MALLORY CATLETT    Vanya Revisited
Through the filter of sleep research and a Proustian formulation of memory and forgetting Catlett has dismantled and reconstructed Chekhov's play, Uncle Vanya.  The central conceit of Vanya Revisted is that it takes place years after the end of Chekhov’s play, probably after the revolution.  Only 4 characters remain -  Vanya, Sonya, Yelena and Astrov.  Much older, they live in a state of disarray.  Part intervention, part re-enactment, the events of the play unfold as the characters reconstruct the past in a last ditch effort to alter the outcome.
 

MATTHEW PAUL OLMOS  the nature of captivity
A two-part play inspired by "Dog Catcher Riots".  During this residency, Olmos will explore Part II of this piece, which focuses on the 'captors'... and is a comedy.
 

DANIEL IRIZARRY  Cho H Cho
Cho H Cho is an original theater collage, which explores and observes the culture of consumption and the new set of values that are being harvested in our globalized World. Cho H Cho questions, but avoids, a fatalistic view of the World: Are we destined to self-destruct? Can we transcend to a new level of sophistication and sensibility? Is it possible to reach happiness without the idea of a God and the after-life? Are we capable of sacrificing individual wealth for the wellbeing of all? Inspired by the Dada movement and Artaud’s ‘Theater of Cruelty’ Cho H Cho is a potpourri of events expressed with Love and Violence.

Performers: Laura Butler, Daniel Irizarry, and surprise guests.
Conceptualized by: Laura Butler and Daniel Irizarry
Directed by: Daniel Irizarry


KRISTI SPESSARD   Essentials of Flor
Essentials of Flor, is an original retelling of the Persephone / Demeter myth. In this dance - theater work, Greek myth and the Victorian Language of Flowers, a 19th Century pastime of sending complex secret messages through bouquets called tussie mussies - CLASH in order to magnify the fate between the human and plant worlds. Our story is told through the performance of 5 characters: Hades, Narcissus; Persephone, Demeter and Flor, the heroine of the work.  Flor’s world is an entanglement of ephemeral relationships and her flower shop serves as the locale for action, which teeters between present day and her imagination. Believing she is Demeter, plucked by Hades each autumn to spend time in the underworld, the dance story unfolds to create it’s own urban myth of cycles, estrangement and rebirth.
 
In growing this work into an evening length piece, collaborator, Illya Azaroff, is creating a deployable set – a florist’s storefront with a facade that opens like a blossom and folds like a defoliating flower. We are expanding the role of Narcissus into a promiscuous Floriographer (one who interprets the symbolic meaning of flowers) who serves to bridge the audience to the performance.  We are also collaborating with a composer to increase the live musical dimension, so the performers drive the action through vocal and musical accompaniment.
 

MALLORY CATLETT – Vanya Revisited
Through the filter of sleep research and a Proustian formulation of memory and forgetting Catlett has dismantled and reconstructed Chekhov's play, Uncle Vanya.  The central conceit of Vanya Revisted is that it takes place years after the end of Chekhov’s play, probably after the revolution.  Only 4 characters remain -  Vanya, Sonya, Yelena and Astrov.  Much older, they live in a state of disarray.  Part intervention, part re-enactment, the events of the play unfold as the characters reconstruct the past in a last ditch effort to alter the outcome.

KEVIN DOYLE – ASYLUM, ATM, CONSOLIDATION
Writer Kevin Doyle is developing of a series of plays for interdisciplinary theatre that examine how Americans are coping with the ongoing financial crisis. The plays are a fusion of two dramaturgical styles that emphasize both "found-texts" and original writing, while employing the usage of live cameras and stylized physicality during performance. These plays are: ASYLUM, in which an American family experiences the breakdown of the American dream in specific terms; ATM, in which New Yorkers' interactions with the city's homeless population express a shift in demographics and values; and CONSOLIDATION, in which a North American Soccer Mom finds herself stuck inside a car dealership for all time.  One of the plays will be completed and presented as a staged reading at the conclusion of the residency.

AMPARO GARCIA-CROW – STRIP
When the infamous Texan, burlesque dancer Candy Barr, died in the late 1990s, the New York Times wrote that Miss Barr, like Lenny Bruce, was a "subverter of official morality."  STRIP, a burlesque musical, being written and developed by Amparo Garcia-Crow, takes both of these iconic figures - Lenny B. as the M.C. (who likes to think of himself as a Hal Holbrook-like Stage Manager) and Candy B. as the headliner (who'd rather be the town librarian) - to tell a dual narrative about trying to make a buck in the burlesque world without losing your soul.  The story begins at a time when Texas was still the largest state in the union and The National Organization for Decent Literature was putting pressure on bookstores and enlisting local police to threaten booksellers too slow to 'cooperate' in removing from their shelves such filth spreaders as Hemingway and Orwell.  Meanwhile "back at the strip show," as our M.C. puts it, "I knew that according to all true Christian standards, nudity in itself was certainly not lewd, but burlesque - with its "subtle” charades of grabbing, “floorwork”, pulling and touching - was lewd.  Lewd in the sense that there was a woman on the stage whose chief aim was to get the audience horny."  And so begins the duality of STRIP.  For Candy B., dancing was her Ginger Rogers moment of freedom from the Dallas, Texas sub-culture, known as the "Capture", that enslaved her as a teen; it gave her an escape to do what she called her "artwork."  "God made my body and if it is dirty, then the imperfection lies with the Manufacturer, not the product," says Lenny B. on her behalf. " Do not remove this tag under the penalty of law!"

DANIEL KWIATKOWSKI – Thirst
A story of two people living in isolation.  One is a woman who has made the ultimate sacrifice for her own survival. The other, a young man who abandoned his mother and the guilt that now drives him to find another.  When the two finally meet the isolation only grows and the consequences of their actions begin to haunt them.  What happens when the needs of one transform another?  This is a story about hearts and stones.  It is a story about blood and feathers, soil and clay.  This is a story about thirst.

ERIC LOCKLEY – Without Trace
In association with members of The Movement Theatre Company
Without Trace is a drama that uses one family’s chilling experience, the disappearance of their son, to investigate the black male psyche, the American Dream and notions of performance in relationship to race.  The play is being developed within the frame of a family drama that takes place amidst an American crisis. The country finds itself in a Race War, and as trust within communities becomes strained, the future seems bleak, but a lost sons return may signal a new beginning or the beginning of the end.

YIN MEI DANCE – City of Paper
In collaboration with Sang Jijia
A new evening-length dance theater work explores a Wayang-like shadow world in which light, sound, paper, masks and movement converge in a post-modern meditation on history, fact and the mutability of human perception.  Set in a digitally interactive scenographic environment, the work weaves together personal vignettes, audio/visual fragments, a complex musical soundscape and abrupt yet sensuous movement, to create a dream landscape from which the events of a single momentous year in the Chinese Cultural Revolution gradually emerge.
The thread holding these multifarious elements together lies in the nature of paper itself – its transformative essence . . . light … its capacity to open doorways between worlds . . . its ability to communicate . . . its ability to lie.  Chinese writing, or calligraphy, is thus both conceptual frame and artistic device in this work, as a digitally interactive paper stage environment becomes the scroll upon which Yin Mei and Sang Jijia, using both electronic sensors and their own bodies, “re-write” a difficult personal history.

SHIRA MILIKOWSKY – The Joe Orton Project
Conceived with Satya Bhabha
A multi-media performance based on the life, work, and death of English playwright Joe Orton.  One actor plays many characters, including both Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, Joe’s long-time lover, sometime collaborator, and ultimate murderer.  Using video and live sound manipulation the piece explores themes of doubling and separation, especially in light of Joe and Kenneth’s “us-against-the-world” relationship.  At a time when concepts of rebellion were resonating with youth culture across the western world, Kenneth and Joe were original cowboys.  Their rage against the universe inevitably turned on each other, but it was never wholly separate from the world in which they were trying to live.  John Lahr describes Orton’s connection to the 1960’s counter-culture in his introduction to The Diaries, “Orton’s plays caught the era’s psychopathic mood, that restless, ruthless pursuit of sensation whose manic frivolity announced a refusal to suffer.”

MATTHEW PAUL OLMOS – The Nature of Captivity
Developed in collaboration with the theatre company woken'glacier. 
The piece is inspired by the "Dog Catcher Riots", about a wave of human progress washing over an indigenous society causing the only remaining native family to fight back against their oppressors. Told in two parts, Olmos and company will be exploring the physical'life of part one, in which the actors will inhabit various forms of movement, including: Viewpoints, Suzuki, Martial Arts, and animal work.  At the same time they will workshop part two, which explores the human (or captor) side of captivity.

ROYAL LACE PAPER WORKS – the RV Party
Jake Margolin and Chantal Pavageaux
In the RV Party, a couple who doesn't know each other very well drives across the country in an RV, fleeing a hometown catastrophe, hoping to run into the American Dream.  Meanwhile, in the RV Party, a girl in a bee suit explains the self-organizing, emergent structure of ant colonies and the complex interactions of meta-social systems such as the stock market.

TAAVO SMITH - Untitled
“The earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.”

What, while we wait for our lives to begin, as we wait for our lives to end? Games, booze, grief, fantasy, and futile gestures toward romance – the sad, silly heroism of the end of things.

A vigorous dual adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Samuel Beckett's Endgame.