HERE's Culturemart Festival January 5th – 16th

By: BWW News Desk Nov. 30, 2004

HERE Arts Center proudly presents their highly esteemed annual festival of multidisciplinary works by nine resident artists beginning January 5th and closing January 16th, 2005. All performances are at HERE (145 6th Avenue at Spring Street, Main Stage). Performances are at 8:30 PM unless otherwise noted in their schedules below. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased by calling 212.868-4444. For more information, please go to www.here.org. This festival is a part of HERE's 2004–05 season featuring six premiere productions developed by their resident artists, three festivals, three visual art exhibitions and the anticipated purchase of their space.

CULTUREMART is HERE'S annual winter festival featuring multidisciplinary works-in-progress by nine resident artists from the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP).

HARP is the only residency program in the country that commissions and develops new multidisciplinary work over a 1- to 3-year period. As part of the program, HARP artists publicly show theirwork at all stages from works-in-progress (known as WIPs) to the workshop productions of CULTUREMART to the fully realized shows that become the core of our season. The audience's reaction helps the artists shape the next phase of their project. Past HARP artists have included Richard Caliban, Collision Theory, Troika Ranch, Will Pomerantz and Peculiar Works.

Descriptions of all shows and biographical information on all of the resident artists are attached:

Wednesday & Thursday, January 5th and 6th at 8:30 PM
Kim Mayhorn's afrocentric dance-theatre piece Zong (5-15 min) and Joshua Fried's radiowave performance piece Radio Wonderland (20-30 min)

Friday & Saturday, January 7th and 8th at 8:30 PM
Mallory Catlett's new music-theatre play The Littlewood Project (20-30 min) and Freefall's (Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse) multidimensional physical theatre work, Clever Hans (20-30 min)

Sunday, January 9th at 8:30 PM
Kate Brehm's experimental puppetry piece A Seemingly Unified Spectacle (30-35 min) and Lake Simons's puppet musical version of Alice in Wonderland (25 min)

Monday & Tuesday, January 10th and 11th at 8:30 PM
NERVE'S (Alyse Rothman) imagery theatre PHENOMENON (over 45 minutes)

Wednesday & Thursday, January 12th and 13th at 8:30 PM
Thalia Field/Jamie Jewett's poetry and dance piece REST/LESS (over 45 minutes)

Friday & Saturday, January 14th and 15th at 9:00 PM
Ruth Margraff and Nikos Brisco's Mediterranean opera Café Antarsia (over 45 minutes)

The work in CULTUREMART is distinguished by the unique versions of what HERE Executive Director Kristin Marting calls "hybrid" performance. It is called hybrid because it approaches a seamless integration of artistic disciplines aimed at reflecting the complex age of imagery and information in which we live.

Since opening in 1993, the OBIE-award winning HERE Arts Center has housed New York's most daring and unique theatre, visual art, puppetry, music and dance in its three theatres, two art galleries and café. Previous works originally produced by HERE include Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, Camryn Manheim's Wake Up! I'm Fat, and original musical and dance works created and directed by Executive Director Kristin Marting. In 2003, HERE launched its Secure HERE's Future campaign to purchase its space and secure a permanent position as one of the city's preeminent presenters of multidisciplinary art.

HERE Arts Center supports the work of artists at all stages in their careers through full productions, artist residency programs, festivals and subsidized performance and rehearsal space. All work at HERE is curated based on the strength and uniqueness of the artist's vision. CULTUREMART is being presented through HERE's Artist Residency Program (HARP), which provides development, commissions and full production support.

CULTUREMART is made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds Program, the Peg Santvoord Foundation and the Jerome Foundation.

HERE Arts Center is located at 145 Sixth Avenue (one block below Spring Street) in SOHO. Tickets for CULTUREMART are $20. Purchases can be made online at www.here.org, by calling SmartTix at (212) 868-4444 or by visiting the HERE Box Office from 4 p.m. until curtain. For more information, visit HERE online at www.here.org.

ARTISTS AND SHOW INFORMATION:

ZONG by Kim Mayhorn

ZONG navigates the depths of the Black Atlantic, an aquatic environment inhabited by bioluminescent creatures and African slaves thrown overboard bound for America. Combining dance, costumes, and original music, ZONG tells the story of a water-breathing species whose need for each other creates a society where everything is possible.

Kim Mayhorn was selected by Essence magazine as one of "30 Women to Watch" (2000), She utilizes mixed media, sound, video, and lighting in her work while interweaving past and present, ritual and art, and history and memory.

RADIO WONDERLAND by Joshua Fried

In Radio Wonderland, Joshua Fried turns bits of FM radio—grabbed live—into grooves that truly DANCE. Using an FM boom box, a PowerBook computer, his famed Musical Shoes, and a computer-hacked steering wheel to slice, dice and create rhythm with the media as it flies through the air, Fried subverts the pop media and technology by using it against itself by creating a new dance of independence. The surreal touch of ordinary objects (e.g. shoes, wheel) underscores the basic, congenial nature of the aural transformations.

Composer-performer Joshua Fried has won many awards, collaborated with artists of many disciplines, and presented his work widely from Lincoln Center to King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, from Tokyo to Jerusalem.

THE LITTLEWOOD PROJECT by Mallory Catlett/Juggernaut Theatre Company

The play is a new music/theatre piece that fundamentally re-imagines Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop's 1963 production of OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR, a groundbreaking production that combined music, theater and visual projection to chronicle the enormous folly and atrocity of WWI.

Mallory Catlett is a director and dramaturg working in theatre, dance, opera and installation art. THE LITTLEWOOD PROJECT is her third collaboration withthe Juggernaut Theater Company where she is an Associate Member. She is also the Artistic Director of Restless Productions NYC, a site-specific theater company.

CLEVER HANS by FREEFALL

Clever Hans is an evening of transformative theater and dance that reimagines a humorous tale of unthinking brutality and obliviousness. This story is about a dullard whose cluelessness unleashes a darkness he is incapable of changing or understanding.

Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse (FREEFALL's founders) have produced four evening-length works as well as numerous site and event specific works in the rivers, playgrounds, parking lots, gardens and galleries of the New York City area. These venues have included Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, Dance Now/NYC, Dancers Responding to AIDS, Dancing in the Streets, DUMBO Arts Festival, and the New York Waterfront Museum.

A SEEMINGLY UNIFIED SPECTACLE by Kate Brehm

A Seemingly Unified Spectacle is a treacherously beautiful journey inspired by Rosalind Krauss's ruminations over 'a constant pulse' as discussed in her essay, 'The Impulse to See'. The piece's glowing white fantasy and grim silver puppet devices resemble a zoetrope as they flicker and spin through constant transformations. Accompanied by electronic noise, the piece avoids narrative to viscerally affect an audience.

Kate Brehm is a puppeteer and artistic director of imnotlost.net, which produces cabaret evenings of puppets and variety, as well as long-form puppetry, multi-media performance events, bizarre theatrics, and critical thinking.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND written by Lewis Carroll; adapted by Lake Simons & John Dyer

Come with Alice as she explores the unknown of the underground world where little
cakes cause growth spurts, tea is served all day on an undulating patchwork
tablecloth and a crying baby turns into a little pig. Told through puppetry, physical theatre and a live original score consisting of storytelling, song, and folly. A variety of puppets including an adapted bunraku style, shadow, and handheld bring this classic story to life.

The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram says that "Simons‚ trippy puppet ballet was the best stage interpretation of Alice I've ever seen -- and the puppets were absolutely divine." -

PHENOMENON by NERVE, directed by Alyse Rothman
Using drama, dance and imagery, Phenomenon tells a tragi-comic account of two simultaneous life-shattering events. It is 1980, 5 miles away from Mount Saint Helens' 50-megaton explosion; and it is the end of a relationship. With NERVE's trademark fusion of drama, dance and image, Phenomenon is an extravagant rendering of the power of Human Nature juxtaposed against the power of Mother Nature.
Alyse Rothman (director/visual artist) is formally trained as both a painter and stage director. Alyse serves as Artistic Director of NERVE, a theatre company dedicated to building a bridge between traditional drama and installation art, and is literary manager for Moises Kaufman's Tectonic Theatre Project, where she is currently creating Evolution, a workshop geared to investigating new structures in dramatic writing.

REST/LESS by Thalia Field/Jamie Jewett

REST/LESS dramatizes a dance-world composed of life's fleeting fragments, shards of stories which literally make the maps we travel by. Set on an interactive grid of wind, music and poetry, five dancers discover and embrace this windswept landscape, their movement illuminating intimate stories, their small phrases adding up to a journey.
Jamie Jewett and Thalia Field have made several pieces of dance-theater with
an emphasis on new media and poetry. Recent pieces include: "After the Fall"
(Danspace, 2003), "Seven Veils" (CULTUREMART 2004) and "ZOOLOGIC"
(published online at HOW2).

CAFÉ ANTARSIA written by Ruth Margraff, composed by Nikos Brisco, directed by Ian Belton, dramaturgy by Donna Linderman

Café Antarsia is a new Mediterranean opera set in a mythic taverna on the highly prized island of Crete that has lain, fatally, for thousands of years, in the coveted passageway between the Balkans, Asia Minor and northern Africa.

Ruth Margraff has received funding and support from Jerome, McKnight, TCG, Bellagio, NYSCA, NEA, New Dramatists, Arts International, Rockefeller Foundation, has taught playwriting at Brown, UTAustin, Fordham and Yale, and is represented by Abrams Artists.

Nikos Brisco is a Greek/American composer creating new work in experimental theatre/opera using the folk idiom and traditional world music, scales and instruments like Gypsy guitar, Greek tzouras, baglama & bouzouki, Cretan lauto & Turkish oud. Nikos studied Rroma music at the Amala School in Valjevo, Serbia, his work has reached Russia, Greece, Balkans & U.K., Public Theatre and Fordham/Lincoln Center.
This presentation of CAFÉ ANTARSIA is part of the Hellenic Festival, www.nypl.org/hellenic

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HERE's Culturemart Festival January 5th – 16th

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