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Featured: Special Effects Festival Happening Now Jan 9-12, 2014 (New York)

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Contemporary Performance announces the inaugural festival Special Effects from January 9-12, 2014. The festival consists of six artists from the Contemporary Performance Network presenting work at The Wild Project in the NYC’s East Village and Participant Inc. Curated by network editors Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson the four day festival will hold panel and artist events, launch the Contemporary Performance Almanac13 book and throw nightly performance parties in the Wild Project Bar.

Artist driven and oriented, Special Effects gathers experimental performance works by practitioners exploring contemporary issues. Drawing on a network of over 15,000 artists who are part of www.contemporaryperformance.com. The festival samples the diversity and richness of the international discipline of performance and presents an open forum for critical thinking on the issues of the day. Tickets are $20.

The Wild Project – 195 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009
Participant Inc. – 253 E Houston St, New York, NY 10002

Stay tuned when we announce the schedule and some surprise artists and events.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”81911″ img_link_target=”_blank”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]

Gallery Opening
Deflated: an Inflated View of Works by Jeffrey Owen Ralston

Running time: 120 min
Wild Project, East 3rd Street,
THURSDAY 1/09 6PM
(On View 2pm-2am 1/10-1/12)
FREE
Contemporary Performance presents Jeffery Owen Ralston in a solo show retrospective of sculptural objects as part of the Special Effects festival. On view in the gallery space at the Wild Project, Ralston’s show “Deflated: an Inflated View of Works by Jeffrey Owen Ralston” investigates desire, the economy of space in the urban landscape, and the links between ecstatic art and New York nightlife. As a regular collaborator with the long-running art parties Spank and Xanadude, Ralston’s inflatables and wrappings cast a sly commentary on the surrealism of pleasure. On view from January 9 to January 12, 2014.

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Fitzgerald & Stapleton Dance Theatre
WAGE

Running time: 60 min
Wild Project, East 3rd Street,

THURSDAY 1/09 8PM
SUNDAY 1/12, 4PM

Tickets:
$20 for male identified
$16.20 for female identified

Who is your Father? Who are YOU? and despite all your WAGE are you still just a twat in a cage?

WAGE fucks with sexuality, gender roles, wage inequality, dreams, spirituality and ritual through the medium of dance.

The performance features a personal account from Justine Reilly, a co-founder and member of SPACE International – Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment. Justine left prostitution in 2010 and shares her story in WAGE.

WAGE is a co-production between Abrons Arts Centre New York and Project Arts Centre Dublin, with touring support from Culture Ireland.

 

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Jill Pangallo
Hope Is Expensive

Running time: 60 min
Wild Project Bar, East 3rd Street,

THURSDAY 1/9 10PM

$20 Tickets

With a percolating mix of humor and emotional honesty, Jill Pangallo’s newest solo offering, Hope Is Expensive, is a painfully hilarious exploration of our contemporary American pop-cultural insanity. With an adept mix of live and onscreen performance, Pangallo portrays a series of awkward stalkers, misguided fans, social media addicts and delusional dreamers. At first glance they seem like losers, until you realize that they are brave, complicated and a little bit like you.

“In considering the social media “celebrity” or just the social networked persona, this lesser-known McLuhan quote better captures the tongue-in-cheek nature of artist Jill Pangallo, whose work interrogates social networked identities and personas: “The stars so big, The Earth is so small, Stay as you are.”
— Alicia Eller, Hyperallergic  [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”81750″ img_link_target=”_blank”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]

Nick Lehane
Chimpanzee/Geneva 16251

Running time: 60 min
Wild Project, East 3rd Street,

FRIDAY 1/10 2PM
SATURDAY 1/11, 8PM

$20 Tickets

Two pieces by the puppeteer, Nick Lehane. An aging, isolated chimpanzee pieces together the fragments of her childhood raised with humans. Bleak reality bleeds to vivid memory in this non-verbal puppet play. This piece was developed through the Puppet Lab at St. Anne’s Warehouse. In Geneva 16251, Nick uses a overhead projection shadow puppetry and live theremin to meld together his childhood growing up in southern California and a fictional exploration to the north pole.

 

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M. Lamar
Surveillance Punishment and The Black Psyche

Running time: 60 min
Wild Project, East 3rd Street,

FRIDAY 1/10 8PM
SUNDAY 1/12, 10PM

$20 Tickets

Surveillance Punishment and The Black Psyche is an imprisoned black man’s reflections on his life sentenced to death for killing his male overseer who was also his lover.This is the first showing of this multimedia music theater piece which draws loosely from the life of Willie Francis the 16 year old black boy who in 1947 was famously executed twice for the murder of Andrew Thomas a Cajun pharmacy owner in St. Martinville Louisiana who had once employed him. It is alleged that Francis and the 53 year old Thomas were engaged in a homosexual relationship. So here Lamar explores interracial homosex, surveillance and punishment from the Jim Crow south back to the plantation to trace it’s legacy in contemporay black life as well as how the state continues it’s white supremacist surveillance and punishment of black bodied Americans.The Text for Surveillance Punishment and the black Psyche is written by M. Lamar with additional text by Tucker Culbertson who is also the director. All Music written by M. Lamar with art design and video by Sabin Calvert[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”81812″ img_link_target=”_blank”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]

David Commander
Oakwood Apartments

Running time: 60 min
Wild Project Bar, East 3rd Street,

FRIDAY 1/10 10PM

$20 Tickets

Oakwood Apartments is an installation set up like a ramshackle security booth for an aging and dilapidated Apartment complex. Several monitors capture footage from surveillance cameras fixed onto miniature sets of lobbies, elevators, loading docks etc… The largest of these monitors shows the footage from a live camera that moves down the hallway of the Oakwood Apartment complex (a dollhouse-like construction which is strewn about the installation). The live camera visits the tenants (action figures) of various apartments as they talk about the life they have built at Oakwood and their disappointment of an unfulfilled future that was promised to them. As they dream about living in a world with an overabundance of vending machines, security from neighbors and finished floors, a wrecking ball swings closer and closer. Oh, and also, some of the tenants are from the future.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”81749″ img_link_target=”_blank”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]

David Commander
New Toy Theater

Running time: 60 min
Wild Project, East 3rd Street,

SATURDAY 1/11, 2PM
SUNDAY 1/12 7PM

$20 Tickets

Amidst a cavalcade of cameras, sampled sound effects, voice modulators, action figures, and miniature worlds made out of cardboard, David Commander weaves three original stories of epic proportions. This is New Toy Theater, darkly humorous vignettes projected larger than life tell the stories of a plane crash in In Flight, massive food waste in Sacrament Burger, and the 1819 sinking of the whale ship Essex in Essex. Commander recontextualizes various toys of science fiction icons into profoundly dysfunctional characters living in tiny toy theater sets while he wrestles with juggling multiple tasks at once, presenting a chaotic performance alongside the spectacle of the projected image he creates.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”81809″ img_link_target=”_blank”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]

Molly Haslund
CIRCLES – drawing upon the universe

Running time: 60 min
PARTICIPANT INC., 253 E Houston St.

SATURDAY 1/11 4:30PM
SUNDAY 1/12, 6PM

$20 Tickets

Molly Haslund trained at the Royal Art Academy of Fine Art in Denmark and Glasgow School of Art (degree 2005). She works in the intersection between sculpture, installations and performances referring to visual arts, performing arts, stand-up, literature and music. Haslund’s work embrace personal rituals, socially engaging workshops and interaction design. Between 2006-2010 she developed performances with the artist duo Lone Twin (UK) Haslund now develop her performance work alone but also often in challenging constellations involving friends, local performers, and musicians.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”81748″ img_link_target=”_blank”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble
Everything One in the Disc of the Sun

Running time: 60 min
PARTICIPANT INC., 253 E Houston St.

SATURDAY 1/11 8PM
SUNDAY 1/12, 2PM

$20 Tickets

A self-help karaoke opera
Conceived by Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (Tei Blow & Sean McElroy)
Featuring Tei Blow, Siobhan Gandy, and Sean McElroy

In Everything One in the Disc of the Sun, three Osirian priests gather at a pseudo-Egyptian karaoke bar at the end of time to perform their favorite tracks from the self-help repertoire. Under the cosmic glow of an LED pyramid, Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble sings, chants, and recites forgotten hits from the VHS vaults of gurus, cult leaders, corporate speakers, and extraterrestrial mediums, which they channel through an embedded in-ear karaoke machine. Combined with original songs, gestural fragments of the Death Trance Dance, compulsive drinking rituals, video projection, and other cultural flotsam, Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble entombs the lost relics of a future civilization in lyrical self-preservation.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”81913″ img_link_target=”_blank”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]

Amber Martin and Nath Ann Carrera
Witch Camp

Running time: 60 min
Wild Project, East 3rd Street,

SATURDAY 1/11 10PM

$20 Tickets

Take a journey to WITCH CAMP where Amber Martin and Nath Ann Carrera transport you through drop-off, Learning Yurts, the pre-dawn camp favorite, “Morning Horses/Blood Sacrifice,” and beyond, while ridding the room of chode intentions! Grab your baggie full of hair and your black latex glove and gather around the fireside for a battle cry against the patriarchal rape heads in this ONGOING inquisition!

With Camp Counselor HEATHER LITTEER!

Featuring songs by Aphrodite’s Child, Black Widow, Coven, Bruce Haack, Heart, Led Zeppelin and Sandy Denny, Yoko Ono, Pentangle, Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Stone Poneys, and more!

“Wonderful, striking…essayistic songs about female revenge and politics” Hilton Als – The Paris Review

photo by Laura Pardo[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Caden Manson is a director, media artist, and teacher. He is co-founder of the media ensemble bigartgroup.com and network, blog, and publisher, contemporaryperformance.com. He has co-created, directed, video- and set designed 18 Big Art Group productions. Manson has shown video installations in Austria, Germany, NYC, and Portland; performed PAIN KILLER in Berlin, Singapore and Vietnam; Taught in Berlin, Rome, Paris, Montreal, NYC, and Bern; the ensemble has been co-produced by the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Automne a Paris, Hebbel Am Ufer, Rome’s La Vie de Festival, PS122, and Wexner Center for The Arts. Caden is a 2001 Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellow, is a 2002 Pew Fellow and a 2011 MacDowell Fellow. Writing has been published in PAJ, Theater Magazine, and Theater der Zeit. Caden is currently an associate professor and graduate directing option coordinator of The John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama.

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