Theater at PS122's 2015 COIL Festival Kicks Off 1/2

Performance Space 122's contemporary performance festival, COIL, returns for its tenth anniversary year. Known for its groundbreaking contemporary performance, this year's COIL 2015 festival spans interdisciplinary art working with new technologies and forms. Through installations, live and virtual practices, PS122 is committed to redefining how, where and when performance is experienced.

Performance Space 122 Artistic Director Vallejo Gantner commented: "In the midst of PS122's transformation, and just a year until our move home to 150 First Ave begins, this year's COIL grapples with questions of transformation, change, and the breakdown of identities between audience and artwork, digitally and physically, and individuals themselves. The creation of new technology plays a part, but there is far more than that going on. We interact, we participate, we see audiences creating the work itself."

In their celebrated show RoosevElvis, (Jan 2-10), the TEAM take us on a hallucinatory road trip from the Badlands to Graceland as the spirits of Elvis Presley and Theodore Roosevelt battle over the soul of Ann, a painfully shy meat-processing plant worker and what kind of man or woman she should become.

In Mike Iveson's dystopian musical Sorry Robot (Jan 6-17) the machines of the future set out to prove they can do almost anything but shut up.

In YOUARENOWHERE (Jan 8-17), Andrew Schneider, the Wooster Group wunderkind, experiments with the virtues of sensory overload via quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and online "Missed Connections."

Unpredictable, dark and funny, The Blind Date Project (Jan 7-17) starring Australia's Bojana Novakovic (Rake, Shameless), is a real event in a real bar to which everyone can relate - a blind date between two people who have never met and who are desperately in need of connection.

Faye Driscoll's Thank you for Coming: Attendance, (Jan 6-10) envisions a society in which performance is both a collective and political act. PS122 and Danspace Project reprise this much beloved premiere iteration of the Thank You For Coming series, in which Driscoll explores different ways of building new bodies, new stories, and new ways of being around a constantly constructed and re-imagined group experience.

Through a unique practice of improvisation Molly Lieber & Eleanor Smith's movement work presents a living, breathing, thumping manifestation of a profound and raw artistic collaboration. Rude World (Jan 7-12) is the final series in a triptych of works created over the course of three years.

Inspired by Diego Velázquez's seminal rendition of Venus at her Mirror (1599-1600), From A to B via C (Jan 11-14), by much celebrated Swiss choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis, explores the various provinces and domains of 'mainstream' popular culture.

Through two parallel solos weaving in and out of each other, BeginAgain, (Jan 14-16) zoe | juniper, questions the multiplicity of self, memory and perspective while exploring new technological methods for setting and triggering a raw tableaux of movement and stage design.

In Sebastian Errazuriz's A Pause in the City that Never Sleeps, (Jan 1-31) a continuous yawn is projected repeatedly in Times Square. The bored character appears on a screen as an omnipresent head looking down from the skies, yawning between the masses of marketing and advertisements.

MY VOICE HAS AN ECHO IN IT (Jan 7-11) by Temporary Distortion is a six-hour durational performance of live music, spoken text and video set within a freestanding, sound-proof installation that is 24 feet long by 6 feet wide. Complex and densely layered, Temporary Distortion creates an intimate experience where everyone has a front row seat.

dataPurge by Ryan Holsopple / 31 Down (Jan 15 & 16) is a live, virtual cleansing of one's digital life. Clients will undergo data dialysis by monitoring the emotions associated with their online identities using body sensors and brain wave monitors during a live-streamed event.

Following its sold-out, line-around-the-block, wall-busting, keg-spewing 10th anniversary blowout at COIL 2014, CATCH (Jan 10) - "everybody's favorite" hydra-headed, multi-disciplinary, rough-and-ready performance series - returns to COIL 2015 to devastate your whole deal. CATCH is curated with delicate irreverence by Andrew Dinwiddie, Caleb Hammons & Jeff Larson.

Reservations and most tickets for COIL will go on sale November 17, 2014. Reservations may be made and tickets purchased online at ps122.org, via phone at 212-352-3101, and in person at venue box offices except where otherwise noted. Single ticket prices vary per event. Ticket packages include: The PS122 Passport (5 tickets for $75) and The COIL Pass (8 tickets for $122), recommended for arts professionals and performance lovers.

PS122's tenth annual COIL festival is made possible, in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York Community Trust, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New York Theater Program.

More information about COIL can be found at ps122.org.