Archives
MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE RECEPTION
THURS JAN 9 . 5:00 PM
The Members of the House Reception kicks-off the 2014 American Realness program with a toast to all the Members of the House who made donations to the 2014 American Realness program. Become a member of the House by making a donation in “honor” of American Realness via Abrons Arts Center.
A donation of any size grants you membership to the House of Realness. As your donation increases, so does your status within the house. All donations are fully tax-deductible when made through Abrons Arts Center.
$1-$24: Member of the House of Realness
+ Acknowledgement on AmericanRealness.com
$25 – $99: Sister of the House of Realness
+ Invitation to Members of the House Reception, Thurs, Jan 9, 5:00PM at Abrons
+ Acknowledgement on AmericanRealness.com
$100 – $249: Auntie of the House of Realness
+ Reserved Seats at AR Performances
+ Invitation to Members of the House Reception, Thurs, Jan 9, 5:00PM at Abrons
+ Acknowledgement on AmericanRealness.com
$250 – $499: Legendary Member of the House of Realness
+ Behind the scenes AR Dress Rehearsal Invitation
+ Reserved Seats at AR Performances
+ Invitation to Members of the House Reception, Thurs, Jan 9, 5:00PM at Abrons
+ Acknowledgement on AmericanRealness.com
$500 – $999: Mother of the House of Realness
+ Exclusive dinner party at the home of AR Curator & Producer Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor
+ Behind the scenes AR Dress Rehearsal Invitation
+ Reserved Seats at AR Performances
+ Invitation to Members of the House Reception, Thurs, Jan 9, 5:00PM at Abrons
+ Acknowledgement on AmericanRealness.com
$1,000 and Above: Grande Dame Mother of the House of Realness
+ 2 tickets to each performance in the 2014 festival program
+ Exclusive dinner party at the home of AR Curator & Producer Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor
+ Behind the scenes AR Dress Rehearsal Invitation
+ Reserved Seats at AR Performances
+ Invitation to Members of the House Reception, Thurs, Jan 9, 5:00PM at Abrons
+ Acknowledgement on AmericanRealness.com
CLICK HERE TO BECOME A MEMBER OF THE HOUSE OF REALNESS TODAY!!
YOU MUST DESIGNATE YOUR FUNDS FOR “AMERICAN REALNESS” WHEN DONATING:
- Enter your donation amount. You must check the “I would like to make this donation in honor or memory of someone else” box to designate funds for American Realness.
- On the next page enter “American Realness” in the required fields as “Honoree Information” and “Recipient Information.”
- Proceed to page three to enter payment information.</li>
Sisters of the House and above are invited to the Members of the House Reception to kick off the 2014 festival at 5:00 PM on Thursday, January 9 at Abrons Arts Center. All members of the House are invited to the festival’s official opening reception at 6:00 PM that same day.
I hope you will join me and become an inaugural member of House of Realness. Please let me know if I can answer any questions you may have.
I sincerely thank you for your support and I look forward to seeing you at Abrons!
Much love,
Ben Pryor
Curator and Producer
American Realness
Holcombe Waller with Cynthia Hopkins & Miguel Gutierrez
CONVERSATON: SURFACING & SONG-BASED PERFORMANCE
THURS JAN 12 . 5:30 PM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
Singer, songwriter and performance maker Holcombe Waller will be joined by fellow singer songwriter and performance maker Cynthia Hopkins and choreographer and music maker Miguel Gutierrez for a conversation exploring the indefinable genre of contemporary song-based performance. Their conversation will seek to elucidate an understanding of how song-based performance has the potentiality to arrive in a similar pefromative space as the work of more theater or dance based contemporary performance. In addition these artists will explore the specific realities around the creation of Waller’s newest song-based performance, Surfacing, a collection of sung narratives exploring Catholic beautification, anarchist communist revolution, health care activism and the history-in-the-remaking of contemporary performance art, that toe the line between realism and fantasy.
Keith Hennessy
Work-In-Progress Showing: Turbulence (a dance about the economy)
WEDS JAN 11 . 5:30 PM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
Turbulence (a dance about the economy) is a bodily response to economic crisis, an experimental hybrid of contemporary dance, performance, agitprop and circus. A collaborative creation choreographed by Keith Hennessy, Turbulence features a core company from San Francisco, musician Jassem Hindi from Paris and ten local performers. Modeling efficient solutions to economic and ecological crises, Turbulence uses resources sparingly and is adaptable to various venues. The intent of Turbulence is to inspire engagement and discourse in response to current economic crises and their historical antecedents.
Big Dance Theater
Work-In-Progress Showing: Ich, KürbisGeist
TUES JAN 10 . 3:30 PM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE
466 Grand Street
Ich, Kürbisgeist, written by Sibyl Kempson, is a theatrical piece of writing, but it is not a play in the usual sense. The language manifests the harsh landscape of a world facing destruction, populated by five crude people speaking a rigorous, specific, invented language. Every word is semi-recognizable, an amalgam of English, Swedish, German and Sid Ceasar. The five characters boast of surviving prior catastrophes and they bitterly recount lost times. They harvest pumpkin seeds; they sing; they dance; they reminisce. They are ever under threat from vaguely understood, external forces from which there is no protection. Their outrageous costumes, created by visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra, place us in an unspecified medieval European locale. Characters pop up on video, further rattling our sense of time and place. Ich, Kürbisgeist, strangely comic, full of rawness, fragmentation, confusion, and superstition, is in the end a contemplation of language itself.
KurbisGeist is co-commissioned by The Chocolate Factory and PS 122. Big Dance is grateful to the Abrons Art Center for residency support. The finished piece will premiere at The Chocolate Factory in Oct. 2012.
Miguel Gutierrez & the Powerful People
Work-In-Progress Showing: And lose the name of action
MON JAN 9 . 1:00 PM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
And lose the name of action is a new performance in development by Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, featuring Gutierrez and a star studded cast: Michelle Boulé, Hilary Clark, Luke George, K.J. Holmes and Ishmael Houston-Jones. Inspired by discoveries in neuroscience and paranormal phenomena, and drawing on the mysterious logic of improvisation, this new piece pushes Gutierrez’s persistent questions about the wonder of living with an ephemeral body into the beyond. Wry and perplexing, And lose the name of action treats the inscrutability of dance as its inherent power and savors its unique ability to be something that doesn’t make sense. The piece includes sound design by Neal Medlyn, lighting by Lenore Doxsee and visuals and writing by Boru O’Brien O’Connell.
The work in process showing will be followed by a moderated conversation with writer Jenn Joy.
Lead commissioning and developmental support for And lose the name of action has been provided by Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center at Florida State University in Tallahassee and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Additional project support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Dorris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust and The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. And lose the name of action has been supported by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council through a residency at Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island. Additional residency support provided by Baryshnikov Arts Center.
Luciana Achugar
Work-In-Progress Showing: FEELingpleasuresatisfactioncelebration holyFORM
SUN JAN 8 . 12:00 PM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER EXPERIMENTAL THEATER
466 Grand Street
Inspired by the 1960’s psychedelic experience, and its quest for enlightened interconnectivity and transcendence through altered states of consciousness, FEEL…FORM presents dance as a celebration of experience, and pleasure as the consummation of experience. With award-winning collaborators Michael Mahalchick (sound design) and Carrie Wood (lighting design), a quartet of women engage Achugar’s signature durational phrasing, multiplying the dancers’ movements to create an organic form reflecting both rigorous formalism and corporeal excess.
Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group
CONVERSATION: Why a dramaturge?
SAT JAN 7 12:30 PM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
Reggie Wilson will be joined by dramaturge and historian Susan Manning to discuss the research process for his forthcoming work, (project) Moseses Project, slated for BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 2013. The conversation will explore how Wilson came to work with a dramaturge on this project, how the working relationship has evolved and how the research process has embraced numerous tangents and unexpected connections in its explorations of Moses as story, myth and metaphor. Through this exploration Wilson and Manning will query “why a dramaturge” not only in Wilson’s new work but also more broadly in the field of dance-making.
DD Dorvillier
CONVERSATION: empty spaces/permanent dances: a lecture and presentation on Danza Permanente
FRI JAN 6 . 6:00 PM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER UNDERGROUND THEATER
466 Grand Street
The choreography of Danza Permanente comes from a musical composition created in Vienna two centuries ago by a nearly deaf man. Initially written for four stringed instruments, it’s transposed to be seen, played by four dancers. They embody the musical structure, behaviors, and dynamics of the string quartet over time, and through space. The dancers behave as sound, in their becoming of visible music. We propose that you watch this performance in near-silence as you would listen to music in a shadowy room. The transposition is by DD Dorvillier and Zeena Parkins and dancers Fabian Barba, Nuno Bizarro, Walter Dundervill, Naiara Mendioroz and Heather Kravas. The acoustic environment created by Zeena Parkins and lighting design by Thomas Dunn follow the score and frame this visible music.
Followed by a conversation led by André Lepecki with Dorvillier and her collaborators, Zeena Parkins and Thomas Dunn.
Earl Dax
AMERICAN PUSSY FAGGOT REALNESS
SAT JAN 7 . 8:00 PM – 4:00 AM
PUBLIC ASSEMBLY
70 North 6th Street between Wythe and Kent, Brooklyn
AMERICAN PUSSY FAGGOT! REALNESS is a performance-laden club night with two stages showcasing over twenty artists from the often-disparate worlds of dance, burlesque, cabaret, club and contemporary performance. For 2012 the event takes place at Public Assembly in vibrant Williamsburg, just a few minutes from the Bedford L subway stop or a short cab ride over the Williamsburg Bridge.
New York City nightclubs have long played a crucial role in the development of cutting edge performance. The real challenges – drunk and often inattentive crowds, limited technical capacity, etc – demand that artists wrest the attention of their audiences, helping to foster the intensity and dynamism characteristic of so many New York performers.
With a name derived from an epithet slung at him during a fabled bar brawl, “downtown impresario” Earl Dax has developed PUSSY FAGGOT! into a one night only, mini-festival of queer culture which is presented quarterly in New York City and has been featured internationally at Queer Up North and Queer Zagreb. With a fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design, Dax has also brought the event to New Orleans and a rural radical faerie community in Tennessee. This year’s festival edition of the event will once again be hosted by internationally acclaimed performance artist Penny Arcade, herself a product of the club scene and “a criminal, homosexual avant-garde.” It’s a night you won’t want to miss and one you won’t soon forget.
“Mr. Dax’s events, the most historically minded of the current generation of club performances, form one of the surest and most politically conscious links to the fabled East Village club scene of [the 1970’s and 80’s].” – Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times
AUNTS
AUNTS realness
SUN JAN 13 . 10:30 PM – 2:00 AM
ABRONS ARTS CENTER
466 Grand Street
AUNTS is about having dance happen. The dance you’ve already seen, that pops into your head, that is known and expected and unknown and unexpected. Dance that seeps into the cracks of street lights, subway commotion, magazine myth, drunk nights at the bar, the family album, and the couch where you lay and softly glance at the afternoon light coming in through the window. AUNTS constantly tests a model of producing dance/performance/parties. A model that supports the development of current, present, and contemporary performance. Simultaneous and sometimes accidental collaborations from a multitude of artists who believe that performance is a “land of plenty” rather than “never enough.” Where the work of AUNTS defies the regulation of institution, capitalism, and consumerism. AUNTS is about being gracious in this world.
For AUNTS realness, a collection of artists organized by AUNTS takes over all three performance spaces at Abrons Arts Center for a night of performance and good old fashioned debauchery. It’s dance, it’s a party. You might find a costume, you might have a snack, you’ll definitely have a drink, you might meet your next lady/boy/girlfriend. It’s a late night performance moment with a committed group of experimental artists who love what they do and love you too.
AUNTS realness is organized by Laurie Berg, Meredith Boggia and Liliana Dirks-Goodman.