#WTSTW: Robert Lepage @bam_brooklyn, Young Jean Lee @cakeshopnyc, Rude Mechs @dancetworkshop

#WTSTW = What To See This Weekend

The Nightingale and Other Short Fables
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Mar 1, 3 & 4, 2011 at 7:30pm Mar 6, 2011 at 3pm

US Premiere
Presented by the Canadian Opera Company and BAM
By Igor Stravinsky
Conducted by Johannes Debus
Directed by Robert Lepage

A theatrical alchemist who combines music, movement, and song into invariably mesmerizing productions, Robert Lepage (Lipsynch, 2009 Next Wave; the Metropolitan Opera’s new Ring cycle) returns to BAM with The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, a brilliant assemblage of works by Stravinsky (Ragtime, Pribaoutki, The Fox, and others) bound together by an inspired mix of pan-Asian puppetry, opera, acrobatics—and 20,000 gallons of water.

The centerpiece of this work is Stravinsky’s ingenious take on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of an emperor’s curiously songful bird, The Nightingale. Lepage reimagines the opera as an aquatic fantasy, transforming the orchestra pit into a luminescent lagoon teeming with half-submerged singers, puppet-piloted boats, and lashing dragons. All the while, impervious to the commotion, the diminutive protagonist soars.
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WE’RE GONNA DIE prep gig
Cake Shop
March 6 @ 11PM

Young Jean Lee, Tim Simmonds, Ben Kupstas, Mike Hanf, Nick Jenkins (Future Wife)

In preparation for the upcoming 13P production of WE’RE GONNA DIE at Joe’s Pub in April 2011, Future Wife will be previewing new songs at few gigs.

In WE’RE GONNA DIE, theater artist Young Jean Lee explores human vulnerability. Surrendering her usual practice of casting larger-than-life performers, Lee sets out to make a show that any ordinary person could perform. Using herself as a guinea pig, non-performer Lee takes the stage herself along with her band, Future Wife, to tell stories and sing songs about our shared human weakness and failure. Join Lee and Future Wife for an evening of heartbreak, despair, aging, sickness, and death. You may be miserable, but you won’t be alone.

Future Wife is Mike Hanf, Nick Jenkins, Ben Kupstas, Young Jean Lee, Tim Simmonds
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Rude Mechs
The Method Gun
Dance Theater Worshop (NYC)
Mar 2 – 5, 8 – 12 at 7:30pm, Mar 5, 11 at 10:30pm
Wed – Sat, Tue – Sat
$30 Tickets

The Method Gun explores the life and techniques of Stella Burden, actor-training guru of the 60s and 70s, whose sudden emigration to South America still haunts her most fervent followers. Ms. Burden’s training technique, The Approach (often referred to as “the most dangerous acting technique in the world”), fused Western acting methods with risk-based rituals in order to infuse even the smallest role with sex, death and violence. A play about the ecstasy and excesses of performing, the dangers of public intimacy and the incompatibility of truth on stage and sanity in real life.