SITI Company Announces Details for Finale Season

The award-winning Siti Company has announced details for its Finale 30th Anniversary Season. At the conclusion of the finale season, in December 2022, Siti Company will cease to operate in its current iteration as a touring, teaching, performing ensemble with an administrative staff and a studio. Some Siti Company members, including renowned director Anne Bogart, will continue to work on theatrical projects together and separately, in addition to teaching and licensing Siti Company works.

A centerpiece of the Finale 30th Anniversary Season is a revival of The Medium, Siti Company's first-ever devised work. A meditation on technology that's more resonant now than when it premiered in 1993, The Medium draws heavily on the writings of pioneering media theorist Marshall McLuhan, coiner of the phrases "the medium is the message" and "global village" to describe his visions of our interconnected future. Performances take place January 22 - February 13 at City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh, PA; March 15 - 20 at BAM in Brooklyn, NY; March 31 and April 1 at the Hopkins Center in Hanover, NH. Additional tour stops in Fall 2022 to be announced.

As the premier interpreters of Charles Mee (Siti Company member and playwright), SITI will bring a new work to NYC audiences in collaboration with La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in October 2022. Still Under Construction, like many of SITI's Mee plays before it, explores the collage of the American experiment in all its glory and darkness.

After fruitful work-in-progress performances in December 2021, Siti Company will return to the Fisher Center at Bard to premiere a new adaptation of Christmas Carol, inspired by Orson Welles's 1939 Christmas Eve radio show with Lionel Barrymore and by Dickens' own reading script. In an intimate re-telling, SITI conjures the ghosts of the past, present, and future to speak to our society's immediate need for gratitude, charity, fairness, justice, and equity. World premiere performances will be in December 2022.

In the summer of 2022, Siti Company, in partnership with Yonkers International Press, will publish a new book by the members of the ensemble, that will chronicle and celebrate the company's 30-year legacy.

Following a two-year planning process that began in 2017, Siti Company determined that its mission was rooted in the passions of like-minded individual artists-its ensemble members-and not a larger self-sustaining institution. In early 2019, Siti Company members, board, and staff decided that shedding the constraints of an organization, such as an administrative staff and a physical office and studio, in favor of moving towards a more flexible configuration, was the organic next step. This would allow all stakeholders to move onto new projects in a healthy way. In the fall of 2020, Siti Company announced the SITI Legacy Plan, which includes the finale 30th anniversary season and the creation of a robust physical and digital archive, which is currently underway thanks to generous funding from the Howard Gilman Foundation, New York Community Trust and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

"The question that we asked was, are we an institution that continues on indefinitely, or are we a group of artists who circled around one another thirty years ago and then stayed together based upon a shared vision about collaborative creation?" said Anne Bogart, Co-Artistic Director of Siti Company. "After much consideration, it became clear that we are a specific group of likeminded artists moving through time and space together. And now, here we are, taking our next step, but united in our intention to help others to carry the tradition forwards, each in their own fashion."

Please visit www.siti.org for more information.

Details on Siti Company's Finale 30th Anniversary Season

The Medium

January 22 - February 13 at City Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA

March 15 - 20 at BAM in Brooklyn, NY

March 31 and April 1 at the Hopkins Center in Hanover, NH

Based on the writings and theories of Marshall McLuhan, The Medium explores the effect of media and emerging technologies on our perceptions, our psyches and our personal lives. The Medium was originally devised by Siti Company in 1993 in Toga-mura, Japan and premiered in NYC at New York Theatre Workshop in 1994. McLuhan, who died in 1980, is generally remembered for his belief that electronic communications would knit an alienated world into an all-embracing global village. But in interviews, he also spoke ruefully of the dominance of technologies. "I wish none of these had ever happened," he once said. In an age where everyone carries a computer in their pocket, The Medium is perhaps even more resonant now than it was in 1993.

Still Under Construction by Charles Mee

Fall 2022 in association with La MaMa at the Ellen Stewart Theatre

Siti Company, the premiere interpreters of Charles Mee, company member and playwright, will bring a new work to New York City audiences. The inaugural season of Siti Company, in 1992, featured Mee's play Orestes. Since then, SITI has staged many of his other plays, including bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, American Document, Café Variations, Under Construction and Falling and Loving. For the finale season, Siti Company returns to Chuck's play Under Construction, but with fresh eyes, new perspectives, and additional text. Beginning with the notion that humans are ALWAYS under construction, Still Under Construction, will take the original 2009 production, which veered between idealistic versions of Norman Rockwell's America to darker and more chaotic visions of the underbelly of our country, and look at it through the social and political lens that has shaped our world in the past decade.

A Radio Christmas Carol

December 2022

World premiere at the Fisher Center at Bard College

Siti Company returns to the Fisher Center to premiere a live performance based on Orson Welles' 1939 radio play of A Christmas Carol, as part of the company's 30th anniversary celebrations. Reimagining the intimacy and alchemy of that recording studio, SITI conjures the ghosts of the past, present, and future to speak to our society's immediate need for gratitude, charity, fairness, justice, and equity.

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