Highlights: Performance Space 122 6th Annual COIL Festival (NYC)

Performance Space 122 6th Annual COIL Festival
January 5 – 15, 2011

PS122’s winter festival of contemporary performance featuring works from its past, present and future seasons
11 days. 17 companies.

Since COIL began in 2006, 50+ companies from NYC, the US, UK, Australia, continental Europe, Latin America and Asia have been presented as part of this mid-winter festival. This year 17 companies boasting over 100 artists and collaborators spanning theatre, dance, multi-media, psycho-sexual storytelling, and live music will take part in this year’s festival. Performance Space 122 teams up with a diverse range of partners to present the largest COIL festival to date.

This year, onsite performances include PS 122 premieres by Vivi Tellas (Theatre / Argentina), The BodyCartography Project (Dance / Minneapolis), Annie Dorsen (Theatre / NYC), Ranters Theatre (Theatre / Australia), Kim Noble (Theatre / UK), Teatro Delle Albe (Theatre / Italy), and Ain Gordon (Theatre / NYC), as well as recent hits by Jack Ferver (Dance / NYC), Amanda Loulaki & Short Mean Lady (Dance / NYC) and Spalding Gray (Theatre / NYC).

The offsite / site-specific programming looks toward the future of Performance Space 122 and represents who PS 122 is now as well as who it will become. COIL offers the following performances outside of its 150 First Avenue space: Ishmael Houston-Jones / Chris Cochrane / Dennis Cooper (Abrons Arts Center), Travis Chamberlain (The Hudson Hotel), Palissimo (BAC / Abrons Arts Center), John Jahnke & Hotel Savant (3LD Art & Technology Center), The Debate Society (Atlantic Stage 2), Radiohole (The Collapsible Hole), and Brian Rogers (The Chocolate Factory).

Highlights:

The BodyCartography Project Symptom (Minneapolis)
Fri, Jan 7 5PM / Sat, Jan 8 5PM / Sun, Jan 9 4:30PM / Mon, Jan 10 6:30PM

Join “twins”, dancer Otto Ramstad and visual artist Emmett Ramstad, as they examine the human body, investigate notions of social bodies versus biological bodies, and explore the gaps between seeing, knowing and empathy. Symptom inspects the slippage between subjective and objective understandings of the human body, where a symptom acts as an indicator, trait, feature, mark or sign that is open for interpretation. Sound composed by electro-acoustic instrumentalist Andrea Parkins.

Co-created by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad. Composer Andrea Parkins. Researcher and theorist Aren Aizura. Performed by Otto Ramstad and Emmett Ramstad.

Since 1998 the BodyCartography Project’s co-directors Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad have created numerous dance, film and installation works. Their work extends from intimate solos for the street or stage, to large community dance works in train stations, dance films in national parks, to highly complex works for site or stage amidst installations, video and sound. Their work has been produced across the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, Russia and South America. Recent highlights include a commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet and the premiere of their work 1/2 Life with a physicist, composer Zeena Parkins and visual artist Emmett Ramstad at Performance Space 122, NYC, the Southern Theater and Art of This Gallery in Minneapolis. They are featured artists in the first book about site dance in the USA published by University of Florida Press titled Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces and 2010 McKnight Fellows.

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Jack Ferver Rumble Ghost(NYC)
Fri, Jan 7 10PM / Sat, Jan 8 7:30PM / Sun, Jan 9 7:30PM

Horror movies will never be as terrifying and shocking as the human psyche. They act as metaphors – scary stories that offer a release or escape from the more devastating twists and turns of an unquiet mind. Without ghosts to explain haunted houses, we are left with the painful sites of crumbling careers, failing marriages, and abused children. In Rumble Ghost, as the flimsy membrane between an American horror movie classic and the fragility of the human condition deteriorates, the darkest place in the world is shown to be right up there—in your mind.

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*Ishmael Houston-Jones / Chris Cochrane / Dennis Cooper Them (NYC / Paris)
Sat, Jan 8 5PM / Sun, Jan 9 7PM / Mon, Jan 10 4PM
Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand Street at Pitt Street)

THEM is an intensely physical interdisciplinary work that presents an unblinking look into the lives of young (gay) men and how they interact with one another. Conceived and directed by Ishmael Houston-JonesTHEM features provocative texts by Dennis Cooper and a cacophonous live electric guitar score by Chris Cochrane. Houston-Jones’ choreography, while rooted in improvisation, develops the themes of connections that never quite happen, grappling and wrestling that seem inconsequential and ineffective, and support that disappears.

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*Radiohole Whatever Heaven Allows(NYC)
Fri, Jan 7 – Mon, Jan 10 / Wed, Jan 12 – Sat, Jan 15 8PM
The Collapsible Hole (146 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn)

Known for its radical and reckless theatricality, avant-garde New York troupe Radiohole’s newest work is a star-spangled American meta-melodrama inspired by film director Douglas Sirk’s 1950s potboilers and Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. Our heroine is an all- American “Eve” who must save her home from an evil-doer while struggling to find fulfillment in a lasting relationship with a supposedly good man who looks like a god. Radiohole’s newest synthesis of cultural flotsam is sure to be bawdy, silly, possibly transcendent, and a touch disturbed.

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*Travis Chamberlain Green Eyes (NYC)
Wed, Jan 5 – Sat, Jan 8 8PM & 9:30PM / Sun, Jan 9 5:30PM & 7PM / Mon, Jan 10 3PM & 4:30PM /
Wed, Jan 12 – Sat, Jan 15 8PM & 9:30PM
The Hudson Hotel (356 West 58th Street)

The New York City premiere production of Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes, directed by Travis Chamberlain, unflinchingly explores one of Tennessee Williams’ later works, hidden away for decades and only recently published 25 years after his death. Erin Markey stars as a ravenous Southern woman determined to satisfy the darkest recesses of her most deviant desires. This site-transformative event, ensconced in a suite at the Hudson, one of Manhattan’s hottest hotel destinations, delves the disturbing subjectivities that exist in the gray areas where sadomasochistic desire and domestic violence overlap. Audience capacity for this highly eccentric, hyper-intimate premiere by America’s most celebrated playwright is extremely limited. Travis Chamberlain (Director) is a director and curator based in New York City. Since 2007, he has produced and curated performances at The New Museum and from 2004-2007 served as Artistic Director at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Also in 2007, he curated and produced the world premiere of “Week 4” from Suzan Lori-Parks’ 365 Plays/365 Days at The Public Theater. A member of Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab, Chamberlain has conceived and directed original productions: Project C: Is This a Dream?(NY Fringe), Never Live Long in Cages (NY Fringe), Head VI + 2(X)ist (Danspace), plus a series of music-theater collaborations with playwright/composer Kyle Jarrow. His direction of Erin Markey’s Puppy Love: A Stripper’s Tail received an extended run at PS 122 in May 2010.

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*John Jahnke & Hotel Savant Men Go Down (NYC)
Thu, Jan 6 – Sun, Jan 9 / Wed, Jan 12 – Sat, Jan 15 8PM
3LD Art & Technology Center (80 Greenwich Street)

A strange and provocative theatre work that utilizes the construction of a Greek drama and the sensibility of a classic Fairy Tale to examine the ramifications of antique guilt on the modern conscience. Following a Greek king who abandons his war torn country for the safety of a cliff-side cave, the play travels one thousand years through the extended lifespan of the tormented ruler, a man who simply will not make a decision about how to handle his human responsibilities, and until he does so, cannot die. This punishment, or gift, is the verdict of an unnamed political council, who observes but remains distanced during his years of decadent, amoral, ethical elusion.

* Off-Site Presentation