckert
Assistant Production Design: Jessie Bonaventura
Production Assistants: Youree Choi, Ben Demarest, Jonathan Ginter, Kenneth Olguin, Nicole Simonson

Catch the last screening of Screamers tonight at 7pm at The Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand Street, near Pitt Street, Manhattan). Click here for details, ticket information and directions.

Subscribe in a reader

Art museums make new space for live performance

When the Art Isn’t on the Walls
Dance Finds a Home in Museums
by Hilarie M. Sheets, The New York Times, January 22, 2015

horribly good

oh, the horror of it. what madeline best and shawn irons and lauren petty and brian rogers have put together. called the horror the horror (I have plenty of energy to drive over there). if it drives you to abrons arts center tonight or tomorrow, i truly hope you get in. not too many seats there and what they have of them all up in the balcony, confined to its central section, so you get this awesome (a word i don't use reflexively) panoramic view down into the stage and across the first panels of walls to either side of the stage where video artists irons and petty splash their stunningly beautiful, alternately hypnotic and hallucinogenic imagery. rogers’s soundscape first lures you into a perfectly reasonable environment of road traffic and bird song then snares you the way a really nasty, grasping dream can do and, before you know it, you’re wondering if you’re hearing the passing roar of one of those 9/11 planes and later you’re recoiling from that mel gibson rant, you know, where he berates and threatens oksana and calls her everything but a child of god, only rogers has electronically manipulated this already scary thing to the extent that the madman’s pants and exclamations come out like the unearthly rasp of the beast outta hell. and then there’s best, who goes from being this slight, perfectly ordinary, pleasant-looking young woman drifting across the stage to this try-brid--simultaneously, a shadow, a live creature and a huge, lipsticked, thrashing head video-projected in this environment of creepy/violent sound and sight, transformed from second to second. all of this plus a heartstopping visitation from rachmaninoff. it's genius.

the horror the horror (I have plenty of energy to drive over there). See it tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. Tickets.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Sorry you missed Hilary Easton's show?

Sorry I Missed Your Show!

Saturday, January 29 (4:30-6:30pm)

The upcoming SIMYS features Gibney Dance Center Advisory Group Member Hilary Easton and her recent acclaimed production, Light and Shade.  Moderated by Brian Rogers, Artistic Director of The Chocolate Factory, the event will include excerpts and discussion around Light and Shade, as well as a look back at previous works that set the context for Hilary's current work. 

Free admission. To RSVP, click here.


Gibney Dance Center
890 Broadway (between 19th and 20th Streets), Manhattan
(map)

Rogers and Best: select your memory

Selective Memory–presented by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City–achieves a most eerie intimacy with its audience. To witness it feels, at times, as if one has fallen into what one is watching and weirdly exchanged places with or fused with performer and multi-faceted creative collaborator Madeline Best.

The roughly 50-minute performance takes place in flesh and blood–Best standing before us, nearly motionless or making slight, generally uninflected movements–as well as in projection of her image upon two screens (set design by Brad Kisicki). The first screen, hanging down like a shower curtain, traces a curving shape in the space, a little like the Greek letter omega lying on its back. The second screen is a narrow rectangle suspended several feet in front of the deepest inner curve of the omega.

Rogers sits to the left of the space behind a Mac, a panel of audio controls and a table-top keyboard. Best–wearing sensible shoes and a navy blue dress with fussy tiers of fabric–enters the space and stands just within the curtain’s curve. She’s holding something in her right hand that appears to be a remote control of some sort, but you’ll rarely catch her using it. Swirling sounds and faint voices are heard. Lights dim.

Best takes a few steps, centering herself deep in the curve. The sounds intensify–a shrill rumble, an indistinct voice. Her face appears on the front screen. A faintly-troubled hush embraces this quiet face with its blinking, sensitive blue eyes framed by straw-colored shoulder-length hair and bangs. Slight, almost imperceptible shifts of her head can be detected the more one looks and looks and looks for long stretches of time. And so, with this most minimalist of minimalist choreography, Rogers begins his campaign of snaring watchers. Did you catch that minuscule twitch? Will she suck up her lower lip one more time? As she makes this next shallow pivot, will she suddenly break out in something a little less subtle, more macro?

It’s amusing to imagine someone thinking, “When will the dancing happen?” This is the dancing.

The face on the screen creates an illusion of Best being closer to each one of us that she could possibly be. And, as you think about it, you realize that’s because she strongly resembles a viewer looking out at a performer–expressionless, curious and expectant, perhaps suspicious, perhaps not daring to make a move, suspending the next breath. Best looks like your neighbors in the row, and like yourself. What, then, is she doing there? But this passes once you think about it too much.

You can imagine all kinds of things that could be happening. You can populate this stripped-down place with a multitude of effects and beings and meanings. That would be your memory, selected. Or you can leave it alone.

Rogers brings up a warm buzz or hum and, later, a short, melodic loop as the screen zooms in on a detail of Best’s face from the lower reaches of her bangs to just below her nose. Her eyes–always watchful, though placid--search us out as she shifts in slow motion. The encounter is hypnotic and an endurance trial. A new development–she turns, and we see the back of her head on the screen–seems like a major advancement in a story we still cannot identify, a new chapter. A close-up of her left ear and cheek and chin feels like a punctuation mark. But what was that sentence?

The thought returns: We’ve been motionless, expressionless, silent, blinking as we stare out at Best--as into a mirror-covered object–for close to 45 minutes.

The screen shows us a close-up of the collar of her dress, her chin, her lips. A real-time projection of her appears on the curtain behind her, just to the left of its center seam. (A new dimension!) In short order, we see multiple shifting, drifting Bests populating the space, only one of them made of flesh and blood. The finale–green, serene and dreamy–seems like it should be a breakthrough but feels unreal, surreal and definitely elusive for the flesh-and-bloods sitting in the seats. Best slips away from us, vanished by the devices that brought her to us and, perhaps, brought us to ourselves.

Selective Memory

Wednesdays-Saturdays, through September 18 (8pm)

The Chocolate Factory

5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

#7 subway to Vernon/Jackson Avenue

Information and reservations

What's cookin' at the Factory

Keeping It Small at Chocolate Factory in Queens

by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, May 25, 2010

Sweeney: Could be

In This could be it, choreographer-soloist Jillian Sweeney, gives herself a tough assignment. She must fill a fairly unforgiving space--The Chocolate Factory, modest in size, intimate for the audience and raw in aspect--with the stuff of her inner, psychic life. She must also fill an hour and hold it down with the force of her personality. I'm not convinced that she's totally there yet--a compelling performer who can, indeed, hold down an hour and keep it from feeling too lengthy and self-indulgent--but I admire her poise and moxie.

This solo evening--concluding its run tomorrow--hinges on the artist's apparent predisposition to spontaneously go out of body. Through various creative means, it tells of her history with this phenomenon. Now, consider that we're talking about a dancer. The notion of a dancer not being all that tightly wedded to her actual physical form is pretty interesting, and Sweeney's ambitious approach offers a variety of ways to contemplate this state of affairs.

Sweeney's a pleasant, wholesome-looking young woman who starts her show by striking glamour-girl poses, hip jutting in a ridiculous fashion--not how you'd normally think of her. So, immediately, she's showing something of a disconnection, a picture of unreality. Her poses become tense, and her tiny moves quiver as if she's in a silent movie. She's also subject to the psychological lashings of a disembodied voice--her own, recorded--that meets her gentle equivocations with a demand that she "Say it!" and issues instructions, some of them contradictory. I was tickled when Sweeney finally--finally!--figured out that she could simultaneously "Go to the shaft!" and "Stay down!" if she just rolled the hell over to that shaftway!

That unrelenting Voice can be a bit of hoot. For those of you who will go tonight or tomorrow, I won't spoil it for you by revealing my favorite moment. At the risk of sounding like The Voice that she's already got inside her artist's head, I'd like to see her push that wit harder and Say It! Whatever it is, just Say It!

This could be it unfolds, with fine support for Sweeney, in a space created by Brian Rogers (sound and video) and Chloë Z. Brown (lighting). Sweeney collaborated with her director Jeffrey Cranor on the writing and set (which consists of her storytelling props) and with Mary McKenzie on the costumes.

See This could be it tonight or Saturday night at The Chocolate Factory, 8pm. Information, directions and tickets here.

Brian Rogers: Body and Soul podcast

Brian Rogers talks about The Chocolate Factory--an influential multidisciplinary arts space and gallery in Long Island City, Queens--and about his new full-evening work redevelop (death valley).

Brian Rogers, a graduate of Bennington College, is the co-founder and Artistic Director of The Chocolate Factory Theater. His works for the company include 2 Husbands (2007), a collaboration with playwright Ken Urban; GUN PLAY (2006); and AUDIT (2004). Brian curates The Chocolate Factory's Visiting Artist Program and has collaborated as a sound, video and performance artist on numerous projects. He is also Director of Operations for Dance Theater Workshop and curator of the newly-renovated cabaret space at Queens Theatre in the Park.

See redevelop (death valley) on Thursday-Saturday, February 12-28 and Monday, February 24, all at 8pm.

Directions and further information

Ticketing or at 212-352-3101

(c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File