PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE by Normandy Sherwood is Coming to HERE

The OBIE award-winning HERE will kick-off its women-led, 30th anniversary season with the world premiere of Normandy Sherwood’s Psychic Self Defense. The abstract, hallucinatory world of Psychic Self Defense—simultaneously a séance, a sculpture, and a live action screen saver—creates a space for audiences to recalibrate their attention. Psychic Self Defense allows audiences to experience mystery and mental spaciousness by way of that most basic of theatrical machineries—the curtain reveal.

 

Running September 12–30, 2023, in the HERE Mainstage Theater (145 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan) for intimate audiences of only 44 individuals, this presentation of HERE's Dream Music Puppetry program, which is set to open on September 15, is the first of two premieres this season that have been developed through HARP, HERE’s nationally recognized $125,000 artist residency program. Tickets, which start at $10, are currently on sale at www.here.org.

Psychic Self Defense is a show that invites audiences into the guts of the theater. Patrons enter the show through portals draped with fabrics and corridors dimly lit by chandeliers. Are they entering into a séance? After piercing many veils, the audience arrives at what is apparently a tiny, haunted proscenium theater. Anticipation mounts as a grand curtain opens with fanfare… and then another… and then a further curtain… and then the curtains keep opening and closing, revealing and concealing characters, objects and scenes in hypnotic patterns, transporting performers and audience to psychic realms. As this dance of curtains ascends to abstraction, creatures of knots and thread emerge from the shadows, protagonists are absorbed into set dressing and scenic ornaments run rampant. The theater digests and incorporates its prey.

“Psychic Self Defense is an homage to the physical space and objects of the theater—and the labor of making it,” says the artist Normandy Sherwood. “It takes the form of an immersive visual and sonic experience rather than a traditional play. My hope is that this playfully abstract and richly sensory experience creates a social space for audiences to reflect on, cultivate, and experiment with their own attention. I made this show during the pandemic, and after the deeply isolating and fragmenting experience we all went through, this is the kind of repair or defense I think we need—an experience of beauty and mystery.”

 

“As a writer, designer, director, and performer, Normandy is the quintessential boundary pushing HERE artist,” says HERE’s Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting. “Her hybrid approach to creating theatre not only expands the contours of live performance, but with Psychic Self Defense, her reverence for the physical spaces we gather in make for a truly transformative and reflective experience. I’m honored to have commissioned Psychic Self Defense as part of my final season at HERE.”
 

“I love the essential experience that Normandy is creating,” says puppeteer Basil Twist, co-director of HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry Program. “I love the abstraction and the absolute theatricality of the curtains. They are the unmistakable frame of meaning and ceremony for performance and have a whole life of their own. This is the kind of performance work my own puppetry has reached towards. I'm thrilled that Normandy’s adventurous exploration has found its place at HERE. I mean, where else could it be?”

Psychic Self Defense is performed by Ean Sheehy, Nikki Calonge, Daniel Allen Nelson, Kate Brehm, Adrienne Swan, and Elyse Durand with musicians Craig Flanagin and Normandy Sherwood.

Psychic Self Defense is created, written, designed, and directed by Normandy Sherwood. It features composition and sound design by Craig Flanagin, scenic and rigging design by Daniel Allen Nelson, curtain and costume design and construction by Normandy Sherwood, and lighting design by Christina Tang. The creative team includes production manager Daniel Allen Nelson, sound engineer Travis Wright, and line producer Caitlin Adams. Conceptual collaborators include Craig Flanagin, Daniel Allen Nelson, Christina Tang, Nikki Calonge, and Ean Sheehy.

 

Following the performance on September 26, HERE will host a post-show discussion focused on design, object theater, and puppetry in performance. Guests Machine Dazzle and Tyler Gunther aka Greedy Peasant will join Normandy Sherwood in a conversation moderated by Moe Yousuf.

Twenty-three performances of Psychic Self Defense will take place September 12–30, 2023, in the HERE Mainstage Theater, located at 145 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Critics are welcome as of September 13 for an opening on Friday, September 15. The performance schedule is Tuesday–Saturday at 8:30pm with late night performances at 11pm on Fridays and 4pm matinees on Saturday and Sunday. The running time is 60 minutes with no intermission.

Tickets, which range from $10-$100, can be purchased by visiting www.here.org or by calling 212-647-0202. In-person sales at the box office after 5 pm only on performance days and two hours prior to curtain for matinees. For Group Sales, contact tickets@here.org. Students and seniors can access free tickets on a rush basis, subject to availability for each performance, and must be redeemed at the box office.

 

Psychic Self Defense was commissioned, developed, and produced by HERE Artist Residency and Dream Music Puppetry Programs.

 

Please visit www.here.org/shows/psychic-self-defense-harp/ for more information.

 

About the Artists
 

Normandy Sherwood is a theater maker who has been building worlds in NYC for two decades. She is a writer, a director, a costume and scenic designer and occasionally a performer. Her shows include Madame Lynch, Tiny Hornets, Permanent Caterpillar, and The Golden Veil, and they have been presented by The New Ohio Theatre, Rubulad, The Kitchen, The Brick, The Public Theater and more.  She and Craig Flanagin make no-wave music-driven spectacles with their theater company, The Drunkard’s Wife and their band God Is My Co-Pilot. From 2001-2017 she was a core collaborator in The National Theater of the United States of America (R.I.P.) and with this company she toured the U.S., won an OBIE award and published a book called A New Practical Guide to Rhetorical Gesture and Action (53rd State Press). As a costume designer she has worked on productions by Faye Driscoll, Tina Satter/ Half Straddle, Young Jean Lee, Rachel Chavkin and Kristin Marting. She has been an artist in residence at Macdowell, Yaddo,and Millay Arts. She is collaborating on Theater in Quarantine’s upcoming virtual production, the 3D-for-your-phone Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, presented by NYU Skirball Center on Oct 27-31. She is a Clinical Associate Professor in Expository Writing at NYU.

Craig Flanagin is a guitarist, composer, playwright, theater director and carpenter. He is a member of the bands God Is My Co-Pilot and Attractive Nuisance. He has toured worldwide as a guitarist, playing in more than 40 countries over three decades. As an improviser, he has recorded or appeared on stage with the likes of Sandy Ewen, John Zorn, Leila Bordreuil and Elliott Sharp – and has booked the Noise Workshop music series since 1994.

Daniel Allen Nelson is a writer, performer, and member of Woofnova Collective. Original works include Microcosmitor, Give Back My Beast, Spoleum, Don’t Peek, Hearts and Tongues, and The Vanishing Play. He has performed at venues including LaMama, HERE, PS122, Public Theater, Target Margin, Ontological-Hysteric, Dance Theater Workshop, Dixon Place, The Kitchen, Mabou Mines, 3LD, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Invisible Dog, Roulette, Issue Project Room; and in projects by Object Collection, John Jesurun, Richard Foreman, Jeff McMahon, and Joshua William Gelb. Regional Theater/Touring: Berkeley Rep, Guthrie Theater, LaJolla Playhouse, Center Stage, Ensemble Theater, Theatre Jeune Lune, Jungle Theater, Red Eye, Ko Festival, Cafe Oto (London), Birmingham Rep (UK), & Borealis Festival (Norway). BFA: UCSB; MFA: Towson University.

Christina Tang is a lighting designer and multimedia art maker based in New York City. She is a frequent collaborator on new works for theater and dance. Select recent credits include City of Women (Catherine Galasso), What We Want (Ariel Rivka Dance), The Singularity Play (Harvard University TDM), Preparedness (The Bushwick Starr), My Onliness (One-Eighth Theatre), and Madame Lynch (The Drunkard's Wife). Her work TRAFFIC premiered in The Exponential Festival in 2021 and was described by the NYTimes as "like a puckish re-enactment (with a soupçon of Battleship visuals)” of Jean-Luc Godard’s 'Weekend.'" She is a 2021 recipient of Opera America's Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize. christinaftang.com
 

About Dream Music Puppetry Program
 

HERE’s Dream Music Puppetry Program, under the artistic direction of Basil Twist, with producing direction from HERE co-founder Barbara Busackino, is one of few programs in the country to grow and commission contemporary adult puppet works, particularly works that feature live music as a collaborative element. Dream Music seeks to secure the future of puppetry by providing increased development and performance opportunities to puppet artists, and by collaborating with artists from other disciplines to develop new puppetry techniques. This program was inaugurated with the premiere of Basil Twist’s OBIE-award winning Symphonie Fantastique in 1998 and the opening of the Dorothy B. Williams Theater, an intimate space created specifically for intimate puppetry. HERE’s Dream Music is also proud to house the Griff Williams Puppetry Collection. The 6 antique marionettes of Harry James, Griff Williams, Cab Calloway, Arturo Toscannini, Ted Lewis and Paul Whiteman were all performed with The Griff Williams Orchestra in the 1930s & 40s throughout America’s big band era. They have a permanent home outside the Dorothy B. Williams Theater at HERE.

 

About HERE
 

The award-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theater by Time Out New York and is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines—theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art. HERE is a producer, presenter and venue for local and global ground-breaking artists.

HERE’s standout productions include Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac’s The Hang and The Lily’s Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle allwear bowlers, Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Robin Frohardt’s The Pigeoning, and Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique, as well as works directed by Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting including James Scruggs’ Disposable Men and Kamala Sankaram’s Looking at You.

 

In addition to its extensive producing work with local artists through its HERE Artist Residency Program, HERE presents work from New York, across the country, and around the globe through its Dream Music Puppetry Program (co-curated with Basil Twist), and its widely acclaimed PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now festival of opera-theatre and music-theatre, co-curated and co-produced with Beth Morrison Projects.

 

As a welcoming venue, HERE proudly curates adventurous artists, companies and productions, whether emerging or recognized, through its SubletSeries.

Since its founding in 1993, HERE and the artists it has supported have received 18 Obies, 2 Bessies, 5 Drama Desk Nominations, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Doris Duke Awards, 7 Tony Nominations, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.