The Brick Theater Presents Gemini CollisionWorks' Sacrificial Offerings 8/8-8/30

The Brick Theater, Inc. presents a Gemini CollisionWorks production of Sacrificial Offerings, text by David Finkelstein and Ian W. Hill, stage version designed and directed by Ian W. Hill, video version created by David Finkelstein

"I trust that when I delicately thrust the point of my remarks right into the meat of your argument that you're going to respond in a deliciously juicy counterargument that's going to coat everything that I said so that the conversation grows heated and juicy and adversarial. Searing. Searing into my skin and my brain."

David Finkelstein has spent over 20 years creating improvisation-based theatre with his Lake Ivan Performance Group, most recently moving into creating original video artworks that begin as videotaped improvised duets between him and other performers, which then are overlaid with a complex interweaving of abstract and literal imagery, text, and original music. After creating several improvs with Ian W. Hill, and deciding on one to transform into a video piece, he has suggested that Hill take the text from his video and re-interpret it as a stage work, and then combine both pieces as a double bill.

So Hill has indeed created Sacrificial Offerings, a dramaticule in which a group of eight actors perform the originally improvised text as a play about a group of wealthy layabouts of several decades past gathering for a seance, amid arguments and backbiting. A version of Finkelstein's video piece of the same text as originally improvised by him and Hill (known as Skewered Remarks) is shown as an interlude from another world midway through the stage adaptation.

Sacrificial Offerings is a small, contained experiment with improvisation, interpretation, repetition, the mixing of prerecorded video and live performance, and ideas of what exactly constitutes a «play.»

Director/designer Ian W. Hill has created 59 stage productions since 1997 with his company Gemini CollisionWorks, including works by Vaclav Havel, Richard Foreman, T.S. Eliot, Clive Barker, Mac Wellman, Ronald Tavel, Jeff Goode, Mark Spitz, and Edward D. Wood, Jr., as well as several original plays. As a designer (light, sound, projections, sets) and technical/artistic consultant he has worked with many other stage artists and theatres for the past 20 years, and he is currently the technical director of The Brick. He will also be presenting three other plays in rep with Sacrificial Offerings in August at The Brick: Blood on the Cat's Neck by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, A Little Piece of the Sun by Daniel McKleinfeld, and George Bataille's Bathrobe by Richard Foreman.

at
The Brick
575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211
½ a block from the Lorimer stop of the L Train / Metropolitan-Grand stop of the G Train
www.bricktheater.com
August 8, 14, 22, and 28 at 10.30 pm; August 16 and 30 at 8.00 pm; August 15, 23, and 29 at 2.00 pm

approximately 45 minutes long
All tickets: $10.00
Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com (212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)

 

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