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- A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia) Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin
- Artaud in the Black Lodge David T. Little
- Botch Joe Diebes
- Chang(e) Soomi Kim
- City Council Meeting Aaron Landsman
- GENET PORNO Yvan Greenberg/Laboratory Theater
- Glass Mouth Leyna Marika Papach
- Keep Your Electric Eye On Me Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty
- Lost Property Unit Mei-Yin Ng
- Restless Nest Rebecca Davis
- Science Fair Hai-Ting Chinn
- Send for the Million Men Joseph Silovsky
- The Pigeoning Robin Frohardt
- The Scarlet Ibis Stefan Weisman & David Cote
- Trade Practices Kristin Marting & David Morris
- Weights and Balances Bora Yoon
- You Are Dead. You Are Here. Christine Evans & Joseph Megel & Jared Mezzocchi
City Council Meeting • Aaron Landsman
Show Description
The formal structures of local government meetings inspire this project:
The Mayor and council sit behind the table, regarding us; citizens and functionaries address them with their backs to us; everyone’s faces play on the video monitors in the room, online and on TV. We have access to power at the same time as we’re separate from it.
How do you know how to act? You can’t possibly be up on all the procedures and you are definitely not in charge, but you know that this is where you are supposed to come if you have something to say, an idea for change, a grievance. Stand if you agree with something, but don’t speak unless you signed up to.
City Council Meeting is created by writer Aaron Landsman, director Mallory Catlett and designer Jim Findlay. We have visited local meetings from Bismarck to San Antonio, Portland to New York. There is something about being in the room we find galvanizing – here is a connection to power we can see. Sometimes it’s power depicted by a splendid dais in an impressive room; at others it’s a few cheap curtains, a couple flags and some velvet ropes installed where there used to be a bank or a classroom or a basement.
In each meeting there are moments of pure performance. The competing agendas, alienating rules, tedium and temper often, remarkably, let adversaries occupy the same room and agonize each other constructively, with one side coming out on top, for now.
If you come to City Council Meeting you may play these relationships out. Maybe you’ll be reading the words of someone real who said - something important or trivial, somewhere in the US. Maybe you’ll speak your own mind. Maybe you’ll just watch and listen. We would be happy to see you.
Featured Media
Artist Bio
Aaron Landsman’s performance works include: Appointment, an ongoing series of pieces for one audience member at a time in small offices; Open House (2008), commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and presented in 24 New York City apartments; the audio walk and gallery performance Love Story (2007), presented by FuseBox in Austin, Texas, and What You’ve Done (2005), a co‐ production between Houston’s DiverseWorks Art Space and Project Row Houses. His stage performances include Special Tonight, Wreckage, and Running Away From The One With The Knife, which have been developed and presented in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Minneapolis, as well as in Sweden, Norway and Belarus. Since 2004 Landsman has performed with Elevator Repair Service, touring three continents and appearing off-Broadway. He has taught at The Juilliard School and NYU, developed a workshop for the Creative Capital Foundation that is taught nationwide, and published writing in several journals.
Artist Statement
I make live performances that mix scenes, monologues, dance, installation and the occasional cheap pratfall. Many of my pieces are staged in apartments, offices and other familiar locations, while others utilize established performance venues. Working this way allows the setting to become its own character, helps implicate the audience into the action and exploits the theatricality of places we go every day. I try to burnish everyday intimacies and transgressions until they take on aspects of the epic. Events and images build and bounce off each other until the audience is caught up with the characters in the same maelstrom.
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