NYU Skirball Fall 2019 Brochure

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SKIRBALL FALL 2019

GET CURIOUS #PLAYS #MOVES #SOUNDS #MATTERS #ACTS #TALKS #LIVES #QUEERS #EXPERIMENTS #QUESTIONS #CHALLENGES NYU Skirball holds close James Baldwin’s dictum that “artists are here to disturb the peace.” Our mission is to present work that inspires yet frustrates, confirms yet confounds, entertains yet upends. We proudly embrace renegade artists, academics, and thought-leaders who are courageous, outrageous, and mind-blowing.

Throughout the following pages you’ll find more on the world-class events we’re sending your way. We’ve commissioned Indefinite Articles from NYU faculty to help contextualize what we’re up to. And we offer reading lists throughout too. We’ve even started a Book Club (glance over at the next page) to get everyone talking and thinking and hanging out before a show.

On nyuskirball.org you can find dramaturgical Prep School study guides for each production, with more reading materials, video clips, and exclusive Office Hours interviews with scholars and artists; plus a calendar of pre- and post-show talks, discussions, seminars, and production programs. We hope you partake.

We are NYU’s largest classroom. We want to feed your head.

Suggested Readings Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. Touchstone, 1995.

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge, 1993.

Clare Croft (editor), Queer Dance.

Oxford University Press, 2017.

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction. Routledge, 2013.

Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dance.

University of California Press, 1986.

Diana Taylor, Performance. Duke University Press Books, 2016.

André Lepecki (editor), Dance (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art). MIT Press, 2012.

Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. University of Michigan Press, 2013.

GET TANGENTIAL Get beyond genre & see our season as a set of conversations between artists working in different fields — here are some thematic connections between shows, with many more to be discovered throughout the season. #STONEWALL50 Artists who bring gender and sexuality center stage, drawing on contemporary experience & the rich histories of queer culture in the 20th century.

#AMBULATEANDRUMINATE These artists ask the audience to move with them, in and around the theater; or to reflect on the experience of pilgrimages and processionals.

Sep 27–28 Zoë Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez, Adrienne Truscott: Wild Bore Oct 11–12 John Kelly: Underneath the Skin Oct 25–26 Mette Ingvartsen: to come (extended) Dec 7–8 The Builders Association: Elements of Oz

Sep 6–8 JoAnne Akalaitis: BAD NEWS! i was there…

Sep 12–14 Philippe Quesne: The Moles Oct 18–20 ICE: George Lewis’s Soundlines

#GETLITERARY Adaptation, inspiration, citation — we’ve got it all, in these artists’ work with bringing texts to the stage.

Sep 20–22 Daniel Fish: White Noise (Freely inspired by the novel by Don DeLillo) Oct 11–12 John Kelly: Underneath the Skin Nov 8–9 Big Dance Theater: The Road Awaits Us Dec 7–8 The Builders Association: Elements of Oz

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GET INTERTEXTUAL NYU SKIRBALL BOOK CLUB FRIDAY NIGHTS @ 6:30 PM Before every Friday night performance — except for Elements of Oz, which will meet on Saturday — we’ll gather in NYU Skirball’s lower lobby to think (and drink — it’s happy hour!). We’re putting together an informal, casual way to find a new favorite book, meet fellow NYU Skirball fans, and get your brain into gear for the show. But don’t worry, there won’t be a test.

We’ve paired each production in our season with a complementary book: novels, short stories, essays, poetry, a memoir, and even a comic book. White Noise and Secret Historian were obvious choices —they’re source material for the shows they’re paired with.

The rest of our picks are more recent works, bringing a diverse array of contemporary writers into the conversation. Check nyuskirball.org/book-club for more information on the authors, the books, and some prompts to get you started before the show.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie A reimagining of Antigone that unfolds amongst British Muslims.

Paired with BAD NEWS! I WAS THERE… (p. 5)

Secret Historian by Justin Spring A compelling portrait of queer life long before Stonewall.

Paired with UNDERNEATH THE SKIN (p. 17)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay A poetic celebration of the beauty of the natural world.

Paired with THE MOLES (p. 7)

Advantages of Being Evergreen by Oliver Baez Bendorf Poems of the earth’s abiding wonders and the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom.

Paired with SOUNDLINES (p. 19)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25

White Noise by Don DeLillo The postmodern classic.

Paired with WHITE NOISE (Freely inspired by the novel by Don DeLillo) (p. 11)

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor Paul’s got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter and can transform his body at will.

Paired with to come (extended) (p.21)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8

Death Threat by Vivek Shraya A comic book that is a bold act of transfeminist reclamation and resistance.

Paired with WILD BORE (p. 13)

The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Short Stories by Yukiko Motoya The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers.

Paired with THE ROAD AWAITS US (p. 25)

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi A modern fairytale: a family recipe & a mythic homeland that doesn’t exist on any map.

Paired with ELEMENTS OF OZ (p. 27)

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JOANNE AKALAITIS: BAD NEWS! I WAS THERE ...

SKIRBALL FALL 2019

“Magisterial artistry ... powerful ... and gorgeous music.”

— Minneapolis Star Tribune

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

NYC PREMIERE

#IMMERSIVE #LEGENDARY #PLAYS

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941 Readings Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us. Pantheon, 2019.

Bryan Dorries, The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us Today. Vintage, 2016.

Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Peter Meineck, Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition, and the Imperative for Theatre. Routledge, 2017.

Deborah Saivetz, An Event in Space: JoAnne Akalaitis in Rehearsal. Smith & Kraus, 2000.

Theatrical legend JoAnne Akalaitis creates BAD NEWS! i was there… — a site-specific processional performance exploring the monumental impact of the messenger character from classic drama — with an original score

by Bruce Odland, lighting design by Tony Award-winner Jennifer Tipton, and visual design by OBIE award-winner Julie Archer. Audiences are split into four groups, each led on a unique journey through NYU Skirball’s lobby, hallways, and out-of-the-way spaces where some of history’s most memorable messengers bring them tidings of bad news.

Taken from the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Racine, and Brecht, tragic monologues are spoken and sung in a harmonious chorus of English, interwoven with Greek, Latin, German, and French, with movement influenced by the Indian Kathakali tradition. All paths lead to the empty stage where the performers tell the battle story from The Persians by Aeschylus, the oldest surviving play in Western literature.

Performed by Rachel Christopher, Kelley Curran, Katie Lee Hill, Jenny Ikeda, Henry Jenkins, Howard Overshown, Jasai Chase Owens, and Rocco Sisto.

JoAnne Akalaitis is a five-time Obie Award-winning theater director and writer, co-founder of the critically acclaimed avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines, former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and a Drama Desk Award recipient. She has staged works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Beckett, Pinter, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Genet at theaters all over America and in Europe. She has taught at institutions such as the Juilliard School, Bard College, Fordham and Yale Universities, and was the Andrew Mellon Co-Chair of the first directing program at Juilliard, Chair of the Theater Program at Bard College until 2012 and the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham University in 2015. She is a recipient of the Edwin Booth Award and Rosamond Gilder Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre.

Advisory: Due to the processional nature of BAD NEWS! i was there..., the audience size and ticket availability is strictly limited.

BAD NEWS! i was there… is presented in cooperation with the Guthrie Theater.

Indefinite Article: Erin B. Mee Five years ago, celebrated theatre director JoAnne Akalaitis called her friends and announced: “I’m giving up theatre.” It “doesn’t seem to be feeding me or the society.” Soon after, the executive director of Poet’s House, Lee Brecetti, invited Akalaitis to do a piece in their new space, and when she looked at the courtyard, she said: “Yes, I want to do a piece called BAD NEWS! i was there..., about messenger speeches from Greek plays. I had never thought about it before. The idea for this piece came from the gods. But it was probably in me deep from undergraduate days and acting and directing Greek drama through the years.”

To create BAD NEWS!, Akalaitis sat down with Greg Taubman, a classicist from Princeton, and some theater buddies, and collaged texts together from various tragedies. “Then I gathered several actors for a single day of rehearsal, and we did it outside in the courtyard at

Poet’s House as part of the River to River Festival.” Akalaitis was most excited by the fact that it was in an outdoor public space, that it was extraordinarily moving material and it came together so quickly. A year later, after a reading at New York Theater Workshop, she felt something like an oratorio form was right for the material. Later, with longtime collaborator (including the Ipheginia Cycle in Chicago at the Court Theater), composer Bruce Odland, she embarked on a ten-day workshop at Bard College where they constructed the basic form with students.

BAD NEWS! i was there... had its official premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where it moved through the lobbies of the enormous building and “woke up the lonely, often empty public spaces common to most large institutions.”

BAD NEWS! i was there... is sung and spoken, primarily in English, with Greek, Latin, French, and German interjections and overlaps. The messenger speeches are

by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Racine, in adaptations and translations by various writers such as Ezra Pound, Caryl Churchill, and Ellen McLaughlin. It focuses on Medea, Thyestes, Orestes, Phedre, Hecuba, Oedipus, Antigone, and The Persians. The audiences travel from site to site in the NYU Skirball theatre — “a space whose architecture tells them to sit and face the proscenium stage to watch a performance. We plan to violate and assault it in open, creative way” — so the audience is invited to rethink their relationship to the physical and aural space which might be fluid, open, even messy.

Akalaitis is currently excited by “theatre where there are no cues, and no scenery (other than the site). No lighting except for homemade or handheld lights. I love the idea of no tech. When actors know it’s on them to get it right and work together, both in terms of acapella singing and co-ordinating in different parts of the building, they are remarkably creative.”

Greek theatre was the polis coming together for a spectacle that examines what is unthinkable. The Greeks are both sublime and terrible and in this piece we use the astonishingly original theatrical device of the Messenger, an ordinary person in the household or community who not only describes a horrific event but also relives it and subliminally invites the audience to negotiate what may be fundamentally non-negotiable.

“I was there“ is a refrain heard every day on the news, often followed by “How can this happen? What’s wrong here? What should we do?”

As the audience is guided through the piece, they are invited to leave notes in boxes that are placed throughout the theatre. BAD NEWS! i was there... ends with a public gathering: people pick up pieces of paper that have been left anonymously by fellow audience members in BAD NEWS! Drop Boxes throughout the spaces and shared during a lobby gathering. The bad news people write about is not necessarily surprising or even shocking but it may fit into a template or workshop that the Greeks created for spectators to consider an unstable, open ended, disorienting, tragic world which continues to speak so urgently to all of us.

Erin B. Mee is Artistic Director of This Is Not A Theatre Company, Assistant Arts Professor of Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and assisted JoAnne Akalaitis on “The Screens” at the Guthrie Theater.

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‘I WAS THERE’ IS A REFRAIN HEARD EVERY DAY ON THE NEWS.

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PHILIPPE QUESNE: THE MOLES SKIRBALL FALL 2019

“Mr. Quesne specializes in finding the marvelous in the minor, the awesome in the resolutely everyday.”

— The New York Times

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14

US PREMIERE

#WHACKED-OUT #ANTHROPO #MATTERS

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Celebrated French director Philippe Quesne creates a mysterious underground world inhabited by giant punk-rock playing insectivores who live in a parallel world, free of words — and of humans. In three distinct events, New Yorkers of every age will have the chance to embark on this improbable journey to the Moles’ ecological and philosophical wonderland.

Parade of the Moles: Thursday, September 12 The Moles venture forth from NYU Skirball to explore the great outdoors and Greenwich Village landmarks.

The public is invited to join in this free, informal parade as the creatures explore the NYU neighborhood.

Afternoon of the Moles: Saturday, September 14 In this family-friendly performance, seven giant moles emerge from a cardboard tunnel, dig, cook, draw, fight giant earthworms, and even form a punk rock band. There will be a pre-show activity for children and their families.

Night of the Moles: Friday, September 13 & Saturday, September 14 In this not-so-family-friendly performance, the Moles dig, cook, draw, fight giant earthworms, copulate, and form a punk band that rocks their underground world.

A disconcerting microcosm that could only have come from the imagination of Philippe Quesne.

Advisory: Night of the Moles contains subject matter that might not be appropriate for audiences under 16.

Afternoon of the Moles is family-friendly.

Philippe Quesne studied fine arts, visual design, and stage design in Paris. In 2003, he founded Vivarium Studio. His many works, which have been presented to great acclaim internationally, combine scenography with visual art and performance. Since 2014, he has been artistic director of France’s Nanterre-Amandiers theater.

In his work, Quesne creates spaces that function like ecosystems, where the performers explore the dynamics within a community. In addition to his work for the theater, he creates performances and interventions in public spaces or natural sites and displays his installations in the context of exhibitions. In 2019, he was named artistic director for the Prague Quadriennal.

The Moles is presented in cooperation with Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. nanterre-amandiers.com

This project is supported by FACE Contemporary Theater, a program developed by FACE Foundation and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States with the support of the Florence Gould Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Institut français-Paris, the French Ministry of Culture, and private donors.

Indefinite Article: Phillip John Usher Philippe Quesne, a visual artist who collaborates constantly with thinkers and philosophers, is (for my money) France’s most exciting contemporary theatermaker. He is a vital artist for the Anthropocene, this new era into which we have stumbled.

The Night of the Moles, as I jotted down on a piece of paper after first seeing it in 2016, is “like getting a very satisfying injection of materialist philosophy cut with something vaguely psychotropic, leaving the spectator with the impression that she now understands something we might call Mole-Paw-Being.” Which is to say that watching seven-foot-tall moles dig tunnels and shift

matter about, play the theremin and the electric guitar, copulate, live, die, grieve, fight, and wrestle with huge earthworms, will put you in an (upbeat and riotous) altered mental state (such is the purpose of theater) and leave you with a deep and intuitive sense of how human and non-human agencies commingle with and in the matter of which our Earth is hewn. It is like going to a party, having a good time, and then returning home to realize that you now possess a visceral grasp of ecological thought.

To situate The Night of the Moles, we can recall that at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, the state-owned theater that Quesne directs on the outskirts of Paris, The Night of the Moles was in November 2016 part of a festival titled “Welcome to Caveland,” an extravaganza that the festival booklet described as “an artistic swarming that gets its inspiration from undergrounds and from caves, from places hidden and clandestine, from alternative and subterranean spaces that are ‘underground’ in all senses of the word, places close to E/earth and to matter, but which also give rise to dream-like visions.” Also featured in the festival were Cécile Fraysse’s playful Earthworm Island and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Fever Room, a film projected on four screens and subsequently on the smoke that fills the room, all to be watched lying on the floor alongside a bunch of strangers doing the same. As with The Night of the Moles, you are here, in the midst of it, nowhere else, and the sky is falling down on your head, and you’re carried off down a tunnel. And you’re in caves, and then you’re here and you’re not sure where here is.

This is being thrown into the ecological here and now.

Nature is no longer over-there.

Also featured in “Welcome to Caveland” — and here, we can appreciate what the shot of materialist philosophy changes in our grasp on the world — were the rock-star philosopher of the Anthropocene, Bruno Latour, and thinker/theater director Frédérique AïtTouati, who also recently collaborated on Inside, which NYU brought to Broadway’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre in 2018 as part of the Center for French Language and Cultures’s “French Natures” conference-festival. In both cases: a shot of materialist philosophy (Latour) + something psychotropic (theater). It is fair to say that, while being much more, The Night of the Moles at once pre-dates, anticipates, translates, and celebrates Latour’s most recent book, Où atterrir? (to which was given the strange and misleading English-title Down to Earth), which hypothesizes that, to live in the Anthropocene, we must get rid of notions like global and local, in preference for the terrestrial, i.e. for the multiple agencies that commingle in the critical zone, that envelope of the biosphere that Lovelock nicknamed “Gaia’s skin.” We can only see our globe if we are astronauts, God, or if we imagine ourselves looking back from nowhere. That is no way to live, no way to do politics. Better, for sure, to think — or rather, to be and to sense — like a mole.

Having and watching moles move about the stage on scooters and play the theremin is not just theater, but philosophical and political theater. Read closely the thirty-one pages of the document known as the Paris Agreement, produced within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 21) in December 2015. On one hand, you will come across the word “emission” a total of ninety-eight times. On the other hand, you will not find the words “extraction” or “mining” anywhere, not once. A mole, though fabled to be blind, would never be guilty of such an oversight.

As Latour recently put it talking about his exhibitions at the ZKM (e.g. Reset Modernity!), Quesne’s play does not seek to “illustrate” philosophical ideas; rather, “it plunges philosophical ideas into the competing field of much more powerful works of art.” After seeing The Night of the Moles, everyone knows for sure that we live not just on Earth, but with it.

Phillip John Usher is the Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. He is most recently the author of “Exterranean: Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene” (Fordham University Press, 2019).

Readings Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (editors), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. Open Humanities Press, 2015.

Thomas J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Sternberg Press, 2019.

Clare Finburgh and Carl Lavery (editors), Contemporary French Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Jeffrey Kastner, Nature (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art). The MIT Press, 2012.

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Lourdes Orozco, Theatre & Animals.

Macmillan Palgrave, 2015.

BETTER, FOR SURE, TO THINK – OR RATHER, TO BE AND TO SENSE – LIKE A MOLE.

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SKIRBALL FALL 2019

Philippe Quesne: The Moles Photographed by Martin Argyroglo

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DANIEL FISH: WHITE NOISE

BY DON DELILLO SKIRBALL FALL 2019

FREELY INSPIRED BY THE NOVEL

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 20 – SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22

US PREMIERE

#DELILLO #POMO #PLAYS

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941 Daniel Fish is a New York-based director who makes work across the boundaries of theater, film, and opera.

He draws on a broad range of forms and subject matter including plays, film scripts, contemporary fiction, essays and found audio. Recent work includes Oklahoma!

(Broadway and St. Ann’s Warehouse), Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta (Prototype Festival), Don’t Look Back (The Chocolate Factory), Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place (Curtis Opera), Who Left This Fork Here (Baryshnikov Arts Center, Onassis Center), Ted Hearne’s The Source (BAM NEXT WAVE, L.A. Opera, San Francisco Opera), and Eternal. His work has been seen at theaters and festivals throughout the US and Europe, and his residencies and commissions include The MacDowell Colony, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mass MOCA, The Chocolate Factory and The Bushwick Starr. He is the recipient of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for the Theater. danielfish.net

“Another remix of an American classic.”

— The New York Times Daniel Fish, Tony Award-nominated director for his revival of Oklahoma! on Broadway, brings a new work freely inspired by Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise to NYU Skirball.

The 70 minute performance extracts its text entirely from the novel’s teeming lists, creating an obsessive reduction of the novel’s prescient themes: rampant consumerism, environmental disaster, guns, media saturation, underground conspiracy, fear of death and the disintegration of the nuclear family.

Originally staged in 2018 by Theater Freiburg and Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen in Germany, White Noise is performed by actor Bruce Mackenzie with live accompaniment by composer/drummer Bobby Previte.

Jim Findlay’s video design features nineteen teenagers from Freiburg, Germany and is projected on Andrew Leiberman’s monumental set, which encapsulates Mackenzie in the center of the image.

This US premiere is a collaboration between Fish, Mackenzie, Findlay, Lieberman, Doey Lüthi (costume), Previte, Alexandra Caffal (associative director) Stacey Derosier (light), and the teenagers who appear in the video.

Advisory: This performance may be most appropriate for ages 11 and up, but all are welcome.

Indefinite Article: Joshua Williams For me, it wasn’t until “Pore Jud is Daid” that Daniel Fish’s Broadway revival of Oklahoma! proved it was exactly as revelatory as everyone said it was. The scene begins in a blackout that seems to go on and on as our anxiety mounts — and then suddenly the upstage wall of the set is illuminated in austere grayscale. It’s a live video of Patrick Vaill (playing a tormented Jud Fry) in extreme close-up as Damon Daunno’s Curly McLain sings inches from his face, goading him into hanging himself. As the camera moves around the two men, the scenic backdrop painted on the upstage wall — fields, two lonely houses, open sky — swims across Vaill’s face. The landscape darkens; there’s weather. Jud’s pain comes sweepin’ down the plain.

Jack Gladney, the Hitler Studies professor at the heart of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, provides the key to this aesthetic. “The world is full of abandoned meanings,” he says. “In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.” Even critics hostile to Fish’s Oklahoma! acknowledge that he discerned dark currents of uncertainty and violence beneath the placid surface of the text. Rather than revealing themselves in a flash, these unexpected intensities accumulate, building slowly like storm clouds on the horizon, casting deepening shadows.

How appropriate, then, that Fish has also chosen to adapt White Noise for the stage. Jack Gladney again: “Weather was very much the point, although I didn’t know it at first.” DeLillo’s characters don’t so much forge a path through life as they are bombarded by it. They are endlessly exposed — to the TV, the radio, the tabloids, product displays in the supermarket, drugs they may or may not have taken, the strange behavior of lovers and children, the inscrutability of everyday conversation, an all-consuming fear of death. Then of course there is the Airborne Toxic Event, a plume of supposedly deadly chemicals that moves like a hurricane through the novel, post-industrial anxiety eddying in its wake.

Reading the weather report is one thing; standing outside in the rain is another. In his stage adaptation, Fish has cast us as Jack Gladney’s fellow evacuees, exposed as he has been to the toxicity of our political, technological and ecological present. “I watched the audience,” Gladney says, surveying a room of people made temporarily homeless by the Airborne Toxic Event. “Look at us, I thought. Forced out of our homes, sent streaming into the bitter night, pursued by a toxic cloud, crammed together in makeshift quarters, ambiguously death-sentenced.” The performance washes over us, crammed together here in the makeshift quarters of the theatre. Even the text itself, in Bruce Mackenzie’s astonishing delivery, is a kind of weather. Where can we take shelter?

Joshua Williams is an Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow in the Department of Drama at NYU Tisch. His research focuses on questions of race and animality in African performance. He is currently translating the complete plays of the Tanzanian dramatist Ebrahim Hussein from Swahili into English for Oxford University Press, and his own plays have been developed and produced at, among others, Princeton University, the University at Buffalo, Capital Fringe, NYMF, Ars Nova’s ANT Fest and EST/Sloan.

Readings Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, Eckart Voigts (editors), The Routledge Companion to Adaptation. Routledge, 2018.

Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward (editors), Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives.

Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Don DeLillo, White Noise. Penguin Orange Collection, 2016.

John N. Duvall, The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Patrice Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today.

Routledge, 2013.

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FISH HAS CAST US AS JACK GLADNEY’S FELLOW EVACUEES.

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WILD BORE SKIRBALL FALL 2019

ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT, ZOË COOMBS MARR & URSULA MARTINEZ

“Three comedians at the top of their game deliver a meta exploration of criticism that is truly, outrageously funny.”

— The Guardian

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 & SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

US PREMIERE

#BUTTTALK #STONEWALL50 #MATTERS

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941 Readings Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Second Edition). University of Michigan Press, 2012.

Jacqueline Millner, Catriona Moore (editors), Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes. Routledge, 2018.

Kim Solga, Theatre & Feminism.

Macmillan Palgrave, 2015.

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me. Haymarket Books, 2015.

Fintan Walsh, Matthew Causey (editors), Performance, Identity, and the NeoPolitical Subject. Routledge, 2013.

The first rule of making art is: don’t respond to your critics. But in the US premiere of Wild Bore, three masters of smart, political and outrageous comedy delve into the torrent of critical fury that has been aimed at baffling, misunderstood and downright awful works of art (including their own). The subversive, hilarious and frequently misunderstood Zoë Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez, and Adrienne Truscott team up to play certain critics at their own game, and prove they too are not afraid to talk out of their arses.

Zoë Coombs Marr (AUS) was the winner of the 2016 Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) award for Trigger Warning and has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, London’s Soho Theatre and MICF. Ursula Martinez (UK) is an established international writer, performer and cult cabaret diva. She produces explosive live performance, for theater, cabaret and beyond. Adrienne Truscott (US) is a choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer, and as of late, comedian, who makes genre-straddling work in New York City and abroad. zoecoombsmarr.com ursulamartinez.com adriennetruscott.com Advisory: This performance contains nudity and mature themes and may not be appropriate for audiences below the age of 18.

Wild Bore is presented in cooperation with Malthouse Theatre Melbourne.

Indefinite Article: Lisa Duggan To See or Not to See? That is the question posed by Wild Bore, a complex meta-tation on the politics of perception and representation disguised as a gleeful revenge romp aimed at theater critics. Created by notoriously provocative feminist performers Zoë Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott, this performance piece reverses the gaze and asks — are reviewers mostly talking out of their asses?

Literally. The first thing the audience sees is a press conference table set up for talking butts — the performers’ shiny white moons — spouting lines from reviews. We are confronted with streams of verbal crap in evolving scenes featuring literalized metaphors from the pontificating butts, to the performers’ heads up prosthetic butts, to semi-clothed and naked antics with all the sight and sound gags you might imagine. This is awesome ridiculous fun for performers, writers, and artists who have issues with the practice of criticism — pretty much all of us.

But it’s not all cathartic acting out! Wild Bore stages a multi-layered critique of critical pomposity, that critiques its own critiques while deconstructing the practice of critique. It runs naked circles around our habits of perception. In other words, sure, it’s a goofy spoof full of toilet and body part humor. But it is also sooooo smart!

It will pop your brain cells while you’re laughing out loud.

The unexpected appearance of trans/genderqueer performer Krishna Istha underscores the ultimate “dramaturgical design” of the show (that phrase is a running gag, a repeated quote from a reviewer who doubted the performer had the capacity for it).

Istha begins with a critique of Wild Bore for featuring “three white women performing on stolen land.” Ahem.

True enough. But after illuminating the limits of the racial and gender horizons of the show’s perspective thus far (seriously, this is not parody), Istha proceeds to critically examine their own point of view and positioning with puckish glee. Istha’s pop-up appearance risks being seen as a tokenistic add on, but their performance actually functions as the core moment, underlining and illuminating the overarching aspirations of the show. This is the moment when outside critique becomes inside performance, spinning critical perspectives into a deeper shift in perception. Plus, it’s part of the fun!

Wild Bore is definitely wild, and definitely not a bore.

When we wish for the kind of night out where we can escape, fantasize, imagine, but also think… this is the kind of the thing we are looking for. Who says feminists can’t be fun?

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and author most recently of “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.”

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WHO SAYS FEMINISTS CAN’T BE FUN?

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SKIRBALL FALL 2019

Wild Bore ZoĂŤ Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez, and Adrienne Truscott Photographed by Maria Baranova

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JOHN KELLY: UNDERNEATH THE SKIN SKIRBALL FALL 2019

“Mr. Kelly exists in the moment of pure imaginative creativity midway between the two realities of the everyday and the life of the theater.”

— The New York Times

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11 & SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12

WORLD PREMIERE COMMISSION

#STUDFILE #STONEWALL50 #MATTERS

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Created and performed by John Kelly, Underneath the Skin is a dance-theater work based on the life of the societal and sexual maverick, Samuel Steward (1909– 1993). A novelist, poet, and scholar, Steward abandoned his post as a staid university professor to reinvent himself as a writer of gay erotic fiction (aka Phil Andros), and as one of the 20th century’s most accomplished and influential tattoo artists (aka Philip Sparrow). He had trysts with Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Roy Fitzgerald (aka Rock Hudson); attracted the friendships of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and André Gide; and having meticulously recorded every sexual encounter he ever had in his “Stud File,” became an unofficial collaborator at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in the 1950s.

An obsessive documenter, Steward’s papers and ephemera survive at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Kelly virtuosically combines these drawings, letters, photographs, and manuscripts, along with video projections and digital animations of Steward’s tattoo designs and erotic illustrations, into a kaleidoscopic manifestation of a life that was virtuosic, courageous, and celebratory.

John Kelly is a celebrated performance and visual artist, vocalist, and dancer. His performance works are sometimes autobiographical or character-driven, and other times focus on the struggles encountered by artists and social outsiders, and the nature of creative genius. His works have been performed at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, La MaMa, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Tate Modern. His visual artwork is based in various aspects of self-portraiture, including drawing, painting, photography, and video. A recent solo exhibition Sideways into the Shadows included over 50 hand-drawn portraits of friends and lovers lost to the AIDS epidemic, and he recently completed his first graphic novel, A Friend Gave Me A Book. He has received two Obie Awards and two NEA American Masterpieces Awards; and fellowships from The American Academy in Rome and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. johnkellyperformance.org Advisory: The performance contains sexually graphic content and may not be appropriate for audiences below the age of 18.

NYU Skirball’s commission and presentation of “Underneath the Skin” is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

Indefinite Article: Marvin J. Taylor “I write for myself and strangers,” Gertrude Stein says on the opening page of The Making of Americans. I feel like I might be doing the same thing and for the same reasons.

With Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the smiley-faced, super smart, married gay man winning over the hearts of the media and the voting public, who can write “In Praise of Shame,” as Bosie Douglas once did? Sam Steward could — and did.

Steward was at times a novelist, professor, tattoo artist, pornographer, masochist, sex researcher, and slut. I first heard of Steward when I purchased a copy of Dear Sammie, an edited group of letters from Stein and Alice B. Toklas to Steward, with whom they shared a long friendship. I have an abiding love for Stein’s writing and thinking. It has taken me to Père Lachaise and to 27 rue de Fleurus. She has followed me to Italy, where I once sat in a small room at Villa La Pietra outside of Florence reading her letters to the great aesthete Harold Acton.

The window was open. It had stopped raining and the lateOctober sun broke through the clouds. I could see Fiesole in yellow at the top of the hill. In my hand was a letter to Acton from Alice, responding to one he had sent to Stein and her. In her spidery hand Alice wrote something like “I know Gertrude would have loved receiving your letter.

She always enjoyed your visits, but she died a few days ago.” The note was not long. Very formal. And the writing filled with pain.

Sam Steward was a part of Gertrude and Alice’s international gang of misfits, artists, and faggots. He began having sex with men at an early age, including sleeping with Rudolph Valentino and Bosie Douglas, as well as numerous men whose information he kept in the “stud file” — a card catalogue of his sexual conquests that caught the attention of Alfred Kinsey. In his new work Underneath the Skin, John Kelly evokes the sexy underworld of queer life before gay rights, AIDS, and gay marriage. Justin Spring calls Steward a “sexual renegade.”

Kelly brings Steward and his time to life. We can only speculate what would have happened if AIDS had not destroyed an entire generation of sexual renegades, leaving only those who wanted to marry. We can only long for “feasting among panthers,” as Wilde said.

Marvin J. Taylor is the founding curator of the Downtown Collection and the Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection at New York University.

Readings Phil Andros, Stud. Alyson Books, 1993.

Debra A. Moddelmog and Martin Joseph Ponce (editors), Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic Sexuality, Literature, Archives. Ohio State University Press, 2017.

Justin Spring and Sam Steward, An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward. Elysium Press/Antinous Press, 2010.

Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Sam Steward and Jeremy Mulderig (editors), Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

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WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF AIDS HAD NOT DESTROYED AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF SEXUAL RENEGADES.

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ICE: GEORGE LEWIS’ SOUNDLINES SKIRBALL FALL 2019

“George Lewis is an astoundingly inventive experimentalist.”

— The New York Times

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18 & SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19

NYC PREMIERE

#EXPERIMENTS #MULTITUDES #SOUNDS

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941 Readings Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete (editors), The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Anthony Elms (editor), Endless Shout.

Institute of Contemporary Art/ University of Pennsylvania, 2019.

George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition.

University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Steven Schick, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams. University of Rochester Press, 2015.

Soundlines: A Dreaming Track — directed by Jim Findlay — is MacArthur Fellow George Lewis’s musical interpretation of Steven Schick’s journal documenting his 700-mile walk from the US-Mexico border to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. Schick’s diary, written during the several weeks of his trek, has been adapted by Lewis as the libretto for Schick, as speaker and percussionist, joined by a chamber ensemble featuring eight musicians from the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and electronics. Reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville, and Henry David Thoreau, and the Great Migration, the libretto describes Schick’s inner moods, doubts, meditations, aesthetics, his personal musical practice, and social commentary, in a fashion that recalls the Australian aboriginal notion of the songline, or “dreaming track,” where repeating a song while navigating a landscape gains access to ancient stories related to the land.

A surround-sound space will be created electronically, enabling text, music and field recordings related to the piece to be experienced more intensively.

The evening is shared with Lewis’s P. Multitudinis, a musical epic that relies on intricate and wordless forms of group communication, which will, alternately, subsume and reveal the personal within the power of the collective.

The work’s title, text, ethics, movement trajectories, and musical methodologies all derive from Spinoza’s notion of potentia multitudinis, presented in his 1677 Tractatus Politicus, published posthumously and later banned.

George Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University and Area Chair in Composition, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work in experimental music and interactive media is documented on more than 150 recordings, and his AACM opera Afterword (2015) has been performed internationally. His 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, received the American Book Award.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective committed to transforming the way music is created and experienced. ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The Ensemble’s 36 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.

Soundlines was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association; the International Contemporary Ensemble, with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation; and in honor of the Taylor Family through ICE’s First Page, with lead support from Billie and Tim Taylor. iceorg.org

Indefinite Article: Malik Gaines A percussionist walked from the border of the United States and Mexico to the San Francisco Bay. It’s a territory long traversed by both migrants and vagrants, a span of the semi-arid Pacific coast that has its own character.

Workers move seasonally with crop schedules within this span. Hippies and love children used to pass each other on this road. In the 18th century, Junipero Serra made a similar journey on foot through a fever dream of colonizing Christendom, planting subjugating missions as he went.

Many of those are still standing. Serra was sainted by the Catholic church in 2015, after Steven Schick, the percussionist who undertook this journey in 2006, wrote a diary fusing sound with thought with movement with fantasy, invoking for composer George E. Lewis a different spiritual path, that of the dreaming track, an indigenous Australian concept that orients philosophical ideas to space. Apart from a linear notion of time, its dreaming forms a continuity between a deep ancestral world and what’s happening here and now. All of this forms the basis for Lewis’s Soundlines, a new monodrama for orator and nine instruments.

George Lewis plays the trombone! It’s an instrument that comes at you and then retreats again, as the instrumentalist moves the slide forward and backward to control the length of the wind column and thus the pitch. It glides; it’s the brass instrument with the true glissando, able to slip between notes. In jazz as in classical, it has its own character. While the mechanism sets musical limits, the place where the person’s mouth meets the instrument’s mouthpiece is a place where many differences can be made, which is especially evident in Lewis’s virtuoso experimentalist playing.

Radically open to differences, Lewis is a legendarily inspiring composer, having worked through improvisation and scoring, orchestral jazz and electronic composition, humans and machines, performance and pedagogy, ensembles of all kinds. His decades of work have earned him many accolades of the highest order. His work brings experience and wisdom to an avant-gardist project, offering a deep continuity at the forefront of music, and with style. The journey continues…

Malik Gaines is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Performance Studies at NYU. His most recent book is “Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible.”

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FUSING SOUND WITH THOUGHT WITH MOVEMENT WITH FANTASY.

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METTE INGVARTSEN: TO COME (EXTENDED) SKIRBALL FALL 2019

“Admirably ambitious, audacious.”

— The New York Times

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 & SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26

US PREMIERE

#SMART #NAKED #MOVES

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941 Readings Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Routledge Classics, 2006.

Jill Dolan, Theatre & Sexuality.

Macmillan Palgrave, 2010.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage, 1990.

André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. Routledge, 2016.

Gayle Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Duke University Press Books, 2011.

With wit and sensuality, political sensitivity and great candor, to come (extended) explores indistinctions between private and public space in regard to sexual representation.

In a performance that literally disrupts erotic orders, a group of 15 performers explore the notion of individual sexual freedom by working on orgiastic relations. The bodies of the performers merge into a collective group formation, making their surfaces indistinguishable from one another. Working directly on how bodies can physically connect, Mette Ingvartsen rethinks how desire works by experimenting with sexual, orgasmic, and even social expressions. And no spoilers, but the last 20 minutes are EPIC. Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. Questions of kinesthesia, perception, affect and sensation have been crucial to most of her work, which includes several site-specific projects that have been seen around the world. Her works include 21 pornographies, to come (extended), 69 positions, The Artificial Nature Project, The Extra Sensorial Garden, and many more. Mette was artist-in-residence at the KAAITHEATER in Brussels from 2013 till 2016 and has been part of the artistic team at Volksbühne in Berlin since 2017. She teaches and gives workshops often related to developing methodologies within choreographic practices. Since 2005 she has been working on “everybodys,” an ongoing collaborative project based on open source strategies, aiming at producing tools and games that can be used by artists to develop work. metteingvartsen.net Advisory: The performance contains sexually graphic content and may not be appropriate for audiences below the age of 18.

This presentation of to come (extended) is supported

by The Danish Arts Foundation.

Indefinite Article: Hentyle Yapp What’s the value of pornography? Feminists have notably tackled this question, as two “camps” are often formed between anti-pornography and sex-positive feminists. The former usually frames pornography as the circulation of violent images against women. The latter usually understands pornography as moving away from puritanism to examine the political and social import of desire and pleasure. These debates have come to be known as the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with reverberations well into today.

Mette Ingvartsen’s to come (extended) not only revisits these debates, but also animates them with contemporary concerns surrounding the oversaturation of sexualized images in today’s digital culture alongside the experience economy. Although it is certainly of value to consider these changes within today’s mediated society, I find that her work is most important for how it helps us revisit the sex wars. to come (extended) is part of Ingvartsen’s larger series, The Red Pieces. In this series, the artist reconsiders sex and pornography as not solely about the private individual.

Instead, she helps us grapple with sex and pornography as always inherently public. In this vein, the choreographer reframes the porn wars by directing us to the ways both sides overlap in their focus on desire as individualized: will the individual reproduce the violence seen in pornography (à la anti-pornography logic) or will the individual have access to pleasure which has historically been governed for femme subjects (à la sex-positivists)?

Ingvartsen, however, renders sex and desire public.

She uses performance and the space of the theatre to make sex a commodity that we consume as viewers.

However, rather than simply reproducing the normalized aesthetics of pornographic displays that dominate public culture and media, she uses choreography to amplify porn to a point of absurdity. Through the cacophonous music, the orgiastic display of bodies, the bouncing around of multiple body parts, and the changing of partners, sex is displayed in its hyperreal form.

The value of pornography then is that as a spectacle, it helps us track public logics and feelings. Ingvartsen’s work locates desire in not only individual pleasure, but also larger structures. Put differently, sex is economic. If economics is the study of the production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services, then Ingvartsen might be understood to be an economist of sex. Her works examine how sex has come to be produced, consumed, and distributed.

Hentyle Yapp is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an affiliated faculty with Performance Studies, Comparative Literature, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Disability Studies Council.

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SHE USES CHOREOGRAPHY TO AMPLIFY PORN TO A POINT OF ABSURDITY.

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Mette Ingvartsen: to come (extended) Photographed by Jens Sethzman

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BIG DANCE THEATER: THE ROAD AWAITS US SKIRBALL FALL 2019

“It’s hard to do justice to the freewheeling brilliance of Big Dance Theater.”

— The New York Times

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 & SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

#ELDERS #ASPIRATION #MOVES

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941 Readings John Cage, Silence. Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

John Haskell, The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts. Graywolf Press, 2017.

Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theater.

Grove Press, 1964.

Mark Strand, The Making of a Poem.

W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Paul Strathern, Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes. Rowman & Littlefield, 1996.

The Road Awaits Us features two North American premieres and a beloved solo from Big Dance Theater.

The titular work, The Road Awaits Us, by Annie-B Parson, was created originally for Sadler’s Wells’ Elixir Company in 2016. The dance is based loosely on an absurdist play

by Ionesco, staged as a birthday party for a company of esteemed dance elders, including Bebe Miller, Meg Harper, Keith Sabado, Sheryl Sutton, George Faison, Betsy Gregory, Brian Bertscher, and Black Eyed Susan.

Ballet, a North American premiere, is a duet based on the imagery, the fundamental actions, and the materiality of ballet traditions.

The solo Cage Shuffle: redux, features Paul Lazar speaking a series of one-minute lectures by John Cage from his 1963 score “Indeterminacy,” while simultaneously performing a complex choreographic score by Annie-B Parson.

Under the Artistic Direction of Annie-B Parson, Big Dance Theater (BDT) creates original works which mix dance, music and visual design with literary and existing texts. Founded in 1991, the company has received numerous commissions from BAM, The Walker Arts Center, National Theatre of Paris/Chaillot and The Old Vic/London among others. BDT received two Bessie Awards, an OBIE, a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, a Franky Award, and was honored by PS 122. The Company received its first commission from Dance Theater Workshop in 1991 and has worked with collaborators that include Anne Carson, Jonathan Demme, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. bigdancetheater.org Indefinite Article: Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar Paul Lazar: The Road Awaits Us: Where’s the title from?

Annie-B Parson: It’s the last line of The Cherry Orchard!

PL: Why Cherry Orchard? And, why the last line?

ABP: It was January 2017 when I received the commission from Sadler’s Wells to make a work on their company of elders. Trump had just been elected, and a deep confusion set in immediately, a sense of dread and…

I was doing lots of protesting — standing, marching, yelling, making signs, writing letters, calling senators’ offices and telling interns how I felt about our democracy — well, it all seemed so hopeless and absurd to me. So, when I thought about engaging elders on stage, I was drawn to how they naturally hold a longer history of our collective experiences in their bodies, and I hoped that I could bring that out somehow as solace and perspective.

I had this image that if they could be very simple and use the tool of a very simple play as a text — as a context to start to think about what’s going on… Well I remembered that Ionesco had written a play where he used only text from his English primer! He was learning English, so he wrote a play limited to these simple English lessons as material. Sentences. I re-read this play, The Bald Soprano,

took out the narrative and kept the absurd language and tone. It felt right.

PL: But then how does The Cherry Orchard come in?

ABP: Sort of snuck in the back door — the end of The Bald Soprano felt wrong for this moment. I think the difference between the absurdity of the late 50s and today, is that post-Obama we now hold a kind of sadness, maybe despair, around an aspiration of what our country might be … this reminded me tonally of the end of The Cherry Orchard. Again, removing the narrative, but holding on to just the elegiac atmosphere of the “end” of things — of a certain way of living with some utopian vision. (pause) How about Cage? Why Cage now?

PL: My response to “Why Cage now” is very much in concert with what you, Annie, are talking about here.

In our mind-bending moment with the fragile threads of our social fabric being trampled on, the question of how to live comes to the fore. I experience the Cage text — a random selection of one-minute stories — as a resonant, funny, invigoratingly, valuable, multi-faceted “answer” to the question of how to live. In dancing your choreography while speaking the Cage stories, I feel that I am attesting to the presence of inexplicable forces in our midst that transcend the deadening discourse of our current day.

ABP: And circling around — this how to live question — it’s for sure a Chekhovian question as well. I think the Ionesco poses questions, it does the Chaplin thing of — If you want to talk about seeing, put a blind man on stage.

PL: … and the Cage, suggests a perspective.

ABP: Yeah. Maybe these two pieces will speak to each other like when you are reading two books and they start to talk to each other!

Annie-B Parson is a choreographer. She co-founded Big Dance Theater in 1991, and most recently staged and choreographed David Byrne’s “American Utopia” on Broadway. She has been teaching choreography at NYU/ ETW since 1993. Paul Lazar, a founding member of Big Dance Theater, is an actor and director. He currently teaches in the Open Arts Department at NYU.

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WE NOW HOLD A KIND OF SADNESS AROUND AN ASPIRATION OF WHAT OUR COUNTRY MIGHT BE.

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THE BUILDERS ASSOCIATION: ELEMENTS OF OZ SKIRBALL FALL 2019

“Technically marvelous … remarkable … dazzling.

— The New York Times

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 & SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8

#OZ #AUGMENTED #STONEWALL50

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941 Readings Ranjit S. Dighe, The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory. Praeger, 2002 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation.

MIT Press, 2015.

Shannon Jackson and Marianne Weems, The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater.

MIT Press, 2015.

Jay Scarfone and William Stillman, The Road to Oz: The Evolution, Creation, and Legacy of a Motion Picture Masterpiece. Lyons Press, 2018.

Evan I. Schwartz, Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Elements of Oz is a wildly inventive celebration of the classic movie, The Wizard of Oz. This technologically innovative production explores the cultural icon’s multiple interpretations — ranging from “Friends of Dorothy” to the 1880’s gold standard debates — while examining how tens of millions of people across the globe have embraced Oz as their own.

As famous movie moments are re-created live on stage and screened back to the audience, Elements of Oz re-contextualizes the movie with juicy background details about the making of the film, excerpts from the original book, testimonials from YouTube Oz fans, interviews with figures including Salman Rushdie and Ayn Rand, and the dazzling incorporation of new technologies.

In much the same way the MGM movie transported an audience from the stark black and white of Kansas to a vibrant Technicolor Oz, this production employs Augmented Reality (AR) to enliven and enhance the audience’s experience. Through a mobile phone app developed especially for Elements of Oz, the live action is layered with cyclones, poppy fields, and flying monkeys that appear on audiences’ screens, creating a unique meditation on the “real” and the “imaginary.”

The Builders Association, founded in 1994 and directed by Marianne Weems, is a New York-based performance and media company that creates original productions based on stories drawn from contemporary life. The company uses the richness of new and old tools to extend the boundaries of theater. Based on innovative collaborations, Builders’ productions blend stage performance, text, video, sound, and architecture to tell stories about human experience in the 21st century.

From BAM to Budapest, The Builders Association’s OBIE award-winning shows have toured to major venues the world over. buildersassociation.org

Indefinite Article: R. Luke Dubois It’s one thing to incorporate cutting-edge technology into art. If you think about it, it’s quite normal. The history of music, to take an easy example, is very much the history of technology — unless you’re improvising with your own voice, a capella, outdoors, you’re most likely leveraging some combination of physical instruments — the core tools for making music, architecture, writing, and, in the last century, electricity, telecommunications, and computing, to make your art. Theater, dance, and the visual arts all have these trends as well, embracing the maximum level of available technology as a natural part of cultural innovation.

But while it’s one thing to incorporate technology into art, it’s quite another thing to use it to explore, demystify, critique, and challenge that very same technology and its role in our lives. For the past quarter-century, the Builders Association have been doing just that. In 1994, long before we ever heard the term “Internet of Things,” Marianne Weems and her collaborators presented Master Builder — a modern take on Ibsen where the audience explores a technologically haunted house that doubles as the stage for the play. Long before outsourcing and the gig economy became topics of concern for presidential primary debates, the Builders’ collaboration with UK-based intercultural arts group Motiroti, Alladeen explores the world, lives, and aspirations of Indian call center workers who we regularly summon when we call an 800 number.

And while most of us still basked in the pre-Snowden naivité that our data was local, private, and anodyne, and Facebook was still concerned with connecting Ivy League students, Super Vision (2005) showed us the ways in which overzealous border agents, long-distance video conferencing, and the ability of parents to make economic decisions in the name of their minor children can conspire to create data that can be weaponized, heartbreaking, and beyond our control.

Alongside these thought-provoking, radically ahead of the curve premises for theatrical expression, the Builders seamlessly integrate beautiful media into the live stage in a way that’s seldom seen. Their sets are theater-sized works of installation art that integrate with the drama — often immersive, sometimes interactive, but never a distraction that unnecessarily draws focus from the actors on stage. As one of the few live theater groups that explicitly treat mass media as a subject of study and creative exploration, their works are invaluable to our cultural moment, as the line between real life and performance becomes more and more permeable.

R. Luke Dubuois is Associate Professor of Integrated Digital Media (Tandon), Music Technology (Steinhardt), and Interactive Telecommunications (Tisch) at NYU.

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THEIR WORKS ARE INVALUABLE TO OUR CULTURAL MOMENT.

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SKIRBALL FALL 2019

The Builders Association: Elements of Oz Photographed by Gennadi Novash

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NATIONAL THEATRE LIVE SKIRBALL FALL 2019

National Theatre Live brings the best of British theater to NYU Skirball. With state-of-the-art filming techniques, tailored to every play, you see each performance as it happens, in all its glory. From close-ups that capture every flicker of emotion, to sweeping wide shots of the stage. Launched in 2009, National Theatre Live broadcasts have been seen by an audience of nearly 9 million people at 2,500 venues worldwide. Join us as we celebrate National Theatre Live’s tenth birthday with a season of smash-hit plays from the National Theatre’s stages and beyond.

Sep 15 @ 2pm & 7pm The Lehman Trilogy

Nov 24 @ 7pm A Midsummer Night’s Dream

”Theatre at its best. Sam Mendes triumphs” — The Times (UK)

“Five stars might not be enough.”

— The Observer (UK)

“Astonishing … an acting masterclass.”

— The Guardian (UK)

“Funny, sexy, and romantic … the sense of mischief spreads like a giant smile.”

— Evening Standard (UK)

Academy Award-winner Sam Mendes directs Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles playing the Lehman Brothers, their sons and grandsons.

Oct 20 @ 7pm One Man, Two Guvnors “Wildly funny comedy.”

— The Times (UK) Featuring a Tony Award-winning performance from James Corden — host of The Late Late Show — this hilarious hit returns to cinemas to mark NT Live’s 10th birthday.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, Shakespeare’s most famous romantic comedy is reimagined in this immersive staging.

Dec 9 @ 7pm Hansard Don’t miss this witty and devastating portrait of the governing class, directed by Simon Godwin, starring Olivier Award winners Lindsay Duncan and Alex Jennings.

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GET TICKETS @ NYUSKIRBALL.ORG | 212.998.4941

GET PHILANTHROPIC BECOME AN NYU SKIRBALL MEMBER We can’t do it without you. Seriously. While NYU Skirball is an NYU program, we receive no programmatic support from the University. We rely solely on ticket sales, outside rentals, grants, and donations. The funds we raise from membership contributions go directly to supporting our world-class performances. When you join NYU Skirball as a Member, or give a gift in any amount, you help support our programs AND help bring essential artists to New York City.

Membership starts as low as $75 and offers a year’s worth of incredible benefits: special discounts (up to 30% off), exclusive access, pre-sale opportunities, invitations to artist receptions, and more.

For more information about membership or to join, visit: nyuskirball.org/join or call: 212.992.8482.

Individual: $75 (Fully tax deductible) Benefits include: • Insider subscription to NYU Skirball’s e-newsletter • Discounts on NYU Skirball events (up to 30% off 1 ticket) • Advance notice of upcoming events • Exclusive pre-sale opportunities • A personalized NYU Skirball Member card • Member offers at local Greenwich Village restaurants and shops Dual: $125 ($118 tax deductible) All of the benefits Individual Members receive plus: • Discounts on NYU Skirball events (up to 30% off 2 tickets) • Complimentary NYU Skirball tote bag or gift • Complimentary ticket exchanges* (savings of $5 per ticket) • Personalized membership cards (2)

Advocate: $500 ($467 tax deductible) All of the benefits Partner Members receive plus: • Two complimentary drinks at the lobby café • Limited Edition NYU Skirball mug • Invitations to opening night parties (2) • Private backstage tour Patron: $1500 ($1467 tax deductible) All of the benefits Advocate Members receive plus: • Enhanced pre-sale, prior to Member pre-sale • Ability to purchase NYU Skirball’s premium house seats • Dedicated patron line for personalized customer service • Invitations to patron night receptions

Partner: $250 ($243 tax deductible) All of the benefits Dual Members receive plus: • Discounts on NYU Skirball events (up to 30% off 4 tickets) • Waived ticketing fees (savings of up to $6 per ticket) • Exclusive access and invitations to meet artists • Invitations to Private Dress Rehearsals

THANK YOU TO OUR SUPPORTERS NYU Skirball’s Presenting Programs are made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Special thanks to the Booth Ferris Foundation, Marta Heflin Foundation, and all of our NYU Skirball Business Partners and Members for their ongoing support.

FALL 2019 SEASON NYU SKIRBALL 566 LAGUARDIA PL NEW YORK, NY 10012

Nonprofit org.

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