CULTUREMART 2009 is a laboratory where our resident artists blur the boundaries between dance, theatre, music, new media, puppetry and visual art, melding these forms to support their adventurous visions.

Throughout the month of January, our artists reveal their newest cross-disciplinary experiments.  Experience Peter Flaherty and Jennie Mary Tai Liu's vivid musings in SOUL LEAVES HER BODY, David Michael Friend's edgy puppetry in EGO or Yoav Gal's striking videopera in MOSHEH.   And these are just 3 of our 17 resident artist offerings during the festival.

New this year, we are collaborating with the Under the Radar Festival to bring you two special engagements: REMOVABLE PARTS, last season's critically acclaimed work by resident artist Corey Dargel and SIREN, Ray Lee's phenomenal sound and light spectacle, imported from the UK.

CULTUREMART is a vital testing ground, an environment where you can sample art in progress, provide feedback and play a crucial role in the development of new work. With a limited number of performances, festival tickets sell fast. Check out CULTUREMART 2009 and let our images fill your imagination.

Kristin Marting              Kim Whitener
Artistic Director             Producing Director

 

photo: Carl Skutsch

 

Performed by Corey Dargel and Kathleen Supové

A theatrical series of love songs about voluntary amputation in which the unrequited lover – whose heart is broken – begins to question the usefulness of his other body parts. Directed by Emma Griffin with dances by Yvan Greenberg and production design by Raquel Davis, Removable Parts returns to HERE after being developed and premiered through the HERE Artist Residency Program in 2007.


Part of the Under the Radar Festival 2009
Removable Parts was made possible, in part, by The New York State Music Fund, the American Composers Forum, with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation, and the Composer Assistance Program of the American Music Center.

Photo: Mark Barton

Siren is a whirling, spinning spectacle of mechanical movement, electronic sound and light by artist, composer and performer Ray Lee.

This 'choir of rotating sirens' creates an audio visual spectacle that is essentially a live experience. While you explore the space, the performers move about within the mass of swirling metal machinery, dodging and ducking the rapid movement of the rotating arms.  The sound pulses past the listener with a Doppler-like effect, while the cluster of closely tuned oscillators creates a rich and pervasive sound world. The closeness of the tuning of the separate tones sets off a series of amazing overtones that evoke the sense of an ethereal choir.

VIDEO PREVIEW

 

Ray Lee is an artist, composer and performer whose work investigates the hidden world of electro-magnetic radiation and how sound can be used as evidence of invisible phenomena.

 

Part of the Under the Radar Festival 2009
With support from the British Council and Oxford Brookes University

Faye Driscoll 837 Venice Boulevard   play		Peter Ksander Oh What War   play		Mallory Cattlett Oh What War   play
Kameron Steele & Ivana Catanese The Gospel According to Jack Vitrolo   play		Toni Dove Ghosts   play		Kristin Marting & Jennifer Gibbs The Stranger   play
Johari Mayfield The Venus Riff   play		Christina Campanella & Stephanie Fleischmann Red Fly/Blue Bottle   play		Berti Ferdman Paris Syndrome   play
Nick Brooke Border Towns   play

Old man Molemo and his two beautiful daughters perform a rare evening of pantomime, dance, puppetry, and song.

Somehow I recall you nestling a doll

A million years ago before today

No one knows for sure why life's so insecure

it comes and goes so fast, so slow, it seems

the way we are tonight makes everuthing all right

all righty then, begin the pas de trois

                                   - Johnny Simons

Johnny Simons, Artistic Director of Hip Pocket Theatre in Fort Worth, Texas performs for a limited engagement in New York City, with his daughters - Lorca Simons and Lake Simons.
An unique opportunity to see two generations of artists performing together on stage, sharing their family legacy and honoring the connection of fathers and daughters.
 

Cooler than Kill Bill, hotter than Shaft! The OBIE award winning Ma-Yi Theater Company teams up with the NYIT award winning Vampire Cowboys for Soul Samurai, the story of Dewdrop and her fight through the mean streets of post-apocalyptic Brooklyn. After avenging her lover's murder in the heart of Coney Island, Dewdrop now must make it back home to the L.E.S. before the shoguns of Kings County find her. In a play that mixes hip-hop culture, blaxploitation, and the martial arts, this production dials it back old school with a seventies-inspired samurai story. This is one slick slice with a sharp sword and a score to settle!

 

Check out the Video Short

 

For more info, visit:

ma-yi Theater Company

and

Vampire Cowboys

"Campanella as Old Lady begins by reciting lines into a microphone, like a neo–Emily Dickinson, narrating a story… that is at times poignant… always beautiful. The world evoked is complex and dreamy and… compelling while also evoking an ephemeral landscape of peculiar fantasies made palpable and menacingly real." — Backstage

Within an environment that is part sound studio/part abandoned house, performer/composer Christina Campanella makes her composition: Aided by an elderly entomologist (Black-Eyed Susan) and a young doppelganger straight out of silent film (Jesse Hawley) the composer, who serves as the frame for this multimedia music-theater work, retraces the deployment of her former companion to an unknown war.

Directed by Mallory Catlett, interwoven with layered video imagery by Peter Norrman and Mirit Tal, Red Fly/Blue Bottle explores the condition of absence experienced by those who remain at home in times of war.

Staged as a concert within a video installation environment created by Marsha Ginsberg, Red Fly/Blue Bottle conjures an associative visual landscape in which objects open up in unexpected ways, unfolding to reveal worlds within worlds. Permeated by loss, the familiar is made strange: Voices emanate from the mouths of jars, clocks explode, flies whisper, oscillators serve as portals to the past. Tightly crafted hypnotic songs (alternative and down-tempo dream-pop) emerge from an evocative multi-channel sonic terrain of found sounds, ticking clocks and analog tone generators; miniature noir films are projected onto floating surfaces, and live and premade video animates earthbound objects. Juxtaposed, these sounds and images create a dense terrain of sonic and visual echoes whose reverberations amplify the conundrum at the core of the piece.

Using the technology of audio/visual documentation as a metaphor for the human memory, this work asks, Is remembering a way to process loss or prolong it? How does the mind, besieged by absence, distort and rearrange reality?

The three women at the center of Red Fly/Blue Bottle serve as manifestations of different stages of grief brought about by the war—the urgency of the immediate moment; the inability to let go; the point of having moved beyond it all—each vying for her own version of the story. As she "makes" the piece, the composer loses control of the narrative, making harrowing discoveries in the process.

Combining the communal nature of performance with the intimacy of listening to records alone through headphones, Red Fly/Blue Bottle explores what it means to live in a culture that acts as if it is not at war.

Red Fly Blue Bottle has received funding from the New York State Music Fund, Meet the Composer, and the NYSCA Individual Artists program (for video artist Peter Norrman and writer Stephanie Fleischmann), and residencies at Gertrude Stein Repertory's Digital Performance Institute and Chashama, and development support from The Chocolate Factory, Long Island City (Fresh Meat Festival).

 

MORE INFO: www.redflybluebottle.com 

Machines machines machines machines machines machines machines by Quinn Bauriedel, Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford explodes the world of garage tinkers and backyard engineers in a ridiculous theatre piece featuring the world's most complicated machines set to perform the simplest tasks. Following the formula, "the most of amount of effort for the least amount of gain," three chowderhead geniuses reach for the heights of mechanical ingenuity to reveal the depths of human idiocy.

Machines x 7 focuses on a trio of fretful men (Rainpan co-founders Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford along with Pig Iron's Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel) who may or may not be brothers living in what may or may not be a postapocalyptic world. In constant fear of an unnamed and unseen enemy, they grow increasingly paranoid and wire their bunker with an enormous array of machines constructed from debris. 

Machines x 7 has played as a work-in-progress to standing-room-only houses at the 2002 Fringe.

The company's first two productions include All Wear Bowlers and Amnesia Curiosa