COIL is Performance Space 122’s annual winter performance festival full of contemporary, textured, global, local, contemplative, grounded, rigorous, and always very live performance.
Below are ContemporaryPerformance.com’s highlights
Seagull (Thinking of you)
Half Straddle / Tina Satter (USA)
New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St., Manhattan
Jan 9, 11, 17, 19 8pm
Jan 10, 12, 18 10pm
Jan 15 5pm
Jan 22, 23, 25 8pm
Jan 26 2pm
$20 / $15 students, seniors
Tickets–>
75 minutes
Writer/director Tina Satter draws on Chekhov’s letters, translations, and perverse sense of comedy to consider anew the darkness, beauty, and history of Chekhov’s iconic play The Seagull and its resonances with her Half Straddle ensemble. Seagull (Thinking of you) is a personal look at performance, failure, and attempted love — ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. With a Russian folk metal-influenced score.
“Full to the brim with killer talent … launching a particularly coordinated goal-line drive to a new feminist form”
Time Out New York
“If you think experimental, deconstructionist experimental theater must be dry and dreary, then Half Straddle has a surprise for you.”
The New York Times
Half Straddle is a New York-based company that makes plays, performances, videos and music written and directed by Tina Satter. The company includes composer Chris Giarmo (Big Dance Theater), designer Zack Tinkelman (Sarah Michelson, The Kitchen), and performers Jess Barbagallo, Eliza Bent, Emily Davis, Erin Markey and Julia Sirna-Frest. A number of additional performers and artists including Annie McNamara, Joseph Keckler, Pete Simpson, Susie Sokol and others have joined Half Straddle in creating their shows and performances.
Commissioned by PS122, co-presented with The New Ohio Theatre
photo by Michael De Angelis
Inflatable Frankenstein
Radiohole
The Kitchen
512 W. 19th St., New York, NY
Jan 5 – 6, 10, 12, 17 – 19 8pm
Jan 11 10pm
Jan 13 – 14 6pm
$20 / $16 students, seniors
Tickets–>
60 minutes
Influenced by James Whale’s Frankenstein films, Radiohole explodes the tumultuous and tragic life of Mary Shelley. Blood chilling and completely strange, Inflatable Frankenstein is brimming with whims, technological absurdity, and bodily fluids. A larger-than-life, Radiohole gothic teen sex dream. With Maggie Hoffman, Eric Dyer, Erin Douglass, Joseph Silovsky, and Mark Jaynes. Also introducing The Creature Without Organs.
“Deliriously entertaining”
The New York Times
“The leading innovator in New York’s third wave of avant-garde theater”
Time Out New York
Radiohole was birthed in a Brooklyn basement in 1998 by Erin Douglass, Eric Dyer, Maggie Hoffman and Scott Halverson Gillette. The company has produced ten original shows that have been presented at venues around New York City including PS122, the Kitchen and the Collapsable Hole (sic) and have toured nationally and internationally. Radiohole’s most recent show, “Whatever, Heaven Allows” was commissioned by PS122, The Walker Art Center and the Andy Warhol Museum through the Spaulding Gray Award. “Whatever, heaven Allows” had it’s European premiere in April 2012 at Katapult Teater at Godsbanen in Århus, Denmark. Over the years, Radiohole has earned a reputation as one of New York’s most tenacious and uncompromising ensembles.
Radiohole is a recipient of the Spalding Gray Award, and has appeared at PS122 with Whatever Heaven Allows and Fluke.
Co-commissioned & presented with The Kitchen
photo by Paula Court
Ruff
Peggy Shaw (USA)
Dixon Place
161-A Chrystie St., Manhattan
Jan 10, 16, 17, 19 7pm
Jan 11, 18 10pm
Jan 12 6pm
Jan 15 9pm
$20 / $15 students, seniors
Tickets–>
60 minutes
Peggy Shaw has always had a host of crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands, and eccentric family members living inside her. Ruff is a tribute to those who have kept Shaw company over the last 68 years, a lament for the absence of those who disappeared into the dark holes left behind by her recent stroke, and a celebration that her brain is able to fill the blank green screens with new insight.
“Truculent and funny, swaggering and sensitive, Shaw is extraordinary.”
The Times of London
“Shaw’s obsession with bones, with origins and what lies at our core is what drives a powerful hour of deeply personal probing… I sincerely urge you to spend an hour in the hands of a genius.”
Edinburgh Festival Magazine
“Exquisite… This is open-heart surgery of the artistic kind, performed without anaesthetic.”
SPLIT BRITCHES was founded by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, together with Deb Margolin (veterans of Hot Peaches and Spiderwoman Theater), in 1981 at NYC’s WOW Cafe. Shaw and Weaver have become known for “a long line of smart, thrillingly well-executed performance pieces” (Katherine Dieckmann, The Village Voice) and “tough intellectual and verbal content (John Hammond, The Native). Peggy Shaw has received Obie Awards for Dress Suits for Hire (1987) and Menopausal Gentleman (1999). Split Britches won two more Obies for ensemble acting in Belle Reprieve (1991), a collaboration with Bloolips that was a reversed-gender version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Shaw and Weaver also create solo shows; You’re Just Like My Father, Menopausal Gentleman and Faith and Dancing (Shaw); Mapping Femininity And Other Natural Disasters, What Tammy Needs To Know… and Diary of a Domestic Terrorist (Weaver). Split Britches is currently touring with their newest productions: Miss America and Lost Lounge. ( www.splitbritches.wordpress.com)
Peggy Shaw is a recipient of the Ethyl Eichelberger Award and has appeared at PS122 with To My Chargrin, and as a part of The 30th Anniversary Season Gala.
Commissioned by PS122 & Out North Contemporary Art House, co-presented with Dixon Place
photo by Michael De Angelis
artaia-creativesinresidence on II INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOP DIRECTED BY JOHN STRASBERG
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