HERE Kicks Off CULTUREMART 2015 Tonight

The OBIE-winning HERE proudly presents CULTUREMART 2015, taking place tonight, March 4, through March 14. In CULTUREMART, process becomes the focus, as this annual festival offers a first look at live performance work in various stages of development from the boundary-breaking artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) on their journey to mainstage productions. CULTUREMART 2015 serves up 12 adventurous workshop performances of new hybrid work -- spanning topics and genres as varied as brainwashing and bureaucrats, opera and espionage, science and stardom, and everything in between -- and blurring the lines between theater, dance, music, multimedia, puppetry and visual art.

HERE's producing residency programs (HARP & Dream Music) commission and develop cross-disciplinary performance work through residencies lasting 1-3 years, focused on mid-career artists. While in residence, artists have opportunities to present work at various stages of development through work-in-progress showings and more fully developed workshops in CULTUREMART. This vibrant festival offers a vital step in the evolution of new work, delivering for artists and audiences alike.

Resident artist projects seen at CULTUREMART culminate in mainstage productions at HERE. This year's festival also features five works by HARP alumni back with new projects in development, as well as a workshop of a new piece by HERE Artistic Director Kristin Marting. CULTUREMART alumni include Young Jean Lee, Taylor Mac, Lisa D'Amour, Faye Driscoll, Erin Orr, Troika Ranch, Corey Dargel, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, and many more,

CULTUREMART 2015 takes place in both of HERE's theaters: the Mainstage and the Dorothy B. Williams Theater. Full schedule follows.

HERE is located at 145 Sixth Avenue (entrance on Dominick Street). General tickets for CULTUREMART productions are $15.00. Lighthouse 40° N, 73° W tickets are $10.00. Student Rush: FREE with valid Student ID at the box office. For tickets & info, call (212) 352-3101 or visit www.here.org. In-person sales at the Box Office after 5pm on show days only. For more info, visit www.here.org.

Join HERE's new new ticketing program for avid HERE fans, the OFF-OFFten Club and see all CULTUREMART shows for $5 each. With an OFF-OFFten Club membership, for $60, one receives 4 tickets to be used flexibly before the end of the season, 4 glasses of wine, as well as $5 tickets to all CULTUREMART performances and more. Visit www.here.org/shows/membership for more info.

---

CULTUREMART 2015 SCHEDULE:
*Note: productions listed with same date/time represent a shared bill.

Wednesday, March 4 & Thursday, March 5 @ 8:30 PM
CasablancaBox by Sara Farrington & Reid Farrington
CasablancaBox is a completely true exploration of the making of America's favorite movie. It is an original play inspired by recently unearthed and never before heard archival material, combined with an intricate video design through which Casablanca's iconic characters are projected onstage, interacting with live actors. Casablanca serves as the spine from which stories of risk, sacrifice, brilliance and accidents branch off, all told by six performers who jump in and out of time, character, gender, style, tone, aesthetic and, most importantly, Casablanca - all in the pursuit of one answer: What makes a great work of art? Far from a bio-pic, CasablancaBox is an immersion into 1940s Hollywood - glamour, war, censorship, rampant sexism, racism, addiction and violence. And cigarettes.
Additional support provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Wednesday, March 4 & Thursday, March 5 @ 7:00 - 8:30PM
Lighthouse 40° N, 73° W (working title) by Christina Campanella (HARP alum) & Jim Dawson
A sound installation where listeners drift through an aural estuary without leaving their seats. From a pared down palette of sampled recordings (shortwave dispatches, space and aquatic telemetry, obsolete communication devices), sound designer Jim Dawson & composer Christina Campanella spin a musical system of codes and cyphers, imagining a lush future landscape beyond the erasure of rising seas. Lighthouse 40° N, 73° W is a sonic remapping of an unrecognizable New York charted from beneath its flooded streets. This version will be broadcast live through headphones; audiences are free to settle in and listen from a fixed position or move about the space. Installation experience runs in a 25-minute loop, approximately 3 times from 7:00 - 8:30PM on these dates.
Funded by NYSCA's Film, Media, New Technologies Award (2015); Commissioned by Harvestworks (New Works Residency 2014) with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Friday, March 6 & Saturday, March 7 @ 7:00 PM
Thomas Paine in Violence by Paul Pinto
Simultaneously set in and around the mind of the revolutionary activist, Thomas Paine in Violence is a text-dense psychedelic opera inspired by the final days of the American Founding Father's life, the strange events of his "afterlife," and the shock jock punditry of our contemporary media landscape. Its score is a combination of lightning quick speech and song, electronics and a vocalizing chorus of instrumentalists. This is the first full-length theater work by composer/librettist/performer Paul Pinto, in collaboration with co-librettist Rick Burkhardt, vocalist Joan La Barbara and the ensemble Ne(x)tworks.

Saturday, March 7 & Sunday, March 8 @ 8:30 PM *
Abaddon by Sean Donovan & Sebastián Calderón Bentin
Drawing inspiration from Alain Renais' Last Year At Marienbad and Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, Abaddon depicts a surreal social gathering that dissects the behavior, character and class structure of a group of partygoers and traps them in a never-ending cycle of interactions. Working with a multi-generational cast of downtown performers, Abaddon explores the extrarational forces behind the precariousness of social life.
Additional support provided by Art Matters Foundation.

Stairway to Stardom by Amanda Szeglowski/cakeface
Stairway to Stardom is a mixed media dance-theatre tour of shattered dreams, from impractical to impossible. Inspired by and sourcing footage from the 1980s public-access television series by the same name, Stairway to Stardom rides the wave of the disenchanted. Synthesizing intricate choreography and original texts with the post-apocalyptic sound and visuals of Brooklyn's Prism House (Matt O'Hare + Brian Wenner), cakeface honors the contributions of the wildly passionate but questionably talented through their powerful female voice and signature style of linguistic performance art.

*Shared bill: Abaddon and Stairway to Stardom

Monday, March 9 & Tuesday, March 10 @ 7:00 PM*
Science Fair by Hai-Ting Chinn
Science Fair is an opera singer's love-song to science. Conceived and performed by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, with composer Matthew Schickele and pianist Erika Switzer, Science Fair melds Science and Opera into a witty evening of songs, slides and live experiments. The words of scientists, writers and teachers become songs about the phases of the moon, the evolution of whales, the physics of the operatic voice, and above all, the wonder of the scientific worldview.

The Emperor and the Queen's Parisian Weekend by Kamala Sankaram (HARP alum), Tim Maner & Pete McCabe
Comedy, Violence, Sex, Tragedy; all in under 45 minutes. The Emperor and the Queen's Parisian Weekend, a fantabulon of operatic ludicrousness, follows the eponymous tyrants through the temptations of revolutionary Paris. HARP alum composer Kamala Sankaram (Miranda, Thumprint), drawing on a bouquet of musical styles, sets the dark farcical libretto by Resident Dramaturg Pete McCabe to an absurd comic romp through the nature of human want. Directed by HERE Co-Founder Tim Maner.
A HARP Alum Presentation.

*Shared bill: Science Fair and The Emperor and the Queen's Parisian Weekend

Tuesday, March 10 & Wednesday, March 11 @ 8:30 PM*
Mata Hari by Matt Marks & Paul Peers
An interdisciplinary opera-theatre piece, Mata Hari is inspired by the life of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle a.k.a. Mata Hari, the mystic dancer who was executed for espionage during World War I. The story is set during the last months of her life while incarcerated in Paris' notorious Saint Lazare prison. It centers on her fight to live and the five men who led to her death.
Additional support provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Psychic Driving by Nick Brooke (HARP alum)
Psychic Driving surrounds the audience with a hallucinatory landscape of audio surveillance, hospital sonification and clandestine broadcasts, based on the CIA brainwashing experiments of the 1950s, in which subjects were force-fed LSD then played looped audiotapes. Four performers chatter, yodel and nosedive from desks, in an intricate physical and musical score that seamlessly combines musical samples with live performers. Nick Brooke (Border Towns) is known for trademark physical mash-ups, called "operatic in scope, unfolding in layers that constantly reveal new meanings" (Culturebot) and the "most exciting and innovative music theater I've seen in years" (Meredith Monk).
A HARP Alum Presentation. Additional support provided by Bennington College.

*Shared bill: Mata Hari and Psychic Driving

Thursday, March 12; Friday, March 13; Saturday, March 14 @ 7:00 PM*
Ship of Fools by Jessica Scott
Ship of Fools is a live concatenation of the past invoked by music, puppetry and movement, which seeks to illuminate the age-old practice of pathologizing women. The audience travels with us as we weave re-imagined moments from history with found text from the lives of iconic and forgotten women towards one question: are the inmates running the asylum? Who is actually steering our ship: storyteller, politician or madman? What happens when this ship, sailing blind, finally runs aground?
Additional support provided by the Jim Henson Foundation.

Fitzcardboardaldo by Robin Frohardt (HARP alum)
Fitzcardboardaldo is an all-cardboard tribute to the 1981 Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo. A second short film, The Corrugation of Dreams, is a tribute to the Les Blank film Burden of Dreams, the making of Fitzcarraldo. These films by Robin Frohardt (The Pigeoning) were created at St. Ann's Warehouse's Puppet Lab in 2013. They were an official selection at the Telluride Film Festival in 2013 and were shown at the Les Blank Retrospective and were featured in the Puppets on Film Festival at BAM.
A HARP Alum Presentation. Additional support provided by St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab.

*Shared bill: Ship of Fools and Fitzcardboardaldo

Friday, March 13 & Saturday, March 14 @ 8:30 PM
Idiot by Kristin Marting & Robert Lyons
Prince Myshkin squares-off with a notorious woman, a spoiled socialite, and a jealous rival in an intricate and violent quartet, as he dances the knife's edge between torrid tragedy and mystical epiphany. This hybrid response to The Idiot by Dostoevsky, features Kristin Marting's gestural choreography, Robert Lyons' original text, and video designer Grant McDonald's live cinematography, invoking a complex and penetrating brain-scan of Prince Myshkin's "truly beautiful soul."
Idiot was developed, in part, with assistance from the Orchard Project, a program of The Exchange, www.exchangenyc.org. A HERE Artistic Director Project.

And all through CULTUREMART, "Continue the Conversation" with post-show talkbacks as follows:
Soundscapes: Friday, March 6 after the 7:00pm show, featuring conversations with the artists from Lighthouse 40° N, 73° W; Psychic Driving; Thomas Paine in Violence
Variants of Video Integration: Sunday, March 8 after the 8:30pm show featuring conversations with artists from: CasablancaBox; Stairway to Stardom; Mata Hari; Ship of Fools
Playing with Operatic Form: Tuesday, March 10 after the 8:30pm show, featuring conversations with artists from Science Fair; Mata Hari; The Emperor and the Queen's Parisian Weekend

---

The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Artistic Director and Kim Whitener, Producing Director), founded in 1993, is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performance viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines -- theater, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art. Standout productions include Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique and Arias with a Twist, Hazelle Goodman's On Edge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Corey Dargel's Removable Parts, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Kamala Sankaram's Miranda, and Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning, among many others. In 2008, following an extensive renovation, HERE re-opened the doors to its long-time downtown home for the arts, where it continues as a vibrant, welcoming haven for artists and audiences alike. In addition to commissioning, developing and producing innovative new work from artists in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), HERE co-produces the acclaimed PROTOTYPE opera-theatre and music-theatre festival, with Beth Morrison Projects. Through its popular SubletSeries@HERE, HERE also proudly hosts adventurous artists, companies and productions - whether emerging or acclaimed -- from New York and around the country.

The HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) has been HERE's core program since 1998. HARP commissions, develops and premieres new hybrid performances. Through HARP, the Resident Artists are given the opportunity to develop projects for up to three years through works-in-progress showings and workshop presentations in CULTUREMART, culminating in full-scale productions.

In honoring HERE with the 2009 Ross Wetzsteon Award, the OBIE Committee noted, "it's become increasingly hard for artists to find a place to take risks, a safe haven where they can develop daring new work. One theater has regularly bucked the trend, making its mission to ensure that artists have a home for their research and development, and that theatregoers can sample the exciting results."

Additionally, HERE is home to the Dream Music Puppetry Program (Artistic Director, Basil Twist; Producing Director, Barbara Busackino), and the visiting artist programs startHERE: Innovative Theatre for Young People, aimed at young audiences, and hemispHEREs, which brings innovative national and international visiting artists to HERE for a residency and presentation.

HERE's 2014-2015 producing season launched with the premiere of the Artistic Director production Trade Practices by Kristin Marting & David Evans Morris, an immersive theater event on Governors Island (August 31-September 21) and followed with Send for the Million Men by Joseph Silovsky (December 3-13) and the third annual PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now festival (January 8-17). Following CULTUREMART, Spring 2015 delivers the Dream Music Puppetry Program production Short Stories by Teatro Hugo & Ines (April 21-25), and the Resident Artist production Bloowst windku, a dance installation by Rebecca Davis (April 30-May 3).

To post a comment, you must register and login.