"Ship of Fools" docks at HERE Arts Center

Scenes from Ship of Fools
at HERE Arts Center
(photos: Josiah Shelton)

Last evening, HERE launched its 2016-2017 season with Ship of Fools, a multidisciplinary production created by visual artist and puppeteer Jessica Scott with Anonymous Ensemble.  After some delay, we were waved into the tiny Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, filling seats atop what would prove to be our very own "ship of fools"--a platform slowly rotating us past various scenarios of puppetry, dance, music-making and video installation tucked along the perimeter of the space.

My first, innocent step onto this seating area made me fear I was having vertigo--or a heart attack! I stepped, immediately and inexplicably pitching sideways, somehow managing to keep my feet and reach an empty chair. Something probably jostled the platform--maybe even just my stepping onto it--but I didn't figure that out until, during the performance, the platform suddenly began to revolve. That realization would have been reassuring had this turning not felt unpleasant. So this is my trigger warning. But go. You'll eventually get used to the sensation and experience some striking artistry along the way.

Scott plunges us into a shifting terrain that evokes both mental instability and the irrational fear and exploitation of what she calls "women as a dark continent."

From France’s famous all-female asylum Saltpetriere, to the Mary Laundry’s of old England, the overwhelming incidence of modern female depression, to the recent attacks on women’s reproductive rights, diagnosing femininity has forged our modern psychology and politics sewing a seed of an insidious fear: a conviction that the fault line between woman and world lies not in the constructions of popular culture but instead somewhere rooted our inherent femaleness.

--from publicity for Ship of Fools 

Scott and her collaborators turn the theater into a combination wax museum, puppet theater, fun house and house of horrors brought to life by her performers--Kate Brehm, Liz Davito, Jacob Graham, Takemi Kitamura, Sarah Lafferty, Georgie Tisdale and Jessica Weinstein. We're trapped in a compelling nightmare--equal parts elusive imagery, numinous beauty, amusing absurdity, disorientation and looming terror. I must resist the temptation, here, to open this box of surprises, but I particularly enjoyed one famous, unmistakable article of clothing that undergoes a wardrobe malfunction of epic proportions. Its construction and puppet-like manipulation are just a taste of the wild imagination and detailed, painstaking craft on display in Ship of Fools.

The production does have some sluggish, awkward moments--including a few text passages spoken by the otherwise wonderful vocalist Liz Davito. But, no worries. This ship just keeps on turning, always delivering you to something new to discover.

Co-direction, puppetry, costume and set design: Jessica Scott
Co-direction, text and projection design: Eamonn Farrell
Original compositions: Alex Klimovitsky
Lighting design: Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa
Sound design: Gavin Price
Live music and vocals: Liz Davito

Ship of Fools runs through October 22. For schedule and ticketing information, click here.

HERE Arts Center

145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan

Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.

map/directions

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Girl Be Heard on eating disorders and the diet industry

Members of Girl Be Heard
perform Embodi(ED).
(photo: Ashley Marinacccio)

They will inform, delight, alarm and help you to reawaken
that authentic voice that still lives within you. – Gloria Steinem

Girl Be Heard--the award-winning troupe that empowers girls to tell their real-world stories with guidance from theater professionals and activists--announces Embodi(ED), a dance and theater piece about eating disorders and "the American distorted perception of body images."

Directed by Ashley Marinaccio, and produced by theater-maker and activist Jessica Greer Morris, the production will run at HERE for eight performances, Thursdays through Sundays, February 11-21.

All performances will be followed by a 15-minute talkbacks, featuring health professionals, women’s rights activists and the creative team.

For Embodi(ED) tickets, 

click here or call 212-352-3101.

Learn more about Girl Be Heard 

here and on YouTube.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/girlbeheard

Twitter: @girlbeheard

HERE

145  Sixth Avenue (entrance: Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

"Trade Practices" on Governors Island: "Dude, money is crazy!"

Scenes from HERE's Trade Practices
Above, l-r: Daphne Gaines, Mary Rasmussen, Peter McCabe
Below, l-r: Mike Iveson, Jr., Peter McCabe, Dax Valdes
(photos by Carl Skutsch)

A theme as weighty as the financial collapse of 2008, the hand basket we found ourselves in, and what money means in American society might take a project as big, as intricately textured and as labored upon--by a list of collaborators as long as my two arms and two legs spliced end to end--as Trade Practices, created by HERE artistic director Kristin Marting and David Evans Morris. A two-hour event directed by Marting and set in Governors Island's Pershing Hall, the site-specific, multimedia, physical theater performance is audience-immersive and interactive to the max, a game of "high-stakes" investor role-playing on our part as we move among rooms and storylines. It also has song-and-dance numbers, undercurrents of soap opera and even a bloodcurdling touch of the supernatural.

Clearly the entire creative team had a blast growing the witty, rousing Trade Practices and making the ten actors work their sweaty butts off--most notably, Daniel Kublick who, with all his physical might, gamely throws himself into his role as a roguish factory foreman. Tip: If you go, you'll sweat, too. This year for sure, Labor Day doesn't really mean the end of summer, and few of these Pershing Hall rooms have A/C.

Above and below: details from Works Progress Administration military history murals
inside Pershing Hall, Governors Island's former Administration building
(c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Trade Practices--written by Erin Courtney, Eisa Davis, Robert Lyons, Qui Nguyen, KJ Sanchez and Chris Wells--introduces us to the fictional Tender family and employees of Tender, Inc., proud paper manufacturers who go back centuries in New England and US history. Tender's CEO, played by the versatile Peter McCabe, would like to keep some of that New England history (and all of the corporation's current troubles) under wraps. Audience members get to trade shares in Tender, Inc. and witness the secret damage and debris from extremely close vantage points. Cast members' performances, and your own, can be fun even if this sort of thing--high finance, corporate intrigue--is so not your thing. Each viewer's experience will differ according to the storylines followed; if you find yourself disengaged, as I did at one point, you'll have a few opportunities to trade your shares for something potentially more promising.

L-r: Daniel Kublick, Dax Valdes and Mariana Newhard
(photo by Carl Skutsch)

Trade Practices runs through September 21 with performances by Jenniffer Diaz, Daphne Gaines, Megan Hill, Brooke Ishibashi, Mike Iveson, Jr., Daniel Kublick, Peter McCabe, Mariana Newhard, Mary Rasmussen and Dax Valdes. Click here for full details, including performance schedules, ticketing and Governors Island ferry departures from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Enjoy Governors Island.

Smith + Tinker writers group presents new plays at HERE

So, what do you want to do this weekend? Catch a Ladder to the Moon?

Smith + Tinker launched Ladder to the Moon on the eve of Halloween at HERE Arts Center, the fruit of a five-month process of collaboration within its group of playwrights. Wikipedia, in its entry on Smith & Tinker--the electronic game company, that is--cites "the fictional characters Smith & Tinker, an artist and an inventor who are briefly mentioned in the Land of Oz series of books as the creators of Tik-Tok the machine man."

And, actually, here's what the theater-oriented Smith + Tinker's Sarah Rose Leonard had to say about that in an interview with blogger Kippy Winston:

In the Land of Oz, Smith, an inventor, and Tinker, an artist, created many fantastical inventions. But they are only referenced in the books; these two characters don’t actually appear. That’s because, long before you, the reader, showed up Tinker painted a river so real he fell in and drowned and Smith created a ladder to the moon and never came back down.

Yes, that certainly is some serious artist juju.

With that thought in mind, the purveyors of Ladder to the Moon promised: "Amid the mystic revelry of Halloween week, two entrancing bills will feature pieces related to fear, reinvention, and how we tell stories."

Above and below:
cakeface in Harold, I Hate You
(photos by Trevor James Martin)

Amanda Szeglowski's Harold, I Hate You, created with her skillful all-female dance/theater troupe, cakeface, gets Program B off with a trio of tick-tock-machine-like scouts--the choreographer, Elle Chyun and Jeso O'Neill--heading off on a camping trip. These squeaky-clean automatons, crisp and uniform in gesture, distract and entertain themselves around the campfire with chatter about things that supposedly scare them--"I contracted flesh-eating bacteria once. I’m pretty sure," "I think I have Mad Cow disease"--in a firm but expressionless way that, perhaps, suggests how we rehearse and ritualize our fears until they truly rule us. And who is the hated Harold? Oh, that's a great story, and I will leave you to discover that one for yourself.

Program B also includes an excerpt from Ghost Stories, created by Tiny Little Band (Jerry Lieblich and Stefanie Abel Horowitz), and an excerpt from The Dinosaur Play by Ryann Weir, directed by Annie Tippe. In fairness, I can't say much about these works-in-progress, but I can tell you that the cozy environment of the first--and its eerie stories--took me back to childhood in a curiously pleasant way. (Caribbean folk love all kinds of ghost tales, and some of these types of stories are quite familiar to me from my early study of the paranormal.) Weir's nutty dialogue with co-star Dylan Lamb in The Dinosaur Play is hilarious and leads, near the end, to a marvelous and touching twist. Both of these projects show signs of something interesting cooking below the surface, and perhaps those elements will strengthen over time.

Ladder to the Moon's Program B repeats today at 4pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Program A--featuring works by Andrew Farmer and Francis Weiss Rabkin--will have its final performance tonight at 8:30pm; click here.

HERE Arts Center

145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan

Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.

map/directions

They're making it right HERE.

New York Performing Artists Share Inspiration on ‘Made Here’
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, March 13, 2013

MADE HERE? Yes, and now available at Hulu!

Vernon Reid and Gabri Christa (photo by Chiara Clemente)

HERE's innovative video documentary series MADE HERE--directed by Chiara Clemente and featuring theme-based interviews with performing artists who make New York New York--has come to Hulu!

Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp (photo by Chiara Clemente)

See it here--yeah, I know, an unavoidable pun--presented in partnership with TenduTV.

Keep an eye on CULTUREMARTists

HERE's CULTUREMART festival concludes this evening with a shared program featuring samples of two promising works-in-progress:

Shaun Irons, Lauren Petty and Mei-Yin Ng consider their multimedia performance work--Keep Your Electric Eye On Me--to be at a very early, very sketchy stage of development. I'll have to take them at their word, although KYEEOM already brings enough ominous razzle dazzle to make me wonder what radical changes, as the creative team calls them, we'll be blown away by when the final product debuts. Irons and Petty contribute the lysergic video and sound, and Ng, the enigmatic choreography and performance, in an already well thought out, well structured display that nevertheless seems to emanate from inside one damaged or very disturbed head. While I can't wait to see what this one becomes when it grows up, I'm a little scared, too.

I saw an early rehearsal of part of Alexandra Beller's other stories at the Gibney Dance Center, and that experience drew me to this CULTUREMART showcase where Beller is showing an excerpt. This interesting ensemble piece, set to premiere at Joyce SoHo in April, comes with three unique features.

The first is a video view into the window of a building in Manhattan's Flatiron District, a voyeuristic monitoring of a couple's unheard, but clearly troubled, conversation.

The second is a big white portable structure designed by Brian Ireland--a clever abstraction of a house with a simple rectangular cutout for a door and an external, embedded ladder. "Stories"--in the form of mystifying allegiances, provocations and conflicts--smoothly drift in and out of this house. (If you go, for a view into the house, where there's always something going on, avoid sitting at the extreme left end of the audience.)

The third, and most exciting, is the guest drop-in collaborator from among the royalty of New York's contemporary dance scene. Here's how Beller describes the collaborator's role:

Every show features a different guest artist...[who] works with us for 1 hour to one day, depending on the event. Their role is structured improvisation, which is then set and developed live during the course of the performance.

So, of course, for that to work, your company must be perceptive and game and, in that, Beller can thank her lucky stars. (Performers for the HERE showing, besides Beller and the guest artist, include Lea Fulton, Toni Melaas, Kendra Portier, Edward Rice, and Simon Thomas Train.)

At GDC, I saw the troupe stirred by the guesting Paul Matteson who moved clean and elegant as an angel on a mission. Last evening, the springy, lusciously flexible Luke Gutgsell gave this vanguard role a far scruffier, feral edge and seemed to rouse an uncommon animal intensity in the company at the conclusion. Alex Springer will perform tonight.

Look for this work when it comes to Joyce SoHo, April 4-21.

The final presentation of this shared program runs tonight at 8:30pm. For program information, click here for Irons/Petty/Ng and here for Beller. For general ticket and box office information, click here.

HERE
145 6th Avenue, Manhattan
(Enter on Dominick Street, one block south of Spring Street.)
(map/directions)