Works in Progress Showcase Held by BAX Artists-in-Residence

BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange has announced the WORKS IN PROGRESS SHOWCASE featuring BAX Artists-in-Residence.

THURSDAY - January 19 @ 8:00 PM
Jillian Peña and Catherine Dill

FRIDAY - January 20 @ 8:00 PM
Morgan Gould + Matthew Paul Olmos and Mariangela Lopez

SATURDAY - January 21 @ 8:00 PM
Jillian Peña, Morgan Gould + Matthew Paul Olmos and Dan Fishback

SUNDAY - January 22 @ 6:00 PM
Mariangela Lopez, Dan Fishback and Catharine Dill

Discussion with the artists following each performance.

Tickets:$15 General | $8 Low-Income [Buy Tickets]

Since 1991, our Artist In Residency program has served as a core for our work with artists. The AIR program provides participating artists with one to two years of uninterrupted artistic, technical, and administrative support, as well as the rehearsal space and guidance necessary to take chances, refine their craft and expand their horizons.

This Works in Progress Showcase allows these artists take their new works-in-development from the studio to the stage. These evenings are designed to offer both artists and audience the opportunity to exchange their impressions of the work. After the artists show their excerpts, they return to the stage for a moderated discussion that delves into their intentions and inspirations, and the audience's perception.

See BAX's Artists in Residence showcase works in progress as they prepare for their evening-length performances in April and May 2012.

Click here for more information about the Artists-in-Residence and the work they will be showing.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

CATHARINE DILL / EXPLODING MOMENT
CATHARINE DILL is the Brooklyn-based director of Exploding Moment, a team of composers, video and sound designers, writers, performers and choreographers. Her credits include DATE: TIME at The Collective Unconscious, WHAT I LIKE ABOUT 'BREASTS' at The Williamsburg Art and Historical (WAH) Center, CAN I HELP YOU? at The Bushwick Starr and YE'RE HERE, CUZIN! at Incubator Arts Project. Honors include a Bessie Award, an AREA Award, grants from Art Matters, the Greenwall Foundation, the Heathcote Foundation, and the Curtis W. McGraw Foundation, The Foundry Theatre Emerging Artists' Award, an Independent Artist's Challenge Program Award from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and The Field, and residencies at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony.

HOT DUST examines the intersection of spiritualism, performance and sexual ecstasy. Sister is a spiritual medium working in the 19th century prairie states whose manifestation of ectoplasm (a substance or spiritual energy "exteriorized" by physical mediums) offers her clients such an otherworldly, transformation. She becomes a Sawdust Trail sensation and ultimately a victim of her own celebrity.
Hot Dust cross-pollinates the force of experiential religion with remnants of 19th century expansionism and showmanship such as spirit photography techniques, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series and Aimee Semple McPherson's Foursquare Church.

DAN FISHBACK
DAN FISHBACK has been writing and performing in New York City since 2003. His play, You Will Experience Silence (Stephen Brackett, dir.) debuted at Dixon Place in 2009. Of that show, The Village Voice wrote: "Fishback has a Kushnerian sense for the complexities of historical memory, and while 'You Will Experience Silence' might not be as panoramic as 'Angels in America,' it's sassier and more fun."
Fishback has performed and developed previous work at Performance Space 122, Joe's Pub, Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Collective: Unconscious and the Sidewalk Cafe. He is currently developing two new theater pieces: The Material World, a pop musical about socialist Jews in the 1920s, and thirtynothing, a solo performance about growing up in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic.
Also a performing songwriter and recording artist, Fishback began his solo music career in the East Village's anti-folk scene. His band, Cheese On Bread, has toured Europe and North America, and has released records in the United States and Japan.
Fishback has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Dixon Place. He was a 2007-2009 recipient of the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists.

The Material World is a pop musical about The Fensters - a family of socialist Jews living in the Bronx in the 1920s. 12-year-old Gittel Fenster wants desperately to move to Russia to participate in the great communist experiment, while her father wants to stay in America where life is comfortable. Gittel lets off steam by hanging out with her family's anachronistic tenants - Madonna, Britney Spears, and Ian Fleishman - a young gay man from 2011 who is trying to overthrow his government by making political comments on people's Facebook pages. Will he change the world? Will the Fensters join the Soviet revolution? Will Madonna use secret Kabbalistic codes to harness the power of God and fix everything wrong with the universe? These questions will be answered... in song. The Material World is the second play in the Ian Fleishman Trilogy. The first installment, You Will Experience Silence, was called "sassier and more fun than 'Angels in America'" by The Village Voice in 2009.

MORGAN GOULD + MATTHEW PAUL OLMOS
MORGAN GOULD - I'm originally from Cape Cod, MA. I moved to New York to go to acting school and then quickly realized that the best part of acting class was watching the teacher give notes, and that's when I thought maybe I should be a director. (Though I also spent time doing costume design for a little while.) I pretty much immediately knew that I was interested in working on new plays, because I value the relationship between the director and the playwright so highly. So after college, I worked for two seasons at the Lark Play Development Center, where I met Matthew Paul Olmos. After the Lark, I moved into a year long position at Playwrights Horizons as a directing resident and also began working with experimental director/ playwright Young Jean Lee on her adaption of King Lear. When I completed my residency at Playwrights Horizons, I stayed on with Young Jean and I'm now the Associate Artistic Director of her company, Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Working with her has shaped me in ways I never thought possible. It has opened my eyes to new methods of collaboration and a fearlessness that has enriched my own work very deeply. My own directing work has been seen at Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, New Georges, Fordham University, The New York Fringe Festival and more. I'm also a a former Ensemble Studio Theatre Resident Director, and a member of New George's writer/ director lab, a member of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab.

MATTHEW PAUL OLMOS - I was born in Montebello, CA, grew up in Southern California, and moved to New York City in August 2001. I am the inaugural recipient of the La MaMa ETC 2012 Emerging Playwright Award (as selected by Sam Shepard), a Sundance Institute Time Warner Storytelling Fellow, a two-time Resident Artist at Mabou Mines/Suite, BBC International Playwriting Top Prize of the Americas winner, Ensemble Studio Theatre lifetime member, and 2012 terraNOVA Groundbreakers playwright. A recent finalist for InterAct Theatre's 20/20 Commission; semi-finalist for Princess Grace, P73 Fellowship, O'Neill Conference, alternate Van Lier recipient at New Dramatists, and Playwrights of New York (PONY) nominee.
Co-founder and former Artistic Director of woken'glacier theatre company (two time New York Innovative Theater Award nominee), an NEA New Play Development reader, a New York Innovative Awards judge, a member of No Passport's Hibernating Rattlesnakes with Caridad Svich, and a core staff member of five years at the Lark Play Development Center. I hold an M.F.A. in Playwriting from The Actor's Studio Drama School, a B.A. in Playwriting from UC Santa Barbara, and was given UCLA's GOP Award for Graduate Playwriting. I am a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail's In Dialogue series, New York Theatre Review, and am soon-to-be-published in their annual book on downtown theater with an essay on Mabou Mines. My work has been presented and developed by Sundance Theatre Institute, Mabou Mines/Suite, P.S. 122, HERE Arts Center, Intar Theatre, The Working Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, LaMicro, Lark Play Development Center, The Kennedy Center with The Inkwell, and the Gala Theatre in DC, Teatro del Pueblo in Minneapolis, and as well in Spain. I am currently working on an original TV series, and two new works: the drinking of an unhappy people and so go the ghosts of mexico, a new trilogy piece about the U.S./México drug wars. I live in Brooklyn, recently became a PADI certified scuba diver, and am currently learning (slowly) to surf. The world-premiere of i put the fear of méxico in'em will take place in April 2012 at Gala Theater in DC. And a new work will be produced by La MaMa ETC in 2012-13.

MONKEY is an absurdist comedy which concerns a privileged Caucasian woman who takes in an urban youth as a means of safekeeping after he commits an impassioned felony. The characters include the Woman From Whitesville, her white butler Winthorp, an aged cholo, Speedy, and his estranged daughter who sparks a love with the urban youth. It takes place in an imagined suburbia just outside of an every'city and is inspired by the film Trading Places. The piece came to me as always I am struck by the disconnect between those'that'have and those'that'do'not. And so, in a ridiculous world, I imagine the two meeting. To perhaps illustrate how far we all are still, and how despite our differences in zip code, lifestyle, and temperament, there is always a need and human curiosity to connect.

MARIANGELA LOPEZ
I am a Brooklyn based choreographer and performer, born in Caracas, Venezuela. Since 2001 I have created six independent works. My pieces has been presented in Venezuela, Mexico, France, Boston and multiple venues in New York City such as Dance New Amsterdam, Williamsburg Art Nexus, Dixon Place, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, P.S 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Tisch School of the Arts and MonkeyTown among others. My work is known for the use of multidisciplinary arts and for the participation of people from the communities where I create my performances. In 2004 after the presentation of Wonders of Progress I began to call my group Accidental Movement, hoping that this name would serves as a platform for the realization of my experimental works. My full evening project Outmigration, was chosen by the New York Times for the "Urban Eye: The Best of New York Today-Weekend."
I was a 2009-11 Movement Research Artist in Residency. I hold a BFA from the Boston Conservatory (1999) and I am Certified Movement Analyst from the Laban Institute of Movement Studies (2001). Currently I am a faculty teacher at the Laban Institute of Movement Studies, Ballet Hispanico and I have taught as a guest teaching artist at Dance New Amsterdam and Movement Research.

In my new project I would like to depart by continuing my fascination with the in idea "exposure" and discovering the different layers of our persona through a group process. "How much is visible, how much is hidden?. How choreography can be conceived as a practice, as a ritual of the body. What does it mean to seduce, to provoke and how much 'seduction' is just a natural behavior, a way to survive?". I will depart by investigating these ideas on my own and then I will establish a group investigation by inviting the community to participate in a workshop where I will be able to propose my practice with the hope to create a micro-organism that is formed by the absolute will of wanting and needing to be part of this.

JILLIAN PEÑA
I am a dance and video artist based in Brooklyn. My work is primarily concerned with confusion and desire between self and other, focusing on the most complicated relationship we all have: that of the self to the self. I make dances that sometimes include people dancing, sometimes include you dancing, and sometimes hope that dance can exist without dance, by being moved by something.
I am inspired by psychoanalysis, queer theory, pop media, and spirituality. I have been presented internationally, including at Dance Theater Workshop and The Kitchen in New York, Akademie der Kunste Berlin, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, International Festival of Contemporary Art Slovenia, and Mix Brazil Sao Paulo. I have an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a fellowship recipient, and a BA from Hollins University. I am a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholar and a Practice-based MPhil/PhD candidate in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. My video work is distributed by Video Data Bank. I was a 2009 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a 2009 DanceWeb Fellow at Impulstanz in Vienna, a 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Archauz in Århus, Denmark, and a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at the National Dance Center of Bucharest, Romania.

I make dances that sometimes include people dancing, sometimes include you dancing, and sometimes hope that dance can exist without dancing, but instead by feeling moved in some way - physically, emotionally, or psychologically. I am a dancer, but I do not dance. Dance is the language I speak. It is inside me and all over me. My work focuses on the most complicated relationship we all have: that of the self to itself. This exists in the work through the relationships between the performers, the relationship of the audience to the work, and the relationship the is stimulated in an audience member to their self.

About BAX
BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange is a is a multi-faceted community performing arts center located in Park Slope, Brooklyn offering an annual presenting season, artist services, and educational programs for youth and adults. For more information about BAX and its programs please call 718-832-0018 or visit us on the web at www.bax.org.