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In Performance: Samuael Topiary -Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (NYC)

NOVEMBER 11-20
SAMUAEL TOPIARY, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
ABRONS ARTS CENTER
466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
Tickets: abronsartscenter.org

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a new, evening-length, solo performance by Samuael Topiary that explores western culture’s relentless compulsion to tempt fate and reach beyond our human limits. Told through the eyes of six fictionalized, historical, mythological and imaginary characters: Icarus, Pieter Brueghel, Henry Hudson, The Wall Street Minotaur, Amelia Earhart, and David Rockefeller; writer/performer Samuael Topiary excavates the symbolic and poetic resonances between the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus and the legacy of contemporary culture’s most mythological empire; New York City.

Two time Bessie Award winning choreographer and dancer Miguel Gutierrez directs the journey from Brueghel’s 16th century Antwerp to David Rockefeller’s 1960’s project to build the World Trade Center. Accompanied by Peter Kerlin’s electronic sound score with live musical saw and accordion by C. Ryder Cooley, …Icarus blends video projections, sock puppets, spoken word, original song, fantastical costumes designed by Jocelyn Davis, and accents into a strange, funny and chilling fugue about ambition and recklessness.

You know, when you are in the tension between what is yet before you and what has already disappeared… the struggle between what you see and what you imagine… ja? And, then suddenly, it is finished. – ‘Pieter Brueghel’, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

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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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