The Brick Theater, Inc. Presents GAME PLAY 7/7-25

The Brick Theater, Inc. presents GAME PLAY: A CELEBRATION OF VIDEO GAME PERFORMANCE ART, runs July 7-25, 2010 

www.bricktheater.com/gameplay

Is art playable? Are video games cinematic? Is machinima theatrical? Are smartphones a stage? Is there an architecture that connects these diverse media forms? What boundaries can be broken within (and without) the walls of an Off-Off Broadway Theater to change your view? With the increasing maturity of the modern video game, the possibilities for multi-media cross-over artworks cry out to be explored.

Boot up your think pad, open your horizon expansion application and prepare to log in to The Brick's

GAME PLAY: A CELEBRATION OF VIDEO GAME PERFORMANCE ART

July 7-25, 2010

Game Play explores the collision of technology, theater, performance art, and video game culture by staging the collaborative work of performance and media artists across the digital spectrum. For 2009, Game Play's inaugural year, works for the celebrated festival included "Adventure Quest," "Thank You, but Our Princess Is in Another Castle," and "Suspicious Package: Rx."
Full coverage at www.bricktheater.com/gameplay2009.

2010 GAME PLAY PRESENTATIONS:

Game Party Nights! (Free-$10)

Opening Night Preview Cabaret & Party (July 9)

Featuring "Real World Instant Messaging" by artist Kurt Bigenho (www.unfinished.com)!

Babycastles

With playable local video games by NY game designers. Costumes by CHERYL: THE DANCE PARTY THAT WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE. Play fresh home-made video games while dancing with half-human half-arcade cyborgs. Wear babycastles arcade suits and have games played on you. Adorn yourself in circuitry and chalkboard paint. Bust out all your QWOP machinima dance moves and join the new CHERYL dance arcade!

www.babycastles.com

Rock Band Karaoke Night
Play Rock Band in a theater! Karaoke-style!

Chiptunes Dance Party

Party to 1980s/'90s video game-inspired Chiptunes with Video-Game Projections!
Video Game Performances ! ($15-$20)

Grand Theft Ovid

Eddie Kim returns to the Brick to present tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses, utilizing his distinctive style of digital puppetry. Characters from World of Warcraft, Halo 3, and Grand Theft Auto 4, among other games, will be projected on a large screen in front of an audience and manipulated by gamers. They will be linked to each other and to others over the internet to play out Ovid's stories, including "Niobe"; "Daedalus and Icarus"; and "Apollo and Daphne." A follow-up to last year's "Thank You, but Our Princess Is in Another Castle," which Theateronline.com described as a "'60s happening for the digital age," and Hemispheres Magazine called "an act of 21st century puppetry." With a new translation of stories by Carrie Thomas and featuring music by Oxygenstar, Eddie Kim's newest machinima piece uses more game systems and more games. Watch as classical stories are fleshed out in pixels and given life in worlds usually inhabited by night elves, aliens, and dirty cops.

Kewl-Aid Man in Second Life

Join Kewl-Aid Man on a live guided tour of the online virtual world Second Life. The audience decides what user-generated realms the tour visits-furry sex clubs, a psychedelic jungle world, or a Blade Runner-esque megacity. Live critical commentary and a discussion of the implications of virtual worlds for modern society accompany the tour, followed by a Q&A. The alter ego of
net art/new media artist Jon Rafman, Kewl-Aid Man is a secular icon that resonates with decades come and gone.

www.koolaidmaninsecondlife.com
Modal Kombat

Modal Kombat, The first ever guitar-controlled video game battle, has arrived. Formed by guitarists David Hindman and Evan Drummond, this forward-thinking ensemble has developed technology that allows classical-electric guitars to control the characters in console video games. Modal Kombat lies at the intersection between music, visual arts, and digital media that results in the defining of a new genre of audio-visual performance: the public guitar-controlled video game battle. Modal Kombat delivers an interdisciplinary performance concerned with the media of modern classical performance, emerging technologies, and popular culture by having its foundation in fields as wide-ranging as composition, performance, lighting design, computer programming, and circuit design. This modern-day dueling banjos raises the bar for performers, composers, interface designers, and competitive gamers, while delivering an engaging combination of music and classic video game competition. www.modalcombat.com

A Short Lecture of a Different Time

Come and hear the story of the OLDVERSE: the universe before this one, long dead and gone. Two lovers meet and soon discover the truth about their existence: their universe is dying, burning up into flames. Told by the Historian, a mysterious corduroy-clad stranger, this show asks the questions: How do you stop the unstoppable? How do you face the inevitable? A combination of Nintendo graphics, Game Boy music, and theoretical physics; acclaimed theatre creator Karim Muasher single-handedly creates an
8-bit universe of wit and wonder.

www.8bithistorian.com
Theater of the Arcade
A violent brute holds an innocent young woman captive and attacks anyone who dares approach. A glutton eats everything in sight while running away from the ghosts that haunt him. A lone survivor forges a peril-ridden path towards a lush refuge he can never reach. Are these the plots of classic video games, or are they searing narratives of modernist drama? In this collection of short plays, the creators of Brick hits Suspicious Package and Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury explore what happens when stories born of the arcade are given the high literary respect and dramaturgical rigor they deserve.
Written by Jeff Lewonczyk, directed by Gyda Arber.
Game Installations!

Chess

Chess consists of rules. Art can also be understood as rules (for example, a painting must be flat). Erik Sanner's public art project Chess (which received a Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant) began when he invited park-goers to invent rules and paint together on chessboards. Video footage of the painting was manipulated and projected onto super-sized chessboards. For Game Play, Sanner is inviting pairs of attendees to the festival to create their own rules and methods of action drawing, using black charcoal and white chalk on the sidewalk outside the theater. The artmaking is videoed, and the result is projected onto the drawings on subsequent evenings. Sanner's Chess, like the game, only exists if participants are willing to collaborate and make it happen. Erik Sanner is a new media artist living and working in New York City. He integrates traditional media with contemporary methods of creative production to create dynamic installations he calls "paintings that move." In addition to utilizing technology, Sanner frequently works with other artists. Recent collaborators include judsoN, Lisa Kellner, James Merrell, and Kazue Taguchi. Sanner's goal in all his work is to expand our experience of painting by utilizing technology.

(www.eriksanner.com)

The Wrench

Primo Levi's The Monkey's Wrench, published in Italian in 1978, is a collection of fictional tales told to a narrator by an itinerant steelworker, Tino Faussone. Faussone's sharply observed accounts of life on the job outline an idiosyncratic philosophy organized by profound individuality and a deeply contingent and physical relationship to the world. The stories reflect on both the meaning of work and the work of narrative. Knifeandfork's The Wrench recasts Levi's work into a mobile phone text-message exchange between participants and a contemporary Tino played by an artificially intelligent agent. Taking place over the course of a week, the dialogue, though reminiscent of an SMS-novel, is not entirely predetermined. Rather, Tino attempts to be convincingly human, and the real-time narrative intertwines the lives of the character and participant through the ubiquitous yet restrictive communication channel of text-messaging. Further, certain interests and events of the character's life are dynamically generated from real-world material via RSS/Atom content feeds. By animating Levi's original text, The Wrench challenges the division between the experience of a fiction and our performance of everyday life.

www.knifeandfork.org
July 7-25, 2010

Schedule to come
Only at The Brick, 575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

All tickets available at www.bricktheater.com or by calling
Theatermania (212-352-3101)

The Brick

Winner of THE 2009 CAFFE CINO FELLOWSHIP AWARD, The Brick is Williamsburg, Brooklyn's destination for cutting-edge theatrical experience. Home to the critically acclaimed premieres of Bouffon Glass Menajoree (NY IT Award Winner-Outstanding Play), Greed: A Musical Love $tory (NY IT Award Nominee-Outstanding Musical), Suspicious Package (NY IT Award Nominee-Outstanding Play), The Brick has hosted some of downtown theater's most innovative artists, including Annie Baker, Young Jean Lee, The Debate Society, Banana Bag & Bodice, Thomas Bradshaw, and Jollyship the Whiz-Bang's Nick Jones. The Brick has also hosted Fight Fest, Amuse Bouche, Game Play: A Celebration of Video Game Theater, The Antidepressant Festival, three years of the international NY Clown Theatre Festival, Gemini CollisionWorks' August repertory festival (The Collisionworks), You're Welcome, Adventure Quest, The Nosemaker's Apprentice, The Protestants, The Granduncle Quadrilogy, Lord Oxford Presents the Second American Revolution, Live!, Third Lows' 2-year Penny Dreadful serial, Richard Foreman's Harry in Love, The Film Festival: A Theater Festival (featuring Death at Film Forum and The Stubborn Illusion of Time), Babylon Babylon, Notes from Underground, Bitch Macbeth, A Thought about Raya, Secrets History Remembers, The Pretentious Festival (including Every Play Ever Written and Macbeth without Words), Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist/Cleansed, The Death of Griffin Hunter, Untitled Theater Co. #61's Havel Festival, Sexadelic Cemetery, The Kung Fu Importance of Being Earnest, The $ellout Festival, Adventures of Caveman Robot, The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, The Moral Values Festival (featuring Dear Dubya, World Gone Wrong, My Year of Porn), Tupperware Orgy, Bizarre Science Fantasy, Who Is Wilford Brimley? The Musical, Jenna is nuts, Habitat, In a Strange Room (based on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying), Assurbanipal Babilla's Assyrian Monkey Fantasy and the Brooklyn premiere of legendary Polish playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz's The Pragmatists.

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