Situated in and around an abandoned subterranean bank vault beneath one of New York's oldest skyscrapers, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's biggest Swing Space — more than 22,000 square feet — has been transformed into a multi-use center for the development and presentation of works by performing artists. The varied, sprawling space on two lower levels offer numerous opportunities to meet the needs of a diverse array of performing arts projects: a small rehearsal room acoustically appropriate for music groups, two medium-sized rooms ideal for table readings and site-specific exploration, and two expansive areas inside the vault itself, where LMCC has installed hardwood dance floors for dance and theater groups to rehearse. The stunning bank vault details of the space make for a unique setting for the creation and exploration of new work. On-site storage for props, costumes and equipment is also available.
14 Wall Street is one of the largest space donations LMCC has received and is generously provided by Capstone Equities.
Carrie Ahern, a Wisconsin native, is an acclaimed independent dance and performance artist who has been based in New York City since 1995. She worked primarily as a freelance performer/choreographer for over a dozen dance and theater companies until fully committing her energy to her company, Carrie Ahern Dance, in 2005. She seeks organic and original collaborations with dancers, composers, musicians, visual artists and most recently, philosophy scholars.
She has had a number of commissions for her work including Danspace Project for the evening length The Unity of Skin (2008) presented at St. Mark’s Church and Baltimore Theatre Project. Red (2006), also evening length, was commissioned both by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church and the Guggenheim Works-and-Process series. In 2003 Bessie award winning dancer Carolyn Hall commissioned a solo, with an original score by Grammy award winning musician Matt Darriau and Ivan Goff. Her shorter works have been presented at numerous venues in New York City: P.S.122, Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, the Angel Orensanz Foundation, Dance New Amsterdam, Chashama, and The Flea, among others.
Nationally and internationally, her work has been presented at Baltimore Theatre Project, Danceworks and Walker’s Point Arts Center in Milwaukee, Le Regard du Cygne in Paris and at the Festival OFF in Avignon, France.
Carrie Ahern Dance has received funding from the Danspace Project Commissioning Initiative with support from the Jerome Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Fractured Atlas’ Creative Development Grant; Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX)/2007 Space Grant Residency; American Music Center and the Henry Cowell Estate.
Ahern has taught master classes in improvisation at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, been a guest speaker at NYU for philosophy classes in Spectacle, and taught dance in the New York City Public Schools.
At 14 Wall Street, Carrie Ahern will be developing Sensate, a 3-hour dance installation for the top and bottom levels of the Brooklyn Lyceum. Ahern is collaborating with Nietzsche scholar Yunus Tuncel; composer Anne Hege; costume designer Naoko Nagata; and dancers Donna Costello, David Figueroa, Kelly Hayes and Jillian Hollis.
Wally Cardona (Artistic Director, WCV, Inc.) is a dance-maker based in Brooklyn, NY.
Current projects include Really Real (BAM and International Festival of Arts and Ideas); Revival (Group Motion and Hidden City, Philadelphia); A Light Conversation (collaboration with Swiss-British choreographer Rahel Vonmoos); and teaching Performance/Phenomenon: Theory and Philosophy into Physical Practice at The New School and composition at The Juilliard School.
Brought up in California and New Mexico, Cardona was a competitive gymnast and clarinetist before beginning to dance at age 19. In 1986, he moved to NYC to study dance at The Juilliard School (B.F.A.) and the following summer attended the Ballet Project at Jacob’s Pillow, where he met Ralph Lemon and subsequently danced with his company until 1995.
In 1992, Cardona’s first work premiered at the Festival International de Danse in Cannes, France; his next work, Made In Voyage (1995), was performed in seven countries; and in 1997, Wally Cardona Quartet (WC4) was founded and WCV, Inc. was formed. Cardona is the recipient of a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a 2006 Bessie Award for the creation of Everywhere (which marked his debut at BAM’s Next Wave in 2005).
Cardona will develop sections of Really Real – a new work created for movers and singers, with original music by Phil Kline and lighting by Roderick Murray – to be performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival.
Chun-Chen Chang, CC, born in Taiwan. Currently lives and works as a choreographer and performer in New York. She received her M.F.A. in dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was awarded a three-year Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship. She worked with Kirstie Simson at the Art of Dance Improvisation: Research and Performance in Italy and Greece. She was a resident at the 2007 Dance Omi International Dance Collective, and 2008-09 Outer/Space Artists in Residence at Dance Theater Workshop. She participated in the 2008 Summer Arts Program at Watermill Center, and has been also invited to join in 2009. In 2008, she received the LMF Dance Fund from Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. CC has also worked with Robert Wilson, Jonah Bokaer, Tere O’ Connor, Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, Esteban Donoso, Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group, and many others.
CC considers dance as her art practice in her conceptual and perceptual exploration. Viewing the body as the representation of time and being, her fundamental concern is to question the body's presence. She is interested in exploring not only the movement of the body, but also human consciousness, transformative states and energy – the things which connect us as human beings. In her work she intends to explore what it feels like to be human.
During the residency at LMCC, she will develop a new project Cloud No. 33, a collaboration with sound artist, Hong-Kai Wang, and visual artist, Ivy Ma.
Joe Diebes creates work that converges around the categories of performance, contemporary music, and visual art. From 1996-2003, as a core member of GAle GAtes et al., he created the sonic element for many large-scale collaborative performance projects. Since then, he has made a range of works including operas, unclassifiable hybrid pieces, and art installations for venues in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He has been awarded residencies at Djerassi, Yaddo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Engine 27, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, and The Experimental Television Center and has received support from the LMCC, Rockefeller MAP Fund and the NYSCA Composer Commissioning Program.
Some venues that have recently presented his work include: Music At The Anthology (NYC), The Noguchi Museum (NYC), Fusebox Festival (Austin), Tramway (Glasgow, UK), Singapore Arts Festival, California State University, David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), the 2006 Winter Olympics (Torino), and Yuanfen New Media Gallery (Beijing). His recent collaboration with Phil Soltanoff, i/o, premiered this past fall at Theatre Garonne in Toulouse, France.
At 14 Wall, Joe will work with vocalists to workshop a score for Hypatia, an opera based on a libretto by Mac Wellman that centers on the life and violent death of the 5th century woman mathematician and pagan philosopher.
SPONSORED BY NOBODY is a Brooklyn-based theatre company dedicated to developing original work that is relevant to contemporary American culture. Founded in 2005, SPONSORED BY NOBODY has developed seven critically-acclaimed, original works of theatre -- including The Position [Ice Factory ’05], not from canada [FringeNYC ’07] and W.M.D. (just the low points) at Ice Factory ’08 (NYC) and The Game Is Up! at the Vooruit Arts Center (Ghent, Belgium). The company has earned a reputation in New York and Europe for presenting abrasive theatre committed to the idea of art as a catalyst for social change. While rooted in theatre, the company incorporates multiple disciplines – borrowing from dance, film, music, and installation art – while employing found-texts and original writing to reflect contemporary realities in our culture. SPONSORED BY NOBODY is committed to a collaborative development process and operates with a sense of urgency on each project. The company remains under the leadership of Artistic Director, Kevin Doyle; Company Members Scott Miller, Paul Newport, Sean O’Hagan, Brendan Regimbal, Jessa Wildemeersch and Sarah Stephens.
We are developing our newest work Behind The Bullseye, prior to its world premiere at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater's INCUBATOR program (July 1-11, 2009). The play fuses elements of journalism, film, music and installation art to examine the shopping habits of Brooklyn residents from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds.
Catherine Galasso is a bi-coastal artist and divides her life and work between New York and San Francisco. She creates dance theater performances that use history as a springboard for abstract emotional portraits. Her subjects include the man with the Guinness Record for being struck by lightning seven times, hysterical women from the Salpetriere hospital in Paris, and Joshua Norton, a beloved San Francisco eccentric who in 1859 proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States.
Catherine was born in New York and grew up in Italy with her father, Michael Galasso, an acclaimed composer for dance and theater. She holds a European Baccalaureate from the Art Institute in Venice, Italy, and a BA in Film from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She has performed her choreography at Danspace Project, Dance New Amsterdam, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and the Chen Dance Center in NYC, and ODC Theater, CounterPULSE, West Wave Dance Festival in San Francisco. Her multi-media work, “Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice,” was awarded Most Original Theater Production at the International Theater and Film Festival in Pristina, Kosovo (2006). Past Artist Residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida, and Dance New Amsterdam’s Choreolab. Catherine is a current Artist-in-Residence at ODC Theater in San Francisco. Her choreography, performance art, and films can be seen at www.catherinegalasso.com.
Risa Jaroslow has been making and performing dances in New York City and across the country since 1974. The Company has performed at the major venues for new dance in New York City, including Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Sitelines 2008, the 92nd Street Y, the Joyce Theater and Central Park Summerstage. Her Company, Risa Jaroslow & Dancers, is dedicated to merging performance and community work and to including diverse communities as participants and audience. The Company has also performed and taught nationally and internationally, most recently at the Dublin Dance Festival. With a grant from Pentacle’s ARC Project she is creating a second home for her Company in the Hudson Valley. Her Company regularly partners with community-based organizations. Using the distinctive series of teaching techniques she has developed, Jaroslow engages dancers of all levels and people of all ages and abilities. In 2005 Jaroslow was the first Jerome Robbins Fellow in Dance at the Liguria Study Center in Bogiliasco, Italy. Jaroslow has taught technique, composition, and repertory at colleges and universities including The University of Maryland, St. Joseph’s College, Adelphi University, and Trinity College. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the New York State DanceForce, the Ford Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, ArtsLink, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust: Live Music for Dance, Meet the Composer, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, North Star Fund, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
We will use our Swing Space to develop The Partner Project (working title), a series of site-specific performances culminating in a final evening-length work. The Partner Project asks, how do we partner, physically and emotionally? What do intimate partnerships look like, and how do they change over time? How are we changed by them? What is the range of dynamics within a single partnership?
Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company (YJLTC) creates and produces new, experimental performances for theater that are written and directed by Young Jean Lee in collaboration with company members from diverse backgrounds. YJLTC deals with major issues such as race and religion in such unpredictable and complicated ways that they stick in people’s minds and challenge them to think rather than reaffirming their pre-existing beliefs, whatever those might be. YJLTC’s works have been funded by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the Tobin Foundation for Theatre Arts, the Norman Bel Geddes Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Since 2003, YJLTC has presented Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Appeal at Soho Rep, Pullman, WA at P.S. 122, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven at HERE Arts Center, CHURCH at P.S. 122 and the Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival (the show subsequently toured to Minneapolis), and most recently, The Shipment at The Kitchen. YJLTC’s works have toured to over 20 venues around the world. The company was awarded the ZKB “Best in Festival” Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel and Young Jean Lee has been awarded the OBIE Award for Emerging Playwright. Theatre Communications Group has published a collection of all of YJLTC’s plays to date in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays. In January 2010, YJLTC will present an adaptation of King Lear at Soho Rep. Young Jean Lee is currently under commission by Playwrights Horizons to write a new musical with songs by Mike Doughty. YJLTC is also developing new projects with Lincoln Center Theater and St. Ann’s Warehouse.
At Swing Space, YJLTC will be developing it's new work, an adaptation of King Lear written and directed by Young Jean Lee. The show will premiere on the mainstage of Soho Rep in January 2010.
The Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) is a multi-disciplinary co-operative organized by director/playwright/visual artist Esther Neff and composer/sound artist/musician Brian McCorkle. Formed to facilitate non-hierarchical dialectic and aesthetic exchange, co-apprenticeships (mutual exchange of discipline skills, information, and ideology/theory) in performance and performative art, PPL’s devised work most often focuses on rhetoric, institutional systems, the social sciences, and the role of emotion in these. Most recent projects include On the Cranial Nerves of Barbarians, a documentary operetta performed at Gathering of the Tribes Gallery, Dixon Place, Manhattan Theatre Source and elsewhere in Spring 2009, installation/performance The Silviculture Museum, chashama, 2008, with Chiasui Chen, Shawna Ferrato, and Herbie Go, Cultur(e)ality: Loud is the Oral Diary of the Western World with Chiasui Chen, and Qualia with Matthew Stephen Smith both at BAX and elsewhere, class/performance Schooled and Unschooled at Dixon Place and West End Theatre 2008, and the film/performance series In the Company of Eshu. Brian McCorkle plays in gypsy jazz band Djangos and Tangos, What Color is your Machine Gun, and just released an album called Detailed Diagrams for Complicated Machinery. Esther Neff’s past work includes collaboration with Dina Keller in Munich, Germany, work with the Internationalists Directors Collective at the Space, the Public Theater, and the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, and theatre direction.
PPL will be developing a performance piece called Work Force/Forced Work, a seminar for all involved in the American work force. Structural, argumentative, and verging on hysterical, the piece is part of a trilogy about demos and the formation of the sensible.
Performance Lab 115 is an actor-driven experimental theater company dedicated to creating works that explore the depth and fragility of human connection. They are an ensemble and approach all projects as a collaborative team, each with an equal voice in the process and an equal stake in the product. Through this experimentation they strive to challenge their audience on an intellectual, spiritual and visceral level.
Since its inception in 2005, the company has produced 7 shows and 5 multimedia projects including FringeNYC Overall Excellence Award-winners God's Waiting Room (2005), A Small Hole (2006) and Mourn the Living Hector (2008). Their work has been performed in New York at P.S.122, HERE Arts Center, Galapagos, Dance New Amsterdam, CSV, The Kraine, chashama, and collective:unconscious, as well as the Merlin International Theater in Budapest, Hungary. Caucasian Chalk Circle, currently in LMCC's Swing Space program, was originally developed through Mabou Mines’ Resident Artist Program and will be produced in June 2009 as part of The Chocolate Factory’s spring season.
Performance Lab 115 tackles Brecht's epic tale of responsibility in times of chaos to close out The Chocolate Factory's Spring 2009 season. Drawing on imagery from current and past economic crises, PL115 presents a bold new approach to Brecht: as a classic American fable.
Eleonor Sandresky writes music that Allan Kozinn of The New York Times decribes as “lovely, but enigmatic,” that TimeOut NY pronounces as having “ever-varying qualities of touch, register and intensity,” The Village Voice reports is “witty, liberating“ and that Leonard Lehrman of AUFBAU hails as “beautiful.” Her work encompasses music for virtuoso soloists and large ensembles, cabaret, art songs, and evening-length collaborations. Her music was featured in the short film Fault, that opened at Cannes in May 2004. Her music can be heard on Koch International, One Soul Records, ERM Media’s Masterworks of the New Era series, and Albany Records. Eleonor has been a composer-in-residence at STEIM in Amsterdam, at The MacDowell Colony, and at the festival in Hvar, Croatia. Recent premieres include excerpts from Phenomenon 2: etudes, for piano and electronics by the composer, Suite for String Quartet, by Ethel in NYC, and Voyelles, a part of the Innocence Lost: Debussy-Berg Project. Her music has been featured at major venues on three continents, from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival to the Totally Huge New Music Festival in Perth, Australia. She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, ASCAP, American Music Center, and Meet the Composer.
Working at the forefront of avant-garde concert-as-theater, Eleonor has reinvented herself as a Choreographic Pianist with her evening-length composition, A Sleeper’s Notebook, that she premiered at The Kitchen as a part of the Keyboard Summit in 2003. In it she explores her deep interest in how motion translates to emotion through sound, a hyper-emotional experience for the audience and the performer. Michele Branwen of HoustonArts, remarks that “Her vision has a freshness and unusualness that has become rare in the avant-garde scene, and her delivery is captivating and true.” One of New York’s pre-eminent new music pianists, with performances and premieres of new works by a wide range of composers from Steve Reich, Egberto Gismonti, and Don Byron to Eve Beglarian, Philip Glass and David Lang, she has recorded for CRI, Nonesuch, One Soul Records, New World Records, Mode Records, and Orange Mountain Music, and has played concerts throughout the world.
The project Eleonor working on during her Swing Space residency is a series of works that are based on sound phenomena, entitled Phenomenon 2: no one wants to meet in real life anymore, for violin, electric guitar and contrabass flute and electronics with video and choreography. The piece uses a sensor triggering system that allows the performers to interact with the electronics directly, controlling the pace of the work through choreography since the sensors are attached to the body.
The Operating Theater, entertains audiences with unusual, innovative, provocative performance, creating art that can only be fully experienced in a live forum. It experiments with perception and explore the visceral subjectivity of human experience. Since its inception in 2003, it has produced full-length productions including FLAT (Moral Values Festival best-of-festival encore run at The Brick Theater) The Present Perfect (NYIT Award Winner for Excellence: Lighting Design & Nominee for Excellence in Set Design 2007) and Van Driver (two productions at The Cherry Lane Theater’s Cherry Pit Late Night Series); short-form performance pieces: Are You ALIVE?, a traveling metaphysical game show (Little Theater, Catch Series, P.S.122’s Avant-Garde-A-Rama), and excerpts from The Garden of Forked Tongues (Little Theater, Catch Series) and The Doctor Schüler Medicine Show, an avant-garde cavalcade at El Cid and The MET Theater in Los Angeles).
At 14 Wall Street, The Operating Theater will be working on The Garden of Forked Tongues, a live and recorded mixed-media performance concerning a group of ordinary people who become involved with tourists from the future. Their journey takes them to all corners of the universe, and to vast, unknown horizons in their minds. Throughout the production the audience is hypnotized to impart the feeling of traveling through time with the characters.
Joanna Settle has directed classic and modern classic work by Sophocles, Ionesco, Shakespeare, Euripides, Pinter and Beckett, among others. She directed “9 Parts of Desire,” which won two Lucille Lortel Awards and was hailed by The New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world.” Recently, Joanna directed “In Darfur” for the New York Public Theater. Joanna is a graduate of the Andrew W. Mellon Directing Program at the Juilliard School and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts/Theater Communications Group Fellowship for Directors.
In 2008, Joanna was named Artistic Director of Shakespeare on the Sound. Her inaugural production for the company will be A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
This summer, Shakespeare on the Sound will present Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Joanna Settle and featuring a score by Stew and choreography by David Neumann. With a cast of 17 and a design team of 5, this production will be performed site-specifically to an audience of 16,000 from June 16 through July 12, 2009 in Rowayton and Greenwich, CT.
Steven Gridley’s plays have been seen in downtown New York theatres such as HERE Arts Center, Lark Theatre, Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Theatre for the New City, Altered Stages, and Spring Theatrework’s Dumbo space. His plays have been published by Playscripts, Brooklyn Publishers, Smith & Kraus, and by Martin Denton in his Plays and Playwrights Anthology. Steven was named as one of the “People of the Year” by nytheatre.com saying, “Indisputably one of the smartest and most innovative young playwright/directors working in New York's Indie theatre scene.” Steven graduated from Columbia’s School of the Arts with an MFA in Playwriting and is currently being mentored by John Guare.
Andres Munar is an actor/director from Bogota, Colombia. He is currently a Fox Foundation “Extraordinary Potential” Fellow through TCG in residence at Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, California under the guidance of artistic director Michael John Garces. Andres' work has been presented at: NY Theater Workshop, The Public/HHTF, INTAR, HERE, The Lark, Rattlestick, NAATCO, Edge Theater Company, Cherry Lane, EST, 24 Hour Plays, NYMF, New Dramatists, Melting Pot, MIle Square, Shalimar... Andres made his feature film debut last year at the Cannes Film Festival in Steven Soderbergh's CHE.
THE DUDLEYS! takes the memories of a young man, Vic, and translates them into a malfunctioning 8-bit video game. Featuring a live band with original music composed on vintage video game equipment (Atari, Gameboy, Commodore 64) and 8-bit video footage, THE DUDLEYS! pits the two dimensional world of happy endings up against the confusion and aimlessness of real life.
Geraldine Cardiel’s choreography draws upon her experiences as an artist from México, living in New York. She has windows into several cultures, and choreography is a way for her to explore and share the differences she has encountered.
Ms. Cardiel’s choreography has been produced in New York by Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as part of Mexico Now 2004, Joyce SoHo Presents, DanceNow Festival, Teatro La Tea as part of México Now 2005, The Local Produce Festival, Joyce SoHo 2005 and 2008, Dance New Amsterdam as part of Mexico Now 2006 and The Limón Institute.In México City by Dharma Danza Contemporánea,In Liverpool/England by Hope University and In Madrid/Spain by Teatro DT.
Geraldine Cardiel was born and raised in Mexico City. She holds a degree in Modern Dance from The Américas University in México. She is currently studying to be a Feldenkrais practitioner. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
At 14 Wall Street, she will be developing a new work, “unfinished,” that manipulates movement and translates it into unresolved sequences that relate to individual habits.
Don Cristobal, Billy-Club Man is a new puppet opera exploring the
life of the Spanish Punch, as he appears in Federico García Lorca's puppet plays
and as he is imagined offstage. Ranging from bawdy, violent puppet
farces to surreal poetry, Lorca's lesser-known puppet plays express
his unique view that Don Cristobal has a life offstage, in which
his traditionally violent role gives way to his complicated
potential for goodness. Puppeteer Erin Orr and composer Rima Fand
take inspiration from Lorca's lovingly irreverent approach, by
combining existing plays with newly imagined visual and musical
scenarios. Through hand, shadow, and bunraku style puppetry, as
well as live action and original music, the piece explores the
violent appetites within Cristobal and within us all.
In the Swing Space, the grantees will develop an excerpt that will
be shown January 14th and 15th in the Culturemart Festival at HERE
Art Center. They will also use the space for exploratory work on a
new scene with the cast and director Jill Samuels. Don Cristobal,
Billy-Club Man is being developed through the HERE Artist in
Residence Program and Dream Music Puppetry Program. This piece has
also received developmental support from the Puppet Lab at St
Ann's Warehouse and is funded in part by the Jim Henson Foundation,
and Cheryl Henson.
Ensemble Eidolon is an acoustic music ensemble consisting of ten dedicated members, all of whom engage in either professional practices or regular concert performances within the experimental music community in and out of New York City.
Eidolon performs original compositions written by its members. Its focus is not only the performance of the pieces, but more importantly, on the development of each piece through workshop-style rehearsals in which musicians exchange ideas and information on technique of the instrument. In effect, the pieces are performed differently each time depending on each musician’s artistic choices and the ensemble’s ongoing molding of the overall interpretation. Since its first rehearsal in May 2007, the group has been meeting for bi-weekly rehearsals and performing monthly since last November at the Lutheran Church of the Messiah in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Current participants in Eidolon are Tucker Dulin (trombone), Ann Adachi (flute), Bryan Eubanks (s. saxophone), Dave Ruder (clarinet), Maria Mykolenko (violin), Andrew Lafkas (bass), Adam Diller (t. saxophone), Dave Kaden (oboe), Katie Young (bassoon), Jim Altieri (violin), and Kenny Wang (viola).
Eidolon is using the 14 Wall Street rehearsal space for intensive research and development of the group’s current compositions and strategies through group and sectional rehearsals. Also, a large-scale installation/performance is being developed and recorded there for presentation at Diapason Gallery for Sound in April of 2009.
***
Eidolon presents an evening of experimental compositions at 14 Wall Street
Eidolon, a 12 member acoustic ensemble, will present compositions they have been developing in the bank vaults at 14 Wall Street. All five spaces of the bank vault in our basement level rehearsal space will be used; one composition, written by an ensemble member, assigned to each room. Sound will overlay, shift, and at times pause, as performers travel through each space and interact with timbers reflected in each space. A few timed sections during the three-hour concert will be designated for a tutti section, where all performers gather to play a single piece. For more information about the Eidolon, please visit their website.
Date & Time
Saturday, May 30, 8–11PM
Location
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space, 14 Wall Street, Level B
Founded in 2002, Ex.Pgirl is a performance company led by artistic co-directors Bertie Ferdman and Suzi Takahashi. Working with an ensemble of culturally diverse female performers, Ex.Pgirl creates original, hybrid, and humorous theatre that explores issues of cultural inclusion and exclusion form the perspective of each company member. Previous works include Ablution (awarded “best’ of American Living Room Festival), Waving Hello (awarded a Franklin Furnace award for Performance Art), and 10 Plates (invited to Prelude '06). Ex.Pgirl is currently in their second residency at HERE Arts Center where they are developing Paris Syndrome, a piece about living in New York City that is based on a phenomenon of extreme culture shock when Japanese tourists visit Paris. Ex.Pgirl' s work is funded, in part, by DCA, NYSCA, the Urban Artist Initiative, and LMCC.
Ex.Pgirl is using the Swing Space grant to develop, create, and rehearse Paris Syndrome. Although the piece will not premiere until Spring '10, Ex.Pgirl will show a 45 minute workshop version at HERE's Culturemart Festival in January '09, and will enter another development phase in Spring '09.
Koosil-ja has received funding from the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation (2008), Asian Cultural Council (2008), Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2007), four National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer Fellowships (1994-1998) and three New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowships (1991, 2000, and 2006). She received a New York Dance and Performance Award, a Bessie, (2004) in Choreography for the creation of mech[a], OUTPUT, and deadmandancing EXCESS.
She received commissions from and presented works in New York at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, The Kitchen, La MaMa E.T.C, Aaron Davis Hall, Performance Space 122, The Performing Garage, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Central Park SummerStage, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, and LMCC's Swing Space at 15 Nassau Street.
Nationally she has presented at Theater Artaud, San Francisco, CA, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, MA, The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA, Dance Umbrella, Austin, TX, Diverseworks, Houston, TX, Jumpstart, San Antonio, TX, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN, American Dance Festival, Durham, NC, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, On The Board, Seattle, WA.
Her international touring has included performances at iDANS,
Istanbul, Turkey (2009); Das Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin,
Germany (2007); and the European Dance Development Center (EDDC),
Arnhem, The Netherlands; EDDC/Werkstatt, Düsseldorf, Germany and
Lisbon, Portugal (1994-1998); International Dance Festival in Rieti,
Italy; and venues in The Netherlands and Germany.
Koosil-ja also creates and performs music and songs. In 1984, she co-founded the band Bosho as a percussionist and vocalist and has toured over thirty cities in Europe and Japan. She has composed the music for her dance works memoryscan (1999), The Anatomy of Happiness (2000), OUTPUT (2004), and wrote songs for many of her works, and also for Woo.Co (a modern dance company), Copenhagen, Denmark in 2004. She worked with The Wooster Group and wrote songs with them. Her composition, Like Us, was released on the Agriculture Record label from New York in 2002 and was licensed for Robert Wilson's digital project Portrays for the Beijing Exhibition in May 2008.
In April 2007, Koosil-ja participated in the Media in Transition Conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In October 2007, Koosil-ja participated in the Flying Circus Project, 2007 - Travelogue, sited in Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Koosil-ja holds Master of Science Degree from Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
During her residency, Koosil-ja and her media group, koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO will develop programming, a video projection system, and a dance, which uses the ideas of Body, Image and Algorithm as a conceptual backbone. The result will be a new work which has been commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop to be presented in Spring 2010 and will tour at The Dance Center, Chicago and MANCC Florida State University. A Work-in-Progress presentation will occur at 14 Wall Street in May.
***
Koosil-ja presents Work-in-Progress Performances at 14 Wall Street:
Performance
Description of Work: (Purposely left blank) Dance by: Melissa Guerrero, Ava Heller Music by: Geoff Matters
Dates & Times
Tuesday, May 12–Saturday, May 16,
7PM and 8:45PM
Location
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space, 14 Wall Street
Sarah Michelson's work has been presented and commissioned in NYC by BAM, PS 122, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, and Movement Research; has toured recently to The Walker Art Center (Mpls), On the Boards (Seattle), Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival (Mass), The Cutting Edge Festival (Frankfurt, Germany), The Venice Biennale, SommerSzene, Salzburg, Tanz im August Festival (Berlin), and the Zurich Theater Spektakel Festival, where she received the Der Foerder prize for best work presented at the festival.
Michelson has created several commissioned works, including The Experts (Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project, 2002), Love is Everything (Lyon Opera Ballet, 2005), Swan Lake (Transitions Dance Company, Laban Centre London, 2006), Daylight (PS 122, 2005), Daylight (for Minneapolis) (Walker Art Center, 2005), & DOGS (BAM's Next Wave Festival, 2006).
She has won three "Bessie" Awards: in choreography for Shadowmann (2003) and Group Experience (2001); and for Visual Design in collaboration with Parker Lutz and Davison Scandrett for DOGS (2006). She received the 2008 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award and the 2006 Alpert Award in Dance.
Michelson, born in Manchester, UK, trained at the Laban Centre, London, IPC and Merce Cunningham Studio, NYC and received an MFA in Fiction Writing from Mills College, CA in 1990.
At 14 Wall Street, Sarah Michelson will develop a new evening-length work DOVER BEACH (working title) with musical score in collaboration with composer Pete Drungle and visual design in collaboration with Parker Lutz, with the U.S. premiere at The Kitchen in June 2009.
Founded in 1998 by Chris Elam, Misnomer Dance Theater is a modern dance company celebrating the nuances of human communication, including the tenderness, humor, and absurdity that characterize our day-to-day interactions. The company's emotional and inventive work transcends the stage, connecting with audiences through the theater, installations, film and the web.
Misnomer's work has been hailed by top critics around the world. Their 2006 production Throw People/Land Flat was named “one of the top ten dance performances in NYC” by The New York Times, and Dance Magazine included Misnomer on their 2007 “25 to Watch” list.
Just as innovative and noteworthy as Misnomer's dances is the work they do to collaborate across disciplines. In 2007, Elam and his dancers worked closely with Björk and in 2006, Misnomer collaborated with Tronic Studios on motion-capture technology.
In addition to its acclaimed choreography, Misnomer is a leader in the dance field in Internet outreach. Rather than using the Web as a traditional static storefront, Misnomer works to transform its web platform into a dynamic hub of two-way communication between artist and audience, and is currently developing an online Audience Engagement Platform for the dance field.
At 14 Wall Street Misnomer is beginning research and development for a new evening-length choreography with our company to premiere in 2010.
Part sonic landscape, part video installation, Red Fly/Blue Bottle is a multimedia music-theater work premiering at HERE Arts Center, April 2009, that uses the technology of audio/visual documentation as a metaphor for the human memory to investigate how the mind distorts and rearranges reality when besieged by absence and loss.
Red Fly/Blue Bottle is created by Christina Campanella (music) and Stephanie Fleischmann (words) in collaboration with director Mallory Catlett, video designers Peter Normann and Mirit Tal, scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg, and lighting designer Miranda Hardy; with performers Black-Eyed Susan, Jesse Hawley, Chris Lee, and live music played by Campanella (accordion, toy piano, and Ace organ) and Sam Baker (drums).
Red Fly/Blue Bottle has been developed thanks to the HERE Artists Residency Program and grants from New York State Music Fund, the Greenwall Foundation, NYSCA’s Individual Artists Program, Meet the Composer, and the Experimental Television Center, as well as residencies at Gertrude Stein Repertory’s Digital Performance Institute and the Chocolate Factory (Fresh Meat Festival) and a space grant from Chashama. Red Fly/Blue Bottle was part of Prelude ’07 at the CUNY graduate center.
In the Swing Space the grantees will be holding a video workshop, investigating the middle of the piece, and rehearsing the entire thing in preparation for production at HERE Arts Center in April 2009.
Founded in 2000, the Tiffany Mills Company investigates highly physical movement (drawn from release technique, partnering, and improvisation) to build layered material with emotional and psychological resonance. The Company's palate of movement is enriched by cross-fertilizing forms. They collaborate with contemporary composers, writers, theater directors, designers and filmmakers, not only to blur lines between mediums, but also to find innovative ways to push form and content.
The Company's process of creation is collaborative and ensemble-based. With each work the performers draw from their personal lives. As a young contemporary female artist, Tiffany Mills directs the work to focus on the body, often investigating themes of disorientation, disjointed relationships, sexual tension, gender, transformation, and the clash between urbanity and nature. The Company places the audience in an active role by asking them to be part of the performance -- challenge them to participate in an experience.
Called "One of the real talents of the emerging generation" (Village Voice), the Company has shown work at: Guggenheim Museum Works & Process, Duke on 42nd Street, Symphony Space, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Dancing in the Streets, Joyce SoHo, DTW Fresh Tracks, Danspace Project, PS 122, and HERE. The Company has toured to: Wexner Center, OH; PICA, OR; Jacob's Pillow Inside/Out Festival, MA; Dance Place, DC; Contemporary Dance Theater, OH. Internationally, they have toured to Mexico and Canada. The Company was initiated into the National Performance Network in 2007.
During their Swing Space residency, the Company will be developing Tomorrow's Legs, a dance/theater work examining the plasticity of memory. The premiere will be at Danspace Project February 12–14, 2009. Touring will follow.
Founded in 1991, Big Dance Theater is known for its inspired use of dance, music, text and visual design to expand and refract literary texts, weaving disparate sources and forms into seamless theatrical wholes.
Under the Co-Artistic Direction of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Big Dance Theater has created 15 dance/theater works, generating each piece over months of collaboration with its associate artists, a long-standing, ever-evolving group of actors, dancers, composers and designers.
In 2000, the company was awarded an OBIE for its "passionate practice of the most implausible choreographic and literary concoctions," and in 2002 Co-Directors Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson were honored with a BESSIE for their "boldly arranged marriage of dance and theater."
Big Dance Theater has been presented in both dance and theater venues in New York City, nationally, and abroad, including Dance Theater Workshop (where the company has performed for seven seasons), The Performing Garage, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, The Kitchen, The Guggenheim Works and Process Series, the Fall for Dance Festival, Classic Stage Co., The American Dance Festival, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, UCLA Live!, On the Boards in Seattle, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Big Dance has performed internationally at the Bonn Biennale, The Polverigi Festival in Italy, The VIA and EXIT Festivals in France, The GIFT Festival in Tbilisi, Georgia, as well as theater in Belgium, Rotterdam and Germany.
French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in NYC and Les Subsistances in Lyon, France have co-commissioned Big Dance Theater to create an original work which will premiere in Lyon in April 2009. In the Swing Space Big Dance Theater will work on the new commission entitled, Comme Toujour Here I Stand, which will re-invent Agnes Varda's classic New Wave film, Cleo From 5 to 7, for the stage.
NYC theatre company CollaborationTown steps outside individual, traditional roles in order to unify different styles, opinions, emotions, backgrounds and philosophies into cohesive ensemble-driven pieces of theatre. All artistic and operating decisions are made by way of a team called the Artistic Core, composed of seven alumni of Boston University's School of Theatre Arts (Jesica Avellone, Geoffrey Decas, Terri Gabriel, Matthew Hopkins, Boo Killebrew, Jordan Seavey, and TJ Witham), along with Managing Director Lee Ann Gullie. Productions include the upcoming The Truth Will Out, Townville (at La MaMa E.T.C.), 6969 (at 59E59 Theaters; winner of three Innovative Theatre Awards: Best Ensemble, Best Featured Actress, and Best Actor) The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos (FringeNYC 2006 Award Winner), They're Just Like Us (nominated for four 2006 Innovative Theatre Awards including Best Original Full-Length Script and Best Production), The Astronomer's Triangle (nominated for four 2005 Innovative Theatre Awards including Best Original Full-Length Script and Best Production), The Trading Floor, This is a Newspaper (FringeNYC 2003 Award Winner), and Dante's Inferno. CollaborationTown has held two residencies at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center in Watermill, NY. Shenanigans Comedy Collective, CollaborationTown's rebellious middle child, performs biting sketch comedy throughout NYC. http://www.collaborationtown.org/
While in residency with LMCC's Swing Space, CollaborationTown will primarily focus on their new collaboratively-created piece, a meditation on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the theme of "waiting." The play, which has yet to be titled, began forming during CTownâs February residency at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center. Also through LMCC, the company will workshop Artistic Core member Jordan Seavey's new dark comedy The Truth Will Out, about a closeted gay TV news journalist/personality and an out gay 15 year old who is murdered by his classmate.
Clubbed Thumb
January-October 2008
Clubbed Thumb commissions, develops, and produces funny, strange, and provocative new plays. Since its founding in 1996, the company has earned three Obies and presented plays in every form of development, including over 60 full productions. Clubbed Thumb is a groundbreaker,
with an unparalleled track record for finding emerging artists and producing some of the country's most innovative new plays; a
matchmaker, cultivating relationships between theater artists through our development and production programs; and an incubator, nurturing
emerging artists and their work, from first read-through to fully mounted production. We are committed to providing opportunities for,
and to improving the quantity and quality of women's roles in dramatic literature.
While at 14 Wall Street, Clubbed Thumb will develop a pool of new
plays and projects, commissioned and otherwise, by Andy Bragen, Sheila Callaghan, Jason Grote, Michael Levinton, Ethan Lipton, Ann Washburn,
and Chris Wells, among others.
Adam Dugas is a singer, actor, writer, producer and director based in New York City. His show Chaos & Candy is a non-traditional holiday extravaganza, launched in 2002 and will see its seventh annual production this December. Other projects include Dueling Harps, a collaboration with Ann Magnuson remounted at Redcat in October, 2008. Adam has made performances for Deitch Projects, which represented The Citizens Band, a project he co-founded in 2004. He performs regularly with harpist Mia Theodoratus as Adam & Mia and released an EP of their harp and voice duets.
The project of Chaos & Candy has always been to disrupt received notions about the history and purpose of Christmas, and to open a window on it for those who feel excluded. At the core of each show are myriad facts about the season: pagan sources of traditional rituals; the evolution of St. Nicholas to Santa Claus; supernatural legends involving witches, trolls and werewolves; and the creation of the modern holiday in 19th century New York City.
The 2008 show, Full Fathom Fiesta, is a two-act theatrical piece that will play the Abrons Arts Center December 19 and 20, 2008. The first act is a rapidly-paced, character-driven book musical set on a cruise ship which is destroyed at the end of the act. The second half, set underwater, is abstract and evocative, and incorporates acrobatics, aerial work, and puppetry.
The Lower Vault space at 14 Wall Street will be used to write and rehearse the piece Full Fathom Fiesta. There is a cast of 25 dancers, singers, and acrobats, multiple choreographers and 20 original musical numbers.
Kyle deCamp
January-October 2008
Kyle deCamp creates and performs interdisciplinary works in an ongoing investigation of the intersections of art, history, individual lives, multiple perspectives. Her work has been produced in NYC and in Europe, with support from The Jerome, Soros, Joyce-Mertz Gilmore and Greenwall Foundations, Arts International, New York State Council on the Arts Theater and Composer Commissions, Franklin Furnace Fund, residencies at Yaddo, Harvestworks, Movement Research, iEAR Studios, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
A "Bessie" award winning performer, she has collaborated and toured internationally with many artists in theatre, dance, performance, film and media including Richard Foreman, The Builders Association, John Kelly, John Jesurun and Chris Kondek among many others.
In the Swing Space deCamp will be working on URBAN RENEWAL. URBAN RENEWAL is an immersive theatrical experience exploring perception, the impact of public policy and the significance of the buildings we live in, from a child's rigorously unsentimental POV. In this solo performance, an articulated house, its destruction and absence, becomes the stage on which the story of a dislocated girl in a disintegrating urban landscape is enacted.
Shana Gozansky
January-October 2008
Brooklyn based director Shana Gozansky has a sharp focus on the development of new work. As a chashama Artist-in-Residence she developed and directed Him, by ee cummings for which she received the Orbis Tertius Award for Young and Emerging Artists and The Midway World, a poetry play investigating the emotional landscape of loss as part of chashama's Theater Incubator Program. Ms. Gozansky has directed various new works that have been presented at various venues including GAle GAtes et al, Stella Adler Studios, Bowery Poetry Club, Dickinson College and site specific work in Los Angeles. She has also been an assistant director on a variety of projects including The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at Henry Miller's Theater, Ken Nintzel's Antidepressant and 9 Parts of Desire at Manhattan Ensemble Theater, The Geffen and Berkeley Repertory Theater. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab and received her B.A. in theater from Bard College. She is currently focused on the development of her new play The Little Secrets, written with Rob Grace and collaborating with designers Kris Anton, Sara Auster, Sydney Maresca, and Eric Southern.
While at 14 Wall Street Shana will be doing the first stages of exploration into the physical world of The Little Secrets with actresses Caitlin McDonough-Thayer and Alexis McGuiness as they ready the play for a full production.
Immigrants' Theatre Project was founded in 1988 by Artistic Director Marcy Arlin to give a public theatrical voice to those who are marginalized; to promote the genre of Immigrant Theatre as a valid American theatre form; and to be an artistic model for intercultural relations. ITP received the 2003 OBIE for innovative theatre. Using traditional and experimental theatre forms, ITP works with professional theatre artists for mainstream audiences and immigrant communities, and has premiered over 400 plays and worked with theatre artists from over 90 nations/ethnicities. Notable projects: Tropic of X/Caridad Svich Artheater of Cologne, Germany, Heresy/Progress/Sabina Berman and Matei Visniec, 365/365U/Suzan-Lori Parks, Journey Theater, a theatre project working with survivors of war and torture; Unexpected Journeys: Plays by Women from Muslim Cultures, American Dreams Staged Readings Series; Czech Plays in Translation (w/ Theatre Institute-Prague/Czech Center NY, Public Theater); Dis-location & Re-Invention (w/ The New Group/Martin E. Segal Theater Center); After the Fall: Reality and New Romanian Theatre (MESTC), New Indigenous Australian Voices, with Australian American Theater Initiative, Difficult Dialogues: Plays About Religion-Laguardia/CUNY; Name Day & Marko the Prince, by Jovanka Bach. Double Auntie Waltz/Aurorae Khoo. Upcoming: Sweet Karma, by Henry Ong; Sandbox/The First Time, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute.
ITP is using the Swing Space at 14 Wall Street for rehearsals and prop storage for its upcoming production at 59E59 Theater, Sandbox/The First Time, 2 plays in English translation by Polish playwright Michal Walczak. The directors, Polish director Piotr Kruszczynski, and ITP Artistic Director Marcy Arlin, are using the Blue Safe Room and the Classroom, often simultaneously, which is an enormous boon to our project. This event is part of the Made in Poland festival, presented with the Polish Cultural Institute. We have been given around 25 days, with access to the space as we need it and it is available.
John Jasperse Company presents live performances of contemporary dance and engages in a broad range of residency activities in the United States and abroad. Featuring the choreography of John Jasperse, the Company continues to build a growing presence on the international contemporary dance scene. Through the development of new works and their presentation the Company aims to challenge and engage its audiences in rich and innovative aesthetic and intellectual experiences, thereby expanding the form of contemporary concert dance and its relevance to the greater culture.
Mr. Jasperse has been awarded many prestigious prizes and fellowships including the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (2003), the Tides Foundation's Lambent Fellowship in the Arts (2004), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1998), the National Endowment for the Arts (1992, 1994, 1995-96) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1988, 1994 and 2000). Jasperse received a 2001 New York Dance and Performance a.k.a. Bessie Award for the body of his work, and John Jasperse Company dancers received a collective Bessie in 2002 for sustained achievement as an ensemble. His work has been presented by festivals and presenting organizations in the United States, Brazil, Chile, Israel, Japan, and throughout Europe including La Biennale di Venezia, Cannes International Dance Festival, Dance Umbrella, EuroKaz, Kampnagel, Montpellier Danse, Tanz im August, TanzQuartier, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, and the VEO Festival.
John Jasperse Company will use the 14 Wall Street Space for the development of a new evening-length performance work Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking and Flat Out Lies (working title), planned to premiere at The Joyce in Spring 2010. Included within the rehearsal development is a series of Open Rehearsals, which will feature a live rehearsal of the work in development as well as projection of video footage from rehearsals of material ranging from improvisational sketches to finished choreographic sequences. Documentation of the rehearsal process is available through the John Jasperse Company's website, including a section of blogs for audience members to further respond to the work:
Juneteenth Legacy Theatre
January-October 2008
With a mission to entertain, educate, enrich, and empower communities of artists and audiences through the telling of stories about the
African-American experience and its legacy, authored by emerging and established playwrights, Juneteenth Legacy Theatre develops new and
original works and produces in both New York City and Louisville, Kentucky, where it is the only professional African American Theatre
company.
The company took the name “juneteenth” to honor the traditional African-American holiday that celebrates the belated announcement of
Emancipation to slaves living in the western territories on June 19, 1865.
Over nine years, the company has presented 137 plays -67 written by women, 30 premieres and eight transfers-through its various programs:
Juneteenth Jamboree of New Plays, BOLD JOURNEY Tour and JLT@NYC. The company also publishes a bi-monthly on-line newsletter, JLTNews. It
has carved a unique niche by emphasizing play development, emerging/established artist collaboration, one-on-one mentoring, and producing
in two cities, New York and Louisville, Kentucky. The company's work has received critical acclaim in both the New York City and Louisville
media.
The company's mission, goals and programming targets both under-represented audience populations and under-represented artists,
especially women of color, as primary stakeholders. The company's emphasis on new play development, and its willingness to encourage artists to cross-discipline and to put “works finding their voice” before general audiences makes Juneteenth Legacy Theatre an exciting creative home for emerging and established artists alike.
During its Swing Space residency, Juneteenth Legacy Theatre will develop two works, Bang! Bang! Bang! Again and Again for a "Field Day"
presentation at Abrons Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, and August in June, a compilation of scenes and monologues from August Wilson plays
for the "Friday Night Footlights", sponsored by the Dramatists Guild.
Open since 2000, Manhattan Theatre Source (the Source) is an arts service and producing organization located in the heart of Greenwich Village. Its mission is to develop exciting, new works for the stage. Recently named "one of the top five Off-Off Broadway theaters" by New York magazine, the Source launched Obie Award-winning Broadway musical and was home to the world premieres of Coronado by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) and Richard Vetere's Machiavelli and the New York premiere of Keith Reddin's All the Rage.
The Source's programs include the Writers' Forum, a weekly think tank for more than 30 playwrights; the Estrogenius Festival, a five-week festival celebrating female artists; the PlayGround Development Series, which supports the development of new plays; and Spontaneous Combustion, a 48-hour short play festival.
Manhattan Theatre Source will use the LMCC Swing Space to develop and rehearse Universal Robots, a science fiction epic for the stage by Mac Rogers, inspired by Karel Capek's R.U.R. We will use the space for developmental readings to enhance the script and for workshops and rehearsals in preparation for our February 2009 production of the play at Manhattan Theatre Source's space at 177 MacDougal Street in downtown Manhattan.
Maria Millar
January-October 2008
Violinist and multidisciplinary artist Maria Millar has performed as a soloist throughout Canada, China, Japan, Ireland and the US. 170 performances in the principal role of Solo Dancing Fiddler in Riverdance On Broadway and the North American and Asian Tours of Riverdance: The Show included 4 center stage numbers of improvised solos and simultaneous fiddling and dance. Maria also performed in Radio City Music Hall's One World Jam and premiered her creation for 5 prerecorded violin tracks and 1 live dancing violinist, All for One, on CBC's nationally televised The Great Canadian Music Dream. Most recently, Maria toured her one-woman show of original compositions for violin, voice and dance – funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts – that illustrates her vision of the multidisciplinary performing artist. Maria currently performs in Kilterclash, a trio whose original works unify the diverging sounds of world and classical music with the force of rock. Beyond performing her creations, Maria lives to improvise: her arrangements and aural transcriptions of Japanese, Chinese, Celtic, Gypsy, Klezmer, Tango, Turkish, blues, jazz, pop, rock and classical music have laid the foundation for fearless ad-libbing in any setting. Maria holds accelerated BM/MM’s from The Juilliard School.
Kilterclash is a trio created to explore world and classical music forms within a rock music framework. At 14 Wall Street Millar will be creating a full-length show that incorporates music, language and dance for the group.
Melinda Ring/ Special Projects
January-October 2008
Special Projects is a production company that supports the creation of dance and movement based art projects. It promotes dance performance as a visual event as well as a kinesthetic experience. Generating works for art spaces, visual art mediums, and specific sites, as well as theatrical venues, its aim is to challenge audiences to expand their expectations for dance performance.
Melinda Ring is a choreographer whose work is informed as much by the concerns of experimental work in visual art, film, and theater, as it is by developments in new dance. More interested in continuing to question why and how to make dances than resolving the answer, Ring has produced works with titles like Impossible Dance, and Huh?. Commissioned and produced by The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College last year, Huh? will be presented again in November at the Santa Monica Museum of Art as part of Martin Kersels’ Heavyweight Champion. Thanks to a Dance Theater Workshop Outer/Space Residency grant, and the Mabou Mines/Suite Resident Artist program, Ring spent the fall developing the dance, Hmmm..., which will premiere at The Kitchen in their 2009 winter/spring season. Ring is a graduate of Bennington College (MFA) and UCLA (BA). She moved from Los Angeles to New York City in September, 2001.
Using spaces within the basement of 14 Wall Street as readymade sets, Ring is working on a video installation version of Hmmm.... Following the mantra of loving it – impulses, mistakes, possibilities – more and more and more, the dance accumulates ever more expressive versions of itself toward exquisite chaos.
Aya Ogawa/ Knife inc.
January-October 2008
Aya Ogawa is a performer, director, playwright and translator. Performance credits in NYC include the title role of The Loneliness
of Noam Chomsky with the Butane Group and JR Oppenheimer in The Bomb with International WOW Company. She has also performed nationally
and internationally in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Milwaukee, and notable venues in The Philippines, Thailand, Japan, and Austria. As
a playwright, her work has been seen at Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, SoHo Rep, HERE,
and The Joyce Theater. Her project in progress, ARTIFACT was staged at PRELUDE07 Theater Festival at City University of New York. She
has translated several Japanese plays into English including the upcoming works of Toshiki Okada, ENJOY and Five Days In March. BA,
Theatre Arts, Columbia; 2005 Playwright Fellow & Usual Suspect, NYTW; Van Lier Fellow, New Dramatists; Artist in Resident, HERE Arts
Center; grants: Urban Artist Initiative; Axe-Houghton Foundation; NYSCA; space grant: Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Founder & Artistic
Director of knife, inc.
Knife inc. is a collective of visual, audio, technology and theater artists who create time-based works that explore the multiplicity of
experience of living in an international context. The company's work is designed to investigate the moments of crisis, the collision of the past and the future, and seeks a modern, international language of art.
At 14 Wall Street, Aya is developing her new play oph3lia slated for full production at HERE Arts Center in June 2008. oph3lia examines
the archetype and themes emerging from the character in Shakespeare's Hamlet in a contemporary and international context. Three interwoven stories of disjoint and disconnection portray the convergence of dream and reality in a globalized world.
Peter Flaherty (Creator/Director) is a video artist and director whose work has been seen in theatres, galleries, and museums internationally. His most recent large-scale video installation, Pass Back a Revolver, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Select theatrical video design work includes: Francois Girard's Flight of Lindbergh & Seven Deadly Sins at Opera National de Lyon; The Builders Association's Continuous City, SuperVision, Alladeen, and Avanti (international touring); Chen Shi-Zheng's My Life As a Fairy Tale at Lincoln Center Festival; Bang On a Can's Lost Objects at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Basil Twist's Dogugaeshi at The Japan Society (NY); and Complicite's The Elephant Vanishes (international touring). Recent video installations have been shown at: Nexus Gallery (Philadelphia), Fleisher-Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia), the home of Agnes Gund (President Emerita of MOMA, NYC), and MIT Media Lab. In 2000-1 he was a Harvard University Artist-in-Residence. He has taught Directing for New Media at Yale School of Drama (Fall '05), as well as intensive new media workshops at NYU, CalArts, and Carnegie-Mellon.
Jennie MaryTai Liu (Creator/Choreographer, Performer, & Film Actor – Chien–nu) is a dance-theater maker whose work has been presented at Dance Theater Workshop, Joyce SoHo, PS 122, Galapagos Art Space, The Bushwick Starr and the now defunct Red Humor Salon in Bushwick. She has had the pleasure of performing with Big Dance Theater, Witness Relocation Company, Cathy Weis Projects and Nellie Tinder. She trained as an undergraduate at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at Hollins University/American Dance Festival.
Soul Leaves Her Body is an integrated-media performance synthesizing theater, dance, live video, music, and cinema. Inspired by a thirteenth-century Chinese story about a young woman who rips her soul from her body in order to pursue her destiny in the city, this original, contemporary work explores the soul-body relationship in today's networked, electronic culture. A team of international film, theatre, electronic music, and visual artists create a multi-channel film live onstage, mixing pre-recorded film with a multitude of onstage cameras. Lush cinematic visuals appear on ghostly moving panels, reshaping and obscuring the glass stage, while outside the cameras' frame we are drawn into a highly-integrated folk dance for modern life.
A multi-media ensemble performance loosely inspired by Ibsen's Lady from the Sea, Sounding synthesizes cinematic POV and live feed video with original dialogue, songs and music. Leda – once New York City's art rock goddess — is now wife to a psychiatrist on Cape Cod. But a Dionysian figure from her past, a musician known as The Stranger, refuses to release her. As she mourns the death of her infant child, Leda confronts the disorder and outsized desire The Stranger brings.
Written by Jennifer Gibbs and directed by Kristin Marting, Sounding is a collaboration with Maya Ciarrocchi (video designer), Kamala Sankaram (composer), David Morris (set designer) and Raquel Davis (lighting designer). Performers include Okwui Okpokwasili, John Gould Rubin, Todd d'Amour, Lathrop Walker and Maureen Sebastian.
Sounding has been incubated in the HERE Artist in Residence Program (HARP) and developed thanks to additional support from the New York Coalition of Professional Women in the Arts & Media Collaboration Award, LMCC and Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater's Digital Performance Institute. Collaborators are working toward a Spring 2010 premiere production at HERE Arts Center.
The grantees will use the Swing Space to workshop video and song sequences in rehearsals with the actors, exploring deep integration of live action and text with video and music, in preparation for a workshop showing in CULTUREMART at HERE Arts Center, January 26 – 28 at 8:30 p.m.
The Shalimar is a New York City based company. Shalimar is committed to making collaborative new plays that are vital and relevant to a younger generation and it strives to strengthen the theatrical community. Shalimar was originally formed by four graduates from the Actors Theatre in Louisville apprenticeship program and IT has SINCE expanded with one more member from the NY theatre community. Shalimar consists of Shoshona Currier (Artistic Director), Alona Fogel (Producer), Kim Gainer, Jen Taher, and Joey Williamson. Since 2004 The Shalimar has produced new plays, short play festivals, and numerous readings. Their contemporary musical adaptation of Phaedra - LA FEMME EST MORTE or Why I Should Not F!%# My Son - played to sold out houses at the 2006 New York Fringe Festival and it won The Stage Award for Best Ensemble at the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Shalimar's original play stirring - devised from online personal ads - played all over New York, and at the Smirnoff Underbelly as part of the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Other productions include: A Thousand Words: Short Plays on Photography featuring new plays by seven writers loosely based on Susan Sontag's book On Photography, and You People (Short Plays About Those People) featuring plays and songs dealing with stereotyping in America. World premiers include Bad Girls Good Writers by Sibyl Kempson at The Brick's $ellout Festival, Clarisse and Larimon and The Rich Silk of It by Deb Margolin, tostitosand over-exposed by Michael John Garces, Skirt by Katie Douglas and Les Carabiniers by Kirk Lynn. The Shalimar will be presented as part of PS122's COIL Festival in January 2009 and it has Binge opening in December which are short plays based on cookbooks.
During its Swing Space residency, Nastaran Ahmadi and The Shalimar will develop The Exchange, a play inspired by the company's initial research and interviews on the subject of immigration, national identity and cultural mythology. Our residency will culminate in a showing of a more polished script in anticipation of a production at The Ontological in June 2009.
