PRELUDE.10 asks a blunt question that straddles funding, audience and disciplinary tensions pervasive in our contemporary performance sector: “Why Does Live Matter?” What is its purpose? How do we measure its value to individuals, to communities, and to that collector of the dead – History? Three themes over three days drive our investigation: Communication, Provocation, and Simulation.

Since live art is as much about the audience as it is about the artist, we start each day with participation.

Our afternoon “Activity Sessions” challenge you to question yourself and the world beyond, formulate answers, experience new tools, and create your own artworks with the curated artists leading the sessions.

The evening “Performances” return audience members to the contemporary habit of distanced observation. But don’t get too comfortable: these artists provoke us to consider how live performance can regain its relevance to society, unsettle perception and habits, and engage organically in the digital age.

During the nightly “Round Tables” you will witness the artists from each day’s sessions discuss and debate the practical & philosophical ramifications of each day’s theme, joined by selected peers. (from the Prelude.10 website)

Trajal Harrell
Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (XS)
Wednesday, September 29 7.00PM | Segal Theater

What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the Voguing dance tradition in Harlem had come down to Judson Church to perform alongside the early postmoderns?” is the proposition for Trajal Harrell’s series of dances that comes in five sizes- Extra Small (XS), Small (S), Medium (M), Larger (L), and Extra Large (XL). The (XS) is a twenty-five minute solo danced by the choreographer and proposed when finished for a maximum audience of fifty seated on the floor of the theater stage, gallery floor, or in the corner of the room.

Trajal Harrell’s choreographic works have been seen at The New Museum, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, PS122, Art Basel-Miami Beach, The Margulies Art Warehouse, and internationally in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Mexico. Since 2001, he has been developing a body of work which links the Voguing dance tradition and early Postmodern dance. In this direction, he has created four evening length works: Notes on Less than Zero (2004), Showpony (2007), Quartet for the End of Time (2008), and Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (S) (2009). betatrajal.org

Jim Findlay
Botanica
Thursday, September 30 6:30pm | Elebash Hall

Two scientists perform experiments into the sentient life of plants even as their own sexual tension threatens to undermine their surprising results. Meanwhile, the janitor keeps sneaking into the lab at night to read pornographic literature to their plant subjects. A perverse futuristic exploration of hubris set in a human terrarium.

Jim Findlay works across specialties as a director, designer, performer and creator with a constellation of theater, performance and music artists including Collapsable Giraffe, Accinosco/Cynthia Hopkins, The Wooster Group, Ridge Theater, Bang on a Can, Ralph Lemon, Phil Soltanoff and Stew. www.jimfindlaynyc.com

Ishmael Houston-Jones
THEM
Thursday, September 30 7pm | Elebash Hall

Ishmael Houston-Jones and his collaborators Chris Cocharne (music) and Dennis Cooper (text) sparked controversy in 1986 at Performance Space 122 with THEM. In the 1986 premier of the full-length version for six male dancers, Cooper read his own provocative words and Cochrane played cacophonous electric guitar live; frequently violent and exhausting dance sequences, culminated in a horrific duet between Houston-Jones and an animal carcass on a dusty mattress. The production almost got PS122 shut down. In 2010, Houston-Jones and his collaborators are revisiting the artistic impulses that propelled its original creation and reconstructing it for the contemporary moment.

Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and arts activist and has been a fixture of New York’s contemporary dance scene for over three decades. His intensely personal and physically exhausting improvisations helped to redefine the language of dance in the post-Judson Church 1980s and continue to set a standard for authenticity and vulnerability on stage. His work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. As a curator, teacher, and writer, Houston-Jones has nurtured the voices of many emerging choreographers, performance artists, and artists from other disciplines, several of whom have gone on to become collaborators.ishmaelhj.com

Kimon Keramidas
Flip-> Cut -> Post -> Press: A crashcourse in performance, digital media and the Internet
Friday, October 1 4.15-5.30pm | Segal Theater

It is undeniable that the nature of performance is changing in the twenty-first century. Just as an increasingly networked population is demanding that new kinds of media, alternative modes of spectacle, and participatory practices be incorporated in live events, the Internet has made it possible for performance artists and theatre companies to not only reach broader audiences through marketing and promotion, but to expand their creative breadth.

In a response to these new times, Kimon Keramidas will lead an activity session which displays some ways that theatre and performance artists can use affordable and accessible technologies to quickly, record, manipulate, and distribute digital media. Kimon will show how simple it can be to use inexpensive video and audio recorders and digital cameras in conjunction with simple digital editing software and publishing platforms to rapidly extend the presence of performance into the digital realm.

Kimon Keramidas is the Assistant Director for the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, where he is responsible for integrating digital media across the curriculum and for providing guidance for digital initiatives in academic publishing and exhibition design. Kimon holds a B.A. in Theatre from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in Theatre with a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagagoy from the CUNY Graduate Center, and has taught courses on theatre, performance, new media, and instructional technology and pedagogy at The Cooper Union, Marymount Manhattan College, the Bard Graduate Center, the CUNY Graduate Center, and in CUNY’s Online Baccalaureate Program. After completing his dissertation on intellectual property rights and contemporary American theatrical production, Kimon has continued to publish in academic journals and with research interests in place and play in video games, sociocultural impact of interface design, and the integration of technology in curricular development. Kimon also has a background in theatrical production, having worked as a designer and set builder for three years at regional theatres in Washingotn D.C. and New Jersey and with the Builders Association on Alladeen and Super Vision.

About:

Philadelphia Live Arts Festival 2010 September 3-18, 2010

A collection of the world’s best contemporary performing artists energize Philadelphia audiences each year during the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Selected by Nick Stuccio, the Festival’s Producing Director, about half of these artists are based in Philadelphia, while others come in from across the globe. In 2010, 15 Live Arts Festival shows will be presented.

The mission of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival is to commission, develop, and present a wide range of the latest cutting-edge, high-quality performance.

Hightlights:

Cédric Andrieux
Jérôme Bel
September 14-16, 2009

Whether you’ve danced professionally, taken a dance class, or frankly worked any job in your life, you can’t help but empathize with the gloriously unglamorous details of the everyday existence of a dancer. In Cédric Andrieux, a touching and humorous examination of the life of a dancer, Cédric himself narrates and dances his way through his training as a contemporary dancer in the city of Brest (France), as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York, and his recent work at the Lyon Opera Ballet.

By isolating moments in his career by performing his former parts, or demonstrating his daily regimen at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, Cédric provides a close up on the individual experience of what audiences normally only view as a group endeavor. With excerpts from Trisha Brown’s Newark, Merce Cunningham’s Biped and Suite for 5, Philippe Tréhet’s Nuit Fragile, and Jérôme Bel’s The show must go on.

CHICKEN
Charlotte Ford
September 3 -6, 2010

Deep beneath the icy swells, a nuclear powered submarine carries three imbeciles in charge of a highly classified mission. A buzz-cut she-beast, a Casper Milquetoast somnambulist cross-dresser, and a passive-aggressive Elvis devotee vie for bunk beds, safety goggles, and poopie suits. Perhaps it’s the recycled air that has pushed them to pursue each other’s destruction through laced grape drink, human Tetris, and the tweezing of nose hairs.

In this microcosm of intense anxiety, petty hatreds are exploited with gleeful abandon, order and ethics have been left behind with the Dramamine, and devising absurd plots of revenge has become their greatest amusement. CHICKEN is an expressionistic clown play that magnifies our most intimate fears into coliseum-sized spectacles: molehills become mountains, kitchen sink drama becomes gladiatorial bloodbath.

Dance
Lucinda Childs with music by Philip Glass and film by Sol LeWitt
Septmebr 10-12, 2010

Three masters of minimalism, choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass, and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, collaborated to construct this seminal work of dance—one of the purest examples of interdisciplinary art-making ever created. An exploration of musical movement, rhythm, and harmony, Dance is a bold statement on the very nature of movement.

A vast, transparent scrim stretches across the front of the stage. Projected upon it is LeWitt’s 35mm black-and-white film of the original dancers from 1979, including Childs, performing Dance on a white grid floor that seems to float in darkness. Concurrently, the work is performed on stage by a new cast and in time with the film’s close-ups, diagonal views, overhead shots, split screens, and freeze-frames. Surrounding this visual experience is Philip Glass’s score, a masterwork of modular patterns that form the perfect counterpoint to Childs’s choreography.

Decasia
Bill Morrison
September 25, 2010

Bill Morrison’s Decasia was created from his discovery of a trove of old, decaying film stock. Scored by Michael Gordon of Bang on a Can, the movie is an expressionist collage of past images—of dreams, romance, drama, exotic locales and mythic cinema—that have become subverted by the striking visual consequences of the decomposing film: melting, rusted, warped, disintegrating. Perhaps this is really what happened after they rode off into the sunset.

The Sun Also Rises (The Select) based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
Elevator Repair Service
September 15-18, 2010

A stage littered with liquor bottles and cafe chairs seamlessly transforms itself from the bistros of Paris to the banks of the Irati River; a long bar table roars to life and charges a champion matador; an out of control dance party takes off during a night of nonstop revelry. As The Sun Also Rises (The Select) winds its way through France and Spain and lands in Pamplona where bullfighting and the fiesta rage in the streets, Hemingway’s narrator carries the heavy burdens of a war injury and his inability to have the woman he loves; a woman whose amorous escapades he follows with bemused but painful fatalism.

De Internationale Keuze
September 9 – October 9, 2010
Rotterdam, Netherlands

About:
This international festival provides visitors with a chance to see a number of special international performances. Some of the productions chosen stand out for their failure to comply with the rules and widely-held opinions of the conventional world of theater. (from the Holland Visitors Site)

Answer me
Dood Paard
September 13 & 14, 2010

Is it harmless to ask questions?
Who are you? What’s your name? How old are you? Where are you from? Are you a journalist? Do you love me? Are you Dutch? Turkish? Portuguese? Do you know where Portugal is? What language do they speak over there? What exactly is your language? Can you actually speak? Why are you here? What did you do in Pakistan? What did you do in Utrecht? Are you married, and if so, why? If you cooperate with us, you can sleep in peace and quiet. Keep your head up! Answer me is the first text famous Dutch writer/director Gerardjan Rijnders has written for theatre company Dood Paard; it is performed together with two Portuguese actors. -performed in English and Portugese, English surtitled-

C’est du Chinois
Edit Kaldor
September 25 & 26, 2010

When learning another language, you open the door to another world. The father raises a can to his mouth, saying: “I – drink – beer”. The audience tries to understand him and tries to remember the words he uses. He is engaged in a Mandarin Chinese course, provided by five Chinese people who use the course to be able to stay in the West. Afterwards, not all things sound like Chinese anymore. Theatre artist Edit Kaldor, Hungarian from origin, is fascinated by communication that is actually impossible, but is nevertheless achieved due to the mutual efforts of actors and audience.
-performed in Mandarin, language no problem-

Der perfekte Tag – Ruhrtrilogie Teil 3
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz/René Pollesch
September 17 & 18, 2010

In the Ruhr Area, post-industrial society has caused huge unemployment, with all the associated social consequences. German writer and director René Pollesch loves to throw himself into such radical processes, together with his actors Irm Hermann, Fabian Hinrichs and Volker Spengler, and scenographer Bert Neumann. At a spectacular outdoor location, they give a razor-sharp and hyper energetic performance showing that all aspects of our life are impregnated with economic interests, the public space is increasingly privatized and the media put pressure on the traditional idea of human beings and family.
-performed in German, Dutch surtitled-

A Note From The Artistic Director:

BANG! How would you pronounce this? In an English tone, and preferably with some stress: BANG, a big bang, an explosion? Sounds dangerous, but also playful. Or maybe you would pronounce it in Dutch (if you can!) as ‘bang’, meaning afraid. Afraid for the English BANG. Or do you actually feel tickled by it, particularly when the BANG is hanging on a seductive arm that is in turn connected with a masked young lady wearing a dress in the shape of a pistol?

Ambiguity: that’s what makes us sit up straight in theatre. When it entertains and hits (the heart, the mind), when it seems to draw no boundaries between performing and being, or when it irritates, even repulses, but in turn stirs up compassion or understanding. Exactly like life itself – and that’s what we want to celebrate. Unambiguously, with the work of theatre makers such as Michael Laub, The Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Philippe Quesne. Ambiguity however should not be mixed up with halfheartedness. Theatre makers like Kornél Mundruczó and Jorge León & Simone Aughterlony interrelate to the dark sides of our society and force us to take a stance: to look away or intervene? Davis Freeman and Lotte van den Berg navigate between these poles, just like René Pollesch who has created a perfect cross-border between a feel-good performance and one that gives the gun to society.

With a cheerful BANG from a toy gun, I wholeheartedly invite you to fearlessly pull out all the stops for the Keuze-performances: sometimes you have to travel a bit to get there, but the unexpected sites will provide you with new encounters, including with Dutch companies that might be more or less familiar to you, such as Wunderbaum, Piet Rogie C.S., Dood Paard and De Warme Winkel. For us, it will be just as exciting: there have never before been so many (co)productions that will have their (Dutch) opening night with us! De Gouvernestraat (previously Lantaren/Venster) will function as the centre of the festival during the entire Internationale Keuze, until Saturday 2 October when the Rotterdamse Schouwburg opens its doors again following a hot summer of rebuilding and redecorating. Please join us for the final performance of the festival in the renovated city foyer of the Rotterdamse Schouwburg.

Until then, I wish you inspiring theatre discoveries, all across Rotterdam.

Annemie Vanackere
artistic director

The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country for more than three decades. Founded as an artist collective in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka and incorporated as a non-profit two years later, in its infancy The Kitchen was a space where video artists and experimental composers and performers could share their ideas with like-minded colleagues. It thus was among the very first American institutions to embrace the then emergent fields of video and performance art, while also presenting new visionary work within the fields of dance, music, literature, and film. The resulting combination was an environment uniquely conducive to experimentation and cross-disciplinary explorations that helped launch the careers of many artists who have defined the American avant-garde, including Vito Acconci, Constance de Jong, Gary Hill, Kiki Smith, Charles Atlas, Lucinda Childs, Elizabeth Streb, Bill T. Jones, and board members Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk. Today, The Kitchen is an internationally acclaimed arts institution still widely known for its commitment to experimental work as it continues to provide instrumental support for the early and mid-career development of the current generation of artists.

Yasmeen Godder: Singular Sensation (Tel Aviv, NYC)
September 23–September 25, 2010

Renowned Israeli-American choreographer Yasmeen Godder presents the New York premiere of a new dance exploring the emotional landscape of a generation desensitized by information overload and excess of all kinds. Oscillating between moments of awkward hilarity, perceptive subtlety, and a sensibility teetering on “bordello morality” [Guardian, London], five individual performers push the boundaries of their own numbness to provoke a singular sensation in each other and themselves. Ultimately, Godder’s work asks who we are in the hyper-informed, self-conscious world of “look at me” and how we find excitement, a true thrill, or a deep connection to sensation.

Christian Rizzo: b.c, janvier 1545, fontainebleau (Paris, France)
September 30–October 2, 2010

Acclaimed French choreographer Christian Rizzo takes a surprisingly intimate turn in this solo work created for the celebrated classical and contemporary dancer Julie Guibert. With his stark choreographic style and almost cinematic staging, bodily patterns gradually unfold, carved out of the shadows with slow measured pace and calligraphic intricacy, revealing the influence of his years spent working in fashion design, rock music, and fine arts. The piece also features long-time collaborators musician Gerome Nox and lighting designer Caty Olive.

Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy: Re:Galli Blonde – A Sissy Fix (NYC)
Friday–Saturday, October 22–23, 8pm
Wednesday–Saturday, October 27–30, 8pm

In this new work conceived as a performance ritual, Mx Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy create an evening of music, spectacle, and magic inspired by the story of the Order of the Galli. In ancient times, these gender variant priests/priestesses maintained temples to the goddess Cybele which were spread throughout the Roman Empire. First detailing the tragic end of the Order of the Galli, Bond and a bevy of NYC’s finest performance witches then gather to lift the harmful curse on gender- and sexually-ambiguous people and to celebrate the legacy of the Galli and the third identity position in our understanding of the natural world.

Singer, songwriter, and performance artist Justin Bond received acclaim for his Tony-nominated work as part of the drag cabaret duo Kiki & Herb and has since gone on to create celebrated works for the stage including Lustre, Justin Bond is Close to You, and Glamour Damage, among many others.