(RUS)H - James Scruggs & Kristin Marting

AN INTIMATE PSYCHOSEXUAL MYSTERY

PRESENTED OFF-SITE at 3LD Art & Technology Center
located at 80 Greenwich St. @ Rector St. Subway: 1/R/W to Rector St. stop

Piece together a fragmented memory trail revealing the hedonistic reality that lies just beneath our everyday existence. As three lives descend into a violent underworld of extreme pleasures--set to throbbing Latin beats--(RUS)H asks the question: "How far are you willing to go to feel something?"

Text and Video James Scruggs
Direction Kristin Marting
Media Effects Hal Eagar
Environment Michael O'Reilly
Music Steve Adorno
Choreography Anabella Lenzu
Fight Choreography Qui Nguyen
Lighting Design Christopher Brown
Sound Design Matthew Tennie
Costume Design Chris Rumery

The story of (RUS)H:

Rus suffers from déjà vécu - a persistent sense of déjà vu that makes every moment of his life seem as if it has already been lived. Feeling lost in a labyrinth of repeating, distorted memories and bored by his marriage to a beautiful singer and dancer (Sireene), Rus yearns to spread his wings. Then a seemingly random car accident connects Rus to Sonny, a gay hustler whose crystal meth addiction has left him unable to feel any real pleasure. Rus, drawn like a moth to the flame, begins a descent on the down low into a world of drugs, sex and violence that will inevitably lead to death. However, when it is Sonny that ends up dead, Rus becomes the prime target of a police investigation that forces him and Sirene to face the past and its consequences. But is he a killer?

Told in a fragmented psychological timeline like the Nolan Brother's film MEMENTO, this gripping narrative is infused with movement and music inspired by Salsa and Tango and visualized with immersive media, using layered video projections and wireless video screens manipulated in Bunraku-style by video puppeteers.

artistic statement

(RUS)H, inspired by the myth of Icarus, is about boundaries, what happens when one becomes distracted and leaves the comforts of the world one knows, to experience an intense heightened pleasure-consumed existence.

Incorporating video, text, an experimental video puppet rig and dance, this project is the fourth collaboration among Scruggs as writer/video designer, Kristin Marting as director/choreographer and Hal Eagar as media effects designer.

In the myth, Icarus became overwhelmed by the sensations he experienced from flight, which made him push past the limitations and rules of his world. In (RUS)H four characters—a husband and wife, the Other Man and a video puppet—inhabit this visceral world where dance and gesture become a type of communication and layered video projections suggest scenic elements, powerfully integrated into the storytelling. (RUS)H's textual layer follows the lives of the four characters: Rus is a mambo dancer with a day job, a passionate man of color who has lost the passion he once felt for his wife Sirene. She is a dancer as well and a very modern African American woman living in denial. Sonny calls himself a Sacred Intimate, but he really is a sex worker whose big attribute is his amazing lack of limitations. Rus and Sonny meet when Rus accidentally hits Sonny with his car. Their relationship is based on Rus’s enormous guilt, which Sonny uses to draw Rus into his dark world.

Biography

Over the last 17 years, Kristin Marting has constructed 20 works for the stage, including 8 original dance-theatre pieces, 8 new adaptations of novels and short stories and 4 classic plays. Recent projects include co-creation with Juliet Chia and David Morris and direction of a collaborative alternative musical, Orpheus, based on the Greek myth; also with Chia and Morris, she developed and directed Erendira, a hybrid performance work adapted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother; direction of James Scruggs’s solo work Disposable Men; Dead Tech a collaborative, site-specific theatrical collage based on The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen and architectural texts. For the last 10 years, she vhas been developing a unique hybrid directorial/ choreographic form that features a "gestural vocabulary" used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element. She is a co-founder and Executive Director of HERE, where she cultivates artists and programs all events for two performance spaces--including 8 OBIE-award winners--for an annual audience of 50,000 . She regularly serves on grant panels for TCG and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others.

James Scruggs wrote and produced a multi-channel video installation called Disposable Men, a piece about the mayor approved NYC police shootings of unarmed black men. It had a private showing in DUMBO in May of 2000. In 2002, Men became a performance piece, performed at BAX and selected to participate in a Summer Institute for emerging performance artists at The Kitchen. In 2003, he was selected for the HERE Artist Residency Program. Men was fully produced at HERE in February 2005, and it was brought back by popular demand for a limited engagement in June 2005. Men received a 2005 NY Innovative Theatre Award for Solo Performance. Other works include Touchscape, (2002 Queer@HERE festival, The 2002 Voices from the Edge festival) and Thuggish, was one of seven plays chosen to be part of Naked Angels Writers Lab in 2003. His newest work, (RUS)H, is being developed through the Mabou Mines/SUITE program. He has received grants from Franklin Furnace, Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation (for his video design), and from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Hal Eagar serves as Associate Artistic Director of Gertrude Stein Rep, Technology Director for HERE Arts Center, and Video Associate with The Builders Association. He focuses on facilitating innovation in live performance technology, putting new media on stage. He designs digital puppets and animations for theatrical productions as well as providing technical solutions and creating innovative hardware and software for multi-screen projection, robotic projection, and real-time/live animation. He is currently absorbed in robots, projection, 3d animation, video, puppetry, and the occasional installation and internet artworks, sometimes all at once.