Electric Pear Production's 'Synethesia' Opens Tonight, 4/2

 This April, Electric Pear Productions presents the second round of Synesthesia, the ambitious performance piece that takes an unforgettable look at how artists influence, inspire and steal from each other. It is a peak inside the dirty work of creation through the schoolyard game of telephone...with art.

Synesthesia is the culmination of five months of work by over a dozen breakout artists spanning 9 different genres including film, dance, comedy, photography, music and spoken word; this year's presentation will be held April 2, 3, 5 and 6 at the historic Judson Memorial Church (55 Washington Square South).

In the fall of 2007, the first artist chose a fortune cookie and used the enclosed fortune to inspire his film. After a few days of furious work, he passed his work off to a writer, and in turn, the writer created a piece that was passed on to the next artist - and so on, and so on…

The evening at Judson will be a tightly woven trip that jumps between documentary footage of each "hand-off" in the series, and the resulting live performance or artistic product. Audiences are given the opportunity to trace not only the overall development of the five-month game of artistic telephone, but also each individual artist's point of attack – and what they generated from their given circumstances.

Synesthesia 2008 includes:

Filmmaker, Gregory Stuart Edwards – Spleen, Independent Feature Project
Author/Playwright, Damian Lanigan – Dissonance, Williamstown 2007
Photographer, Peter Hapak – New York Magazine
Comedians, Nathan Phillips and Joe Schiappa - Project:Projekt
Artist, Brian Whiteley – 717 Gallery
Spoken Word Artist, Shanelle Gabriel – HBO's Def Poetry Jam
Author/Playwright, Clay McLeod Chapman – The Pumpkin Pie Show
Dancer/Choreographer, Jo-anne Lee - Brian Brooks Moving Company
Singer/Songwriter, Leah Siegel – Little Mule
DJ, JayCeeOh – The Masters, Special Teamz
Filmmaker, Avriel Hillman
Music by Zac Lasher - U-Melt