Banana Bag & Bodice to Present Film Premiere of SPACE//SPACE in January

Banana Bag & Bodice will present the premiere of their film Space//Space as part of the Special Screenings program at the Anthology Film Archive. Space//Space is a cinematic reimagining of their 2012 critically acclaimed live theatre piece of the same title. Space//Space is directed by Alex Harvey (Walden: Life in the Woods, I Am a Seagull, The Unsilent Picture), written by Alex Harvey and Jason Craig (Beardo, Oh What War, Gogol: a clown-opera), and stars Jessica Jelliffe (Yale Repertory's Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, Botch, Shadows) and Jason Craig.

Space//Space will be screened on January 14 at 7:00 PM and January 15 at 1:30 PM at the Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Avenue, New York, NY 10003). An artist talkback will follow both screenings. Tickets are on sale at anthologyfilmarchives.org.

Watch the trailer below!

Banana Bag & Bodice

(BB&B) is a theater collective that makes play-shows centered on original writing, music composition, and collective design. BB&B's elastic approach to creating has one common goal - to celebrate and expose the inspiring awkwardness of being a human. Founded by Jessica Jelliffe and Jason Craig in San Francisco in 1999, then based in Brooklyn, and now in the Hudson Valley, Banana Bag & Bodice has created ten original shows, including Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage, which received its World Premiere with The Shotgun Players in Berkeley, CA, and has toured to New York, San Francisco, Boston, Montreal, Kilkenny, Edinburgh, and Adelaide. Beowulf was awarded a Herald Angel, the Will Glickman Award, and the American Theatre Wing's 2009 Jonathan Larson Grant for music composition. BB&B's work has been presented at such New York City venues as PS122, The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, The OHIO, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick, The Bushwick Starr, Joe's Pub, and the Abrons Arts Center. Banana Bag & Bodice is known for its intricate and complex set designs formed from discarded materials found in off-Broadway dumpsters.

The 2012 theatrical production of Space//Space was lauded by the New York Times, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, and Backstage among others, and played a three-week run at The Collapsable Hole in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The production was supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts' Individual Artist Commission.

Dubbed "Waiting for Godot in Space" by the New York Times' Jason Zinoman, the 2012 theatrical production of Space//Space serves as a launchpad for this cinematic reiteration. Galvanized by the pressure-cooker of a year in Covid-lockdown, Jelliffe and Craig have reprised their production-a claustrophobic container tale of two brothers stuck in a space capsule-in the empty theatre of their attic. Doubling down on containment and existential dread, Banana Bag & Bodice unleashes a nesting doll of narratives. A video-document within a play, within daily life, within a film, within a pandemic, Space//Space is an outlandish and poignant look at the function of performance (both intended and unintended), spectatorship (again, both intended and unintended), and artistic legacy. Wrapped in layers of isolation, relationships both real and fictional are pressed and amplified. As the play-conceit begins to degrade, Space//Space reveals a married couple attempting to co-exist as a family, as well as artists grappling over the purpose and preservation of their labor.

The production team for Space//Space features cinematography by Miklos Buk (Come Find Me, Walden: A Life in the Woods), editing and sound design by Alex Harvey and production design by Banana Bag & Bodice. Space//Space is produced by Series Fest award-winning Anne Troup (Human Interest), Jessica Jelliffe, Jason Craig and Alex Harvey.

BIOGRAPHIES

Jessica Jelliffe

(Performer) is a Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Banana Bag & Bodice. She has collaborated on and performed in each of their shows since 1999, notably Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage, which received its World Premiere with The Shotgun Players in Berkeley, CA, and has toured to The American Repertory Theater, Summerstage New York City, Les Escales Improbables de Montreal, the Kilkenny Arts Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Adelaide Festival, Mayfest Bristol and the Brighton Festival. Other BB&B favorites include: The Sewers (The Ontological-Hysteric Theater), The Fall & Rise of The Rising Fallen (PS122), and A Very Sandwich Christmas (Abrons Arts Center). Additional stage credits include: Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls (Rachel Chavkin, Yale Rep), Botch (Joe Diebes, director), Shadows (Alec Duffy, director), Oh What War and As You Like It (Mallory Catlett, director), History of the World Pt IV (gALE gATES et al, NY), and Gogol: a clown-opera (Exit Theater, SF). Film credits: Space//Space (Alex Harvey, director, Banana Bag & Bodice co-producer), The Unsilent Picture (Alex Harvey, director), The Fixer (Ian Oldes, director), Stingray Sam (Cory McAbee, director), Made Up Language (Zbigniew Bzymek, director). She is currently collaborating on a very messy adaptation of Dante's Inferno (Jason Craig playwright, Alex Harvey director). She lives in Beacon, NY with her husband and kid and dog and chickens.

Jason Craig

(Writer/Performer) is a Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Banana Bag & Bodice. He is also a writer, performer, set designer and technical director for the company. His work with BB&B has won him awards nationally and internationally, including Best New Production at The Dublin Fringe Festival, and has kept him busy for the last 20 years. Craig's adaptation of Beowulf entitled Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage was commissioned by, and received its World Premiere with Shotgun Players in Berkeley, CA, followed by performances at The Ashby Stages and Berkeley Rep. In 2009, Beowulf made its New York premiere at Abrons Arts Center and also toured to Adelaide, Australia, Edinburgh, Brighton, Bristol, Kilkenny, Montreal, and Boston (A.R.T). Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage is the recipient of the Will Glickman Award for Best New play in the Bay Area. Jason Craig's other commissions include Beardo for Shotgun Players, Berkeley, CA; Oh What War for Juggernaut Theatre, New York, NY; and Gogol: a clown-opera for Exit Theatre, San Francisco, CA. Craig has been a featured artist in Theatre Forum, Theatre Bay Area, Time Out New York, The New York Times, and American Theater Magazine. As a performer, he has worked with such companies as gALE gATES et al, foolsFURY, Misery/Loves Company, Inverse, Radiohole, The Exit Theatre, and Shotgun Players. He received a BA (hons) in Architecture from Hull University, England.

Alex Harvey

(Director/Writer) is a filmmaker, editor, producer, writer, theater director, musician, and end-of-life doula. Alex created, produced, and directed the feature narrative film, Walden: Life in the Woods starring Academy Award nominee Demián Bichir. The film played at a variety of domestic and international festivals including Whistler Film Festival, Oaxaca Film Festival, Denver International Film Festival, River Run International Film Festival, NCTE Houston, FilmFort Idaho. Walden: Life in the Woods was picked up by Virgil Films and released on all platforms in October of 2019. Alex also wrote and directed The Unsilent Picture, a black and white silent film starring the world famous clown, Bill Irwin. The Unsilent Picture screened in an immersive spiegel tent accompanied by a live orchestral score and live foley sound performance as a centerpiece of the Horseman's Hollow Festival in both 2018 and 2019. Alex was a co-director and producer for I Am A Seagull, the documentary-narrative hybrid film made by the art collective Lake Lucille Chekhov Project. I Am A Seagull is the first feature film to have played at The Public Theatre's Under the Radar Festival in New York. It has subsequently toured to the Spoleto Festival in Italy, The Noorderzon Festival in the Netherlands, and the Kontakt Festival in Poland. In 2014, Harvey was apprentice director under master director Allen Coulter on the fourth season of HBO's Boardwalk Empire. He has created various video art projects including one short film immersion called SONNET23 which was presented in 2015 at the Festival Cine Futuro in Salvador, Brazil. He has also created content for Action Group Network, producing multi-lingual ICE preparedness shorts for imperiled immigrant communities throughout the tri-state area. He lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with his wife and son.

For more information visit: Bananabagandbodice.org

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