The Orchard Project provides the theatre community with a much needed resource and development center – a space for company sponsored artists to experiment and explore new ideas, as well as collaborate with other theatre companies. Participants range from emerging “on-the-cusp” companies to established leaders and may return year after year or as one-time residents.

WHAT IT IS: The Exchange produces The Orchard Project, an extensive company and artist development program unrivalled by any other company in the country. At The Orchard Project, the most innovative companies and artists outside of The Exchange are invited to retreat at our space in the Catskills in order to develop their next great work. Over the past four years, 30 American and international companies have developed work at the Orchard Project, and that work has gone on to stages ranging from Broadway and regional theaters, to off-off Broadway and international houses. Acceptance into the program is uniquely based on a peer-evaluated process, empowering professional theatre artists to support each other and who they believe are the voices of the future. The Orchard Project brings companies and artists together with overlapping residencies to share working processes and inspire new ideas. An “Open Studio” environment and staggered work schedules allows its residents to see each other’s work, work together and enables the local community to share in the artistic process. Companies at the Orchard Project are producers themselves. By investing their resources alongside those of The Orchard Project, it ensures the continued life of a piece after its development. The Orchard Project does not retain intellectual property rights over work developed during its residency but requests that it be acknowledged as having contributed to the success of the project in future material. Hosted at the Catskill Mountain Foundation, the Orchard Project is resident within the stunning Catskill Mountain Forest Preserve. (from the Orchard Project Website)

SOME RECENT SUCCESSES AND PROJECTS CREATED AT THE ORCHARD PROJECT (2006-2010)

• 33 Variations – (Tectonic Theatre Project) La Jolla Playhouse, Arena Stage and Broadway
• Thrown, Sucker Punch and Posh, all produced at the Royal Court
• Sweet By and By (Teatre Slava  and Pig Iron Theatre Co) – Philly Live Arts Fest, Theatre Slava (Sweden)
• Method Gun (Rude Mechs) –Humana Festival 2010 and upcoming at Exchange NYC, Yale Rep, Mark Taper Forum
• The Shipment (Young Jean Lee) – The Kitchen, world tour
• Compulsion (Rinne Groff) – Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, upcoming at NY Public Theater
• Bottom of the World (Lucy Thurber) – Atlantic Theater Company
• The Aliens (Annie Baker) – Rattlestick Theatre, Obie Award
• Architecting (The TEAM) — PS122, Barbican Theatre UK
• American Sadness (The Chase Brock Experience) –  Abron Arts

(AND A PARTIAL LIST OF THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN…)

In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes begins with Samuel Beckett and considers failure in performance as a hopeful strategy. She examines the work of internationally acclaimed UK and US experimental theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, addressing accepted narratives about artistic and cultural value in contemporary theatre-making. Her discussion draws on examples where misfire, the accidental and the intentionally amateur challenge our perception of skill and virtuosity in such diverse modes of performance as slapstick and punk.

Detailed rehearsal and performance analysis are used to engage theory and contextualise practice, extending the dialogue between theatre arts, live art and postmodern dance. The result is a critical account of performance theatre that offers essential reading for practitioners, scholars and students of Performance, Theatre and Dance Studies.

Contents:

1. Introduction: Failure and Representation
2. World(s) after a Different Image: Marxism, Slapstick, Punk
3. Profane Illumination: Theatre and Forced Entertainment
4. News from Nowhere: Goat Island Performance Group
5. Dislocations of Practice: Elevator Repair Service
6. Afterword

Ten years into the 21st century, it seems a fitting time to look at the state of New York City’s theatrical avant-garde. How has it evolved over the past decade? Who’s doing the most inventive work, and who’s coming up short? What exactly constitutes a vanguard these days, and where is it heading?

Big Art Group, Radio Hole, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Thomas Bradshaw, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Les Freres Corbusier, Cynthia Hopkins, Elevator Repair Service, Witness Relocation, The TEAM, Taylor Mac, Sibyl Kempson, Improv Everywhere, and Mike Iveson are discussed among others.

Ultimately, there are degrees of “avant-garde”: Not many artists today call for, say, burning down museums and libraries in the name of new technology, as the Italian Futurists did a hundred years ago. Nor do we hear many downtown voices calling for a new order, or even for an end to a disastrous war—as theatermakers here did in the 1960s. In 21st-century New York, aspirations look milder and more careerist: Experimental stage artists want creative outlets and a responsive public. Understandably, they also seek good publicity and financial relief. But in the next era—now under way—there’s an appetite and opportunity for enlarging the theatrical experience in New York. If anyone can seize the day, it may be Big Art Group, Nature Theater, and anyone else with the intellectual muscle to build up the vanguard.

Read the full article here