The Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) is pleased to announce the fall 2010 performance season, which begins September 9 and features some of the finest artists from around the world in BAC’s Howard Gilman Performance Space and the newly opened Jerome Robbins Theater.

This fall’s theater offerings include two productions based on revolutionary works by Fyodor Dostoevsky. First will be the U.S. premiere of The Boys, an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov,performed by the renowned Theater Art Studio (Moscow), October 6-10. BAC will then present, in association with Theatre for a New Audience, the New York premiere of Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of Notes from Underground, adapted for the stage by OBIE Award-winning actor Bill Camp and internationally acclaimed director Robert Woodruff (November 7-20).

BAC’s dance presentations will include a New York premiere by Les SlovaKs Dance Collective (October 19-20); a performance by Aszure Barton & Artists (December 17-18), and a live dance installation created by Russell Dumas, which will feature the Australia-based Dance Exchange company (October 10). BAC’s popular film and discussion series, BAC Flicks, will comprise three dance films by Charles Atlas, featuring works performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, including the world premiere of Interscape (October 11); BIPED (November 15); and the world premiere of Split Sides (December 20).

Completing BAC’s fall season will be five music presentations. Pianist Eteri Andjaparidze and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton will join together in Spectral Scriabin, a work that explores the composer’s connections between chords and colors (October 25-26).  The Movado Hour, BAC’s signature series of free hour-long chamber music concerts presented in an intimate salon setting, will include four concerts: September 9, November 16, November 29, and December 8.  Highlights include the New York premiere of Jonathan Berger’s Sink or Swim for solo violin, performed by Livia Sohn, and a rare U.S. appearance by the world renowned Ensemble Organum performing Guillaume de Machaut’s 14th-century Messe de Notre Dame.

Tickets for all events go on sale August 30, 2010 and are available via Smarttix (www.smarttix.com / 212-868-4444).

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Jess Barbagallo & Annie McNamara in Half Straddle's "Nurses in New England." Photo by Ryan Trupp.

Half Straddle‘s Nurses in New England, playing through Sat., July 31 as part of the Soho Think Tank’s Ice Factory, is hardly without its charms. Tongue firmly in cheek, playwright Tina Satter sends up virtually every medical TV show cliche through this musical set in a small town hospital run, inexplicably, entirely by nurses. In New England. (“It’s very specific,” a character quips at one point.)

There’s the slightly bitter and world-weary head of nursing, Derek Shepherd (Jess Barbagallo), fond of secret smokes and booze cruises, trying to juggle ER drama and her new, nerve-wracked intern fond of narrating her own life (Emily Davis) with the unwelcome reappearance of her former partner Lois Lewis (Annie McNamara), whose own carefree, hospital-hopping lifestyle is running smack-dab into the brick wall that is her new-found passion for brash, balls-to-the-wall EMT Abby Lockhart (Erin Markey).

Throw in some stuffed animals, sweet supporting characters, and a bunch of one-liners, and you pretty much have the show. It’s clever, usually funny, and entertaining enough at 75 minutes. By and large, the casting is good. Barbagallo has amazing stage presence and plays exasperated quite well, and she and McNamara have a nice chemistry racing through occasionally nonsensical medical terminology or re-hashing their own troubled past. And Erin Markey easily takes the cake for best performance of the show, charismatically belting out her number–and I was assured this was her toned-down performance, in comparison to Puppy Love: A Stripper’s Tale, which was recently at soloNOVA at P.S. 122.

But if the show has a fault (aside from occasionally uneven singing and under-realized choreography), it’s that it’s too comfortable in the fringe theatre mode (with admitted slightly higher production values). I haven’t seen Half Straddle’s Family, which apparently went over well last year at the Ontological and won a fair bit of praise, but Nurses in New England doesn’t offer much besides winking, absurdist parody of well-worn TV tropes with a sapphic twist, and while the musical composition by Chris Giarmo is good, it also remains fairly true to standard pop musical formulas. It’s fun, but doesn’t seem all that ambitious.

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So I was catching up with Createquity.com and all the big ideas that have been bouncing around over there. I came across a link to a post on Gary Steuer’s blog in which he writes eloquently about “The Greatest Sacrifice Arts Workers Make For The Arts.” He goes on to say, among other things:

I think the more significant – and unique – sacrifice arts workers make is that we lose the capacity for full, innocent and glorious enjoyment of the very art that our passion for drove us to make our life’s work in the first place.  What do I mean by this?  Think about your earliest experiences with the arts, your first encounter with Matisse, or Chuck Close; your first time in the audience for Sondheim, or Verdi; that time you first saw Baryshnikov on stage, or Judith Jamison. Remember that childlike joy – even if you were not a child – that total immersion in the art where the whole world disappeared and you were unaware of time, of the person chewing gum next to you? Now tell, me when was the last time you felt that?  Sure, you are still passionate about the art form or all art forms, you still go to museums, or opera, or theatre, but something has been lost. Admit it.

I was just lamenting this to a friend of mine. I had just seen a show that was disappointing for many, many reasons and I was saying how burnt out I was feeling. As someone who spends a lot of time in his day job helping artists realize their visions, and then in this “off” hours going to see and experience a lot of art, it is easy to become jaded. It can be hard to hold on to the optimism, idealism and excitement that art can bring. I think part of it is true in any profession – if you know about the “man behind the curtain” then some of the mystery evaporates. But as an arts worker, dedicated to the idea that the creative impulse is something unique and worth celebrating, that the experience of aesthetic arrest is a vital part of the human experience, then burn-out feels really devastating, like you’re losing the center around which everything is built.

Of course – eventually that work of art, that show, that experience, will come again. Someone imaginative and creative will transport you to a special, magical place outside of time and make you remember why you do this in the first place. But those long stretches of blah can be hard to get through.

I started Culturebot mostly to talk about the art itself; but also to advocate for the idea that Art is Work – whether you’re a maker or an administrator – and that it should be taken seriously as such. In that sense burnout is as real in this field as in any field. Makers can feel lost and “blocked”, administrators can feel overwhelmed and under-inspired.

Whether you’re a maker or administrator – or both – how do you deal with those moments when you lose that lovin’ feelin’?

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DTW announced its 2010-2011 season and it is a doozy! Featuring work from international artists Alain Buffard (France), Raimund Hoghe (France/Germany) with Faustin Linyekula (Congo), Verdensteatret (Norway); national artists olive Dance Theatre (Philadelphia), and Rude Mechs (Austin); and New York City based artists, Sidra Bell, Yanira Castro, Walter Dundervill, Natalie Green, Neil Greenberg, Juliana F. May, Andrea Miller, Juliette Mapp, and Richard Move. Not to mention the critically acclaimed Season of Returns remounts works by Trisha Brown Dance Company and Faye Driscoll. David Parker and The Bang Group return with Nut/Cracked, the celebrated downtown dance version of The Nutcracker as Dance Theater Workshop’s holiday programming. The Studio Series supports the creative processes of Vanessa Anspaugh, Souleymane Badolo, Oren Barnoy, Maria Bauman, Maggie Bennett, Hilary Clark, Wendell Cooper, Niall Jones, Susan Rethorst, Jen Rosenblit, David Thomson, and Geoff Trenchard. And Tony Orrico creates a drawing installation in the Dance Theater Workshop lobby.

Its WAY too much to re-post here. Go check out the full listing at DTW’s site.

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Name: Alexandro Segade
Title/Occupation: artist, performer, director, teacher
Organization/Company: My Barbarian (performance collective); Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (performance workshop)
URL: alexandrosegade.wordpress.com; performanceartworld.wordpress.com; mybarbarian.com

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in San Diego, California, and I moved to Los Angeles at eighteen to go to school. I stayed in LA because I fell in love here, but I don’t know if I would stick around if I didn’t get to travel a lot. LA is a great place to come home to. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s the best place to live.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

I am a promiscuous artist, and different projects are born from love affairs with a bevy of beautiful influences. For the piece at REDCAT, Replicant VS Separatist, I was influenced foremost by Octavia Butler’s fiction, most of which is set in Los Angeles, as well as classic sci-fi movies set in LA, like Bladerunner, which I love, and Terminator, which I hate. I am also a fan of more esoteric cult movies like “Breaking Glass,” “Jubilee,” “Shock Treatment,” and “The Apple,” all movies from the 1970′s-1980s in which the corporate world is an evil empire that controls people through popular media and new wave music. Movies about making movies, particularly Fassbinder’s “Beware a Holy Whore,” also figured into it. I was interested in what happens when you frame a fiction with a crew, and show the audience the process of making of a fake world that expresses a reality. In this case, the position of gay men in society was something I wanted to talk about by using an allegory (clones vs mutants) for an internal debate around gay marriage, asking, “Do we want to be art of society, or do we want to remake it?” It may be impossible to chose, so the same actors play both sides. Musically, I was collaborating with Scott Martin, and we were imagining those great 1980s electronic scores by composers like Vangelis and Tangerine Dream, set against outdated pop music, particularly boybands from the 90s, like N’Synch, Backstreet Boys, and Boyzone.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

That is a hard question for a renaissance man! It’s also difficult to admit to myself that there are some things I simply can’t (and never will) do. I wish I could play an instrument: piano or guitar to accompany myself or others. I also wish I had a superpower, like telekinesis or time travel, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve started imagining that the ability to speak any language on earth would be the truest and most awesome of mutant abilities.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

A normal day involves emailing with institutions and collaborators, applying for grants, sending out packages of DVDs and PDFs of past projects, meeting with people, going to rehearsal, installing a work, teaching a class, or getting on a plane, or off one, and feeling guilty that I didn’t edit that video I was thinking I should, or feeling panicked that I forgot to do something else and that maybe tomorrow it will all fall apart, and the emails will cease, and no one will remember me when I die. In between that is a lot of talking, mostly to my boyfriend, sometimes to my cat. Then I watch something weird on Netflix or Hulu as I fall asleep…

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

I chose art, and art is work, if you conceive of it that way, with all the responsibilities and problems that work always contains. I had a full time job as a graphic designer at a big internet company after college, and I liked it, but at a certain point, what I did after hours, as an artist, became what I was doing at my desk, and I started getting in trouble with my bosses and feeling angry with myself for not trusting the art, or the audience that was connecting to it, enough to dedicate my whole life to this practice. So I quit. Focusing all my time and energy on art lead me to realize I needed more training. I got into UCLA’s Interdisciplinary Studio Program. I worked professionally in the field at the same time I was studying with artists such as Mary Kelly, Cathie Opie, Stanya Khan and Andrea Fraser, and during that incredibly productive time I began to really understand what it means to use your voice. Now I teach and make art and I don’t miss the corporate oppressor, or his money, at all.

***

Alexandro Segade will be appearing in Week Three (AUG 5-7) of REDCAT’s New Original Works (NOW) Festival. For more information click here.

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Mind the Gap, over at ArtsJournal, replies:

I personally thought Perron’s admonishment to knock the blogging off was a little harsh, but the seemingly always-distracted-by-blinking-technology side of me understands that she has a point.

trailerpilot replies:

The act of putting my creative process into words is immensely helpful to me as I seek to solve the problems I encounter therein. I agree wholeheartedly with both Perron and Stravinsky that the depths of some aspects ofcreation are dark, murky, inexplicable and, like dance itself, outside language. But there are many stages to dance making.

It seems like its more of a complicated questions than it would first appear.  What are your thoughts? Do you blog your process? Is it helpful? Do you see the act of blogging your process as an outreach tool or as a vital part of your creative process? Do you think the act of blogging affects the outcome of the work itself? I’d like to hear from more creative folks about the role blogging/twitter, etc etc. plays in how they make and conceive of their work.

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HERE announced its 2010-2011 which features presentations from many of its HARP (HERE Artist Residency Program) Artists. HERE is unique among downtown presenter/producers in its longterm commitment to artists developing work over the course of several years. This season is full of longterm projects coming to fruition as well as some return engagements and a few special presentations.

HARP artist presentations include:

“Border Towns” by Nick Brooke
Phantom Limb’s “The Fortune Teller” by Erik Sanko & Jessica Grindstaff
“Soul Leaves Her Body” by Peter Flaherty & Jenny Marytai Liu
“Mosheh” by Yoav Goal
“Secret Rendezvous” by The South Wing

Plus a Puppetry Festival featuring “Sonnambula” by Michael Bodel and “Don Cristobal: Billy-Club Man” by Erin Orr & Rima Fand

AND

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS CURATED BY HERE:
“Sleeping Beauty” by Colette Garrigan and Company Accès L’air’
“As The Eyes of The Seahorse” by Mural & The Mint and Nichole Canuso Dance Company

— MORE DETAILS—

HERE 2010-2011 Season Line-Up:

First up is Border Towns by Nick Brooke/The Cabinet, which plays HERE’s mainstage from September 10-18. A collision of recordings from the borders, this production melds musical sampling, lip-synching, live singing and theater into a genre all its own. Yodels, anthems, ambient sounds and fringe broadcasts are layered in perfect lockstep with seven performers, who mimic sampled collages of sound effects, pop songs and musical ephemera in a theatrical reflection on location and culture. With myopic precision, musical Americana is reconstructed one town at a time. Border Towns is co-directed with Jenny Rohn, and performed by members of The Cabinet. Developed through HARP.

Also in September, Sleeping Beauty by Colette Garrigan and France’s Company Accès L’Air’ takes to HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, appearing September 28 – October 2. At her birth they call her “Princess.” Her fate is sealed. Left to her own devices and brilliant imagination, this modern day Princess pays off her debts and takes her skeletons out of the cupboard once and for all. Arriving in the United States after an international tour, this creative retelling of the Briar Rose tale joins shadow puppetry, object theater and passionate monologue with a hard-hitting story filled with dark humor by renowned Liverpool-born French-transplant puppeteer Colette Garrigan. A startHERE and Dream Music Puppetry Program presentation.Soul Leaves Her Body by Peter Flaherty & Jenny MaryTai Liu plays a mainstage engagement November 5 – 23. From a boat, a light is seen blinking in a distant high rise. A family sits down for tea. An intercom buzzes, a home is emptied. A steaming cup of tea remains. Set in Hong Kong and based on a 13th Century Chinese story about a young woman who rips her soul from her body, this densely choreographed work unfolds live onstage through film, dance theatre, video, and foley sound. SOUL LEAVES HER BODY is a story for modern life, love and family. Developed through HARP.

In a special return engagement, Phantom Limb’s The Fortune Teller created and directed by HARP alum Erik Sanko & Jessica Grindstaff appears at HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre from October 28 – December 4. Seven unsavory strangers gather for a reading of a will. An alligator lawyer meets them at the door. Their future is in the hands of a mysterious fortune teller. Back by popular demand, this feature length marionette performance weaves the haunting music of Danny Elfman and Erik Sanko with an eerily comic and macabre tale of fate and fortune. Created and directed by Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff, The Fortune Teller drew rave reviews and garnered strong audience response in an extended run at HERE in Fall 2006. Originally developed through HARP. A Dream Music Puppetry Program presentation.

Philadelphia band The Mural and The Mint teams up with Nichole Canuso Dance Company in As the Eyes of the Seahorse, a collaborative work integrating live music and immersive choreography. Nichole Canuso weaves a series of movement prose that reflects, joins and pushes against the power and presence in the songs of The Mural and The Mint, whose music spans the spectrum of acoustic lullaby to epic sweep, incorporating guitars, cajon, bike wheels, plastic cups, digital loops, pianos, analog keyboards and voice. Set to play December 9 – 11 in the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre at HERE, the show is performed in the round, as dancers and musicians interact, trade places and draw focus to different areas of the space. A hemispHEREs presentation.

Back in the mainstage, MOSHEH by Yoav Goal is set to play January 26 – February 5. MOSHEH is a hybrid opera tracing the life of the legendary Biblical figure Moses. Through immersive video projections and highly stylized music, costuming and movement, MOSHEH brings four female characters to the forefront of the Biblical story – mother, sister, adoptive mother, and wife – who nurtured and protected the leader from birth. A series of episodes based on a short narrative in the book of Exodus follows the evolution of a hero from infancy through maturation and acceptance of his mission. The female characters highlight ancient pagan traditions veiled in the text, while their extensive arias, sung in Hebrew, are punctuated by appearances of God, a jealous and fearsome father figure, who bestows on Moses a harsh an arduous gift. MOSHEH evokes a spiritually charged, ancient/futuristic ritual. Developed through HARP.

Next in the mainstage is Secret Rendezvous by The South Wing, playing April 7 – 23. Led by Kameron Steele and Ivana Catanese, Brooklyn-based The South Wing theatre company presents its translation/adaptation of Kobo Abe’s 1977 novel Secret Rendezvous, chronicling the bizarre and erotic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital. This production is brought to American audiences for the first time through The South Wing’s neo- expressionist lens. Developed through HARP.

Finally, the season concludes in Spring 2011 with a Puppetry Festival in the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre featuring two Dream Music Puppetry Productions, developed through HARP:

• Sonnambula by Michael Bodel. Bellini’s pastoral opera, La Sonnambula is peeled back to reveal the experience of young Amina on the day before her wedding, surrounded by her village but lost in her own mind. A sleepwalker, Amina exists in the space between sleeping and waking, vibrant and lifeless. Visceral choreography of two dancers converges with puppetry on multiple scales. Amina’s world decomposes. Soprano Mme. Giuditta Pasta, performed by Casey Cole, is brought to life, moments before she steps onto the stage of La Scala, 1831.

• Don Cristóbal: Billy-Club Man by Erin Orr & Rima Fand. For centuries, the puppet Don Cristóbal has charmed audiences with his drunken, lusty, billy-club wielding antics. But does he secretly struggle with his role as the Billy-Club Man and long for love and escape? Through

experimental puppetry, clowning and live music, Don Cristóbal, Billy-Club Man explores the violent appetites of Cristóbal’s on-stage persona and follows him off-stage to reveal his poetic possibilities. Inspired by the puppet plays of Federico García Lorca, the piece features shadow, hand and large figurative puppetry by Erin Orr and evocative original music by Rima Fand.

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Shakespeare’s masterpiece without all that pesky dialogue! This award-winning adaptation, performed by LA Weekly Award nominees for BEST ENSEMBLE and PRODUCTION OF THE YEAR, features slapstick, vaudeville, puppetry, live original piano score, and a shark. That’s right. Shark.

More info at http://hamletshutup.com/.

WHAT: “Hamlet Shut Up” at the New York International Fringe Festival

WHO: Yer old pal Jonas “A Federal Offense” Oppenheim and a bunch of
really talented silent comedians

WHEN:
SAT 8/14 @ 8:30pm
MON 8/16 @ 2:30pm
WED 8/18 @ 9:45pm
FRI 8/20 @ 8:15pm
SAT 8/21 @ 2:30pm

WHERE: The First Floor Theatre @ LA MAMA, 74A East 4th St., New York, 10003

TICKETS & INFO: fringenyc.org, 866.468.7619, hamletshutup.com

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The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, announces the 2010-11 MCA Stage Season of multidisciplinary theater, dance, and music. In this season of Chicago firsts, with many debuts and new work premieres, MCA Stage announces the MCA Global Stage series, featuring four distinctive international theater arts companies. New York audiences – and Under the Radar audiences – will be familiar with a number of these groups. Great line-up!

Redmoon Theater: The Astronaut’s Birthday
September 9-26, 2010

International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)
September 11, 2010; February 26 and June 4, 2011
MCA Composers Stage series

Superamas: EMPIRE (Art & Politics)
October 2-3, 2010
MCA Global Stage series

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes with MAVerick Ensemble: El Gallo: opera for actors
October 6-10, 2010
MCA Global Stage series

Sankai Juku: Hibiki : Resonance from Far Away
October 20, 2010 at Harris Theater in Millennium Park
MCA Global Stage series

Big Dance Theater:
Comme Toujours Here I Stand
November 4, 6, and 7, 2010

Stew and The Negro Problem with Heidi Rodewald
November 12-13, 2010
MCA Composers Stage series

Creative Music Summit
November 19-21, 2010
MCA Composers Stage series

JASC Tsukasa Taiko: Taiko Legacy 7
December 19, 2010

Betontanc and Umka LV: Show Your Face!
January 14-16, 2011
MCA Global Stage series

eighth blackbird: PowerFUL/LESS
January 22 and February 5, 2011
MCA Composers Stage series

Every house has a door: Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never.
February 9-13, 2011

Abbey Theatre of Ireland: Terminus
March 2-6, 2011
MCA Global Stage series

Trisha Brown Dance Company
April 15-17, 2011

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NY Times has an interesting article on the trend of “theater for one”. Mentions Nicole Blackman, Aaron Landsman and a bunch of others.

These are all theater pieces meant to be experienced by an audience of one. High-concept and immersive, intimate theater has been cropping up for years, but now in Europe it has reached such a critical mass that the Battersea Arts Center in London, known for innovation, hosted the largest one-person-audience festival this month. Called One-on-One, it brought together 40 productions from around the world. And in New York on Thursday night “The Blind Trip” — the five performances based on different themes — will be presented as part of an international festival at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Long Island City, Queens.

Read the rest here.

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