Archive for December, 2012

Blood Play comes to Boston

Monday, December 24th, 2012

Following its January run at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, Blood Play will pick up and move to Boston, to perform as a part of ArtsEmerson’s The Next Thing Festival!

The Debate Society’s play, co-written by and starring Fellow Hannah Bos, sold out its run at the Bushwick Starr in October of 2012, including a week-long extension. It was a Critic’s Pick in New York Magazine, and The New York Times, Time-Out NY, and The Village Voice (among others) all gave it glowing reviews. So if you missed it in New York City, head over to Boston to see what you’ve missed!

Blood Play, a darkly comic thriller of post-war verve and pre-adolescent disquiet, translates the anti-Semitic medieval perception that Jewish men menstruated into a provocative, 20th century thriller.

In the tranquil Chicago suburbs in the early 1950’s, the kids are away camping with their Jr. Cherokee’s Troop, and a string of coincidences yields a spontaneous grown-up party. In the basement of a brand-new ranch house, exotic cocktails like “Rapupu Sours” are sampled, games like “Bee Pee Bo” are played and new friends like Jeep, the door-to-door photographer, are made.

But things are happening that no one is talking about, and something is stirring underground…

Blood Play will perform February 21 – 23, 2013, at varying times. Tickets go on sale January 2, so click here for more details!

February 21 @ 8pm
February 22 @ 6pm
February 23 @ 9:30pm

Emerson University
The Paramount Center
559 Washington St.

Sylvan Oswald’s SUN RA

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

Sylvan Oswald’s new play SUN RA will receive a reading at La MaMa’s rehearsal studios!

A theatrical response to the life and work of avant-garde jazz composer Sun Ra (who believed he was from Saturn), the play imagines the musician’s last act of self-articulation before dying.

The bandleader is on the wane, returning after a stroke to his childhood home, so his sister can care for him. He abandoned her so long ago, she has no idea who he’s become – of his new name, or of his self-styled mythology that fuses ancient Egypt with outer space. He can speak only through a keyboard, yet his prophetic instinct is still alive in him. He spirals from the outer frame of his homecoming back to his childhood, and through pivotal moments in his middle-age, to conjure for his sister a vision of his deepest identity.

SUN RA explores the story of a radical, black, and probably queer and maybe even autistic artist in the twentieth century. It’s about how an artist nurtures his own exquisite and expansive vision in the face of
disability, racism, and everybody who isn’t ready to hear it yet.

Wednesday, December 19 at 4pm

***This event is sold-out!***

SUN RA
by Sylvan Oswald
directed by Charlotte Brathwaite
music by Samuel Carl Adams

Apocalypse Now? Art Event, Live Screening and Themed Party

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

Come together for the End of Times! Join Six Points Fellow Jonas Becker for art work reflecting on the end of days, a screening of footage being shot live in Mexico for her 2012102 Video, and a festive party featuring Apocalypse themed micro brewed beer and Karaoke. Bring your skepticism, bring your questions, bring your flashlight, and for heavens sake, bring your dance pants.

Apocalypse Now? is a time specific collaborative art event and screening of footage from the film 2012102. While guests gather in Highland Park, attempting Apocalypse themed Karaoke, making end-of-the-world drawings or just hanging out, artist Jonas Becker will be in Mexico, shooting the video 201210. She will be driving from one major Mayan site to another, filming believers and skeptics, cultural tourists, spiritual leaders and doomsday conspiracy junkies as they gather to prepare and honor the last days of the Mayan calendar. This footage will be streamed and projected for the live audience a Apocalypse Now?, whose comments, questions and curiosities will be incorporated into the final video.
2012102 is part of a larger body of work, titled 2×12, comprised of a series of 12 short videos that explore cultural myths about time and the end of the world, beginning with Noah’s Ark. The 12 videos will ultimately be exhibited together, embracing the diversity of what the end of days evokes. As a whole, this piece will contextualize each (unfulfilled) end inside the persistent march of time, allowing both humor and hope to incite questions of how “the end” operates in contemporary culture.

December 21st, 8pm
5118 York Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
90042

Corrie Siegel — Press

Monday, December 17th, 2012

LA Weekly
December 10, 2012

Blood Play at The Public!

Monday, December 17th, 2012

The Debate Society’s Blood Play, co-written by and starring Fellow Hannah Bos, sold out its run at the Bushwick Starr in October of 2012, including a week-long extension. It was a Critic’s Pick in New York Magazine, and The New York Times, Time-Out NY, and The Village Voice (among others) all gave it glowing reviews. So for those of you who missed it the first time, or just want another chance to see it, you’re in luck!

Blood Play is one of the dozen shows selected to be a part of The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival! Showcasing innovative theatre from around the world, the Under the Radar Festival has been called “the most exciting theatrical event of the year” by Gothamist. Blood Play, a darkly comic thriller of post-war verve and pre-adolescent disquiet, translates the anti-Semitic medieval perception that Jewish men menstruated into a provocative, 20th century thriller.

In the tranquil Chicago suburbs in the early 1950’s, the kids are away camping with their Jr. Cherokee’s Troop, and a string of coincidences yields a spontaneous grown-up party. In the basement of a brand-new ranch house, exotic cocktails like “Rapupu Sours” are sampled, games like “Bee Pee Bo” are played and new friends like Jeep, the door-to-door photographer, are made.

But things are happening that no one is talking about, and something is stirring underground…

Blood Play will perform January 9 – 20, 2013, at varying times. Click here for more details, to see the show schedule, and to get your tickets!

EAST COAST, WEST COAST A performance by Yelena Zhelezov and others

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

EAST COAST, WEST COAST A performance by Six Points Fellow Yelena Zhelezov, with Amy Howden-Chapman and Eugene Kotlyarenko at Actual Size Los Angeles, December 7, 2012 8-10pm.

In this one-night performance in conjunction with the closing weekend of Sculptures from the Pedestrian Memory Bureau, Yelena Zhelezov will use sculptural objects and projection to interpret “East Coast, West Coast,” a video that documents a 1969 conversation between artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Amy Howden-Chapman will read the part of Robert Smithson and Eugene Kotlyarenko will read for Nancy Holt. The dialogue parses out bi-coastal approaches to art making and explores the dynamic between structure and intuition in the act of examining one’s environment. The exhibition will be open for viewing at 8:00pm and the performance will begin promptly at 9:00pm.

The exhibition, Sculptures from the Pedestrian Memory Bureau, features a collection of Yelena Zhelezov’s recent sculptures and performative objects. The works displayed act as playful ciphers, translating topographic markers into lyric constructions that intimately investigate the biological and social body in space and time.

Yelena Zhelezov’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, installation, film, drawing, and sculpture. Though her approach stems from research and critical engagement, she intuitively constructs and stages her work. Zhelezov often builds structures and modular parts that can be transformed by the individuals that interact with them. This process endows each object with its own layered history and expressive potential.

“The Worlds Most Charming Instrument” is a participatory installation piece that generates a looping soundscape of soft harp tones. This children’s zither was produced in Belarus, the area Yelena Zhelezov was born. One can play specific songs on the instrument by following a visual score that is slid beneath the strings. The song sheets indicate which string needs to be plucked and the order in which each note should be played. The scores of this instrument are black and white photographs of the Los Angeles landscape. In order to perform the songs the viewer must read the fronds of palm trees as musical notation. A projection visually amplifies this tactile exploration and the cycle of recorded sound creates a wistful and eerie baseline for Zhelezov’s constructed environment.

Shelves staggered along the gallery wall elevate diminutive porcelain sculptures of buildings, palm trees, cars, and abstract structures, dramatizing these handmade ceramics with a tongue in cheek gravitas. The figures were originally employed as interpretive tools for a body of work entitled, “PEDXING.” For this ongoing project, Zhelezov produces participatory installations that explore traditional Jewish leitmotifs of oral history and migration. Yelena Zhelezov investigates personal and societal relationships to space by staging mobile memory collecting stations in public areas. She uses the sculptures as interpretive markers to record stories from the individuals that she encounters. Removed from their performative context, the porcelain works become independent entities. The figures form a structural typology of Los Angeles. They exist as moveable monuments in absurd, poetic landscapes that could serve as utopian models or memorials for a remembered place.

Actual Size Los Angeles
741 New High Street
Los Angeles CA
90012

Join Corrie on the Mulholland Dérive!

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Please join Six Points Fellow, Corrie Siegel, Sunday December 9 at 11801 Mullholland Drive as she participates in Mulholland Dérive,  a day of site specific interventions by over 100 artists along the 21 mile stretch of Mullholland Drive. From 12:00- 6:00PM she will be stationed at Barbara Fine Summit Overlook in order to circulate free maps to passing motorists and pedestrians. These maps, which reference early Renaissance and turn of the century documents, explore Los Angeles history and draw parallels to biblical narrative and visions of “The Holy Land”.

Mullholland Dérive

site-specific works along the entire length of Mulholland Drive
Sunday, December 9, 2012 12 PM – 6 PM

Los Angeles Road Concerts presents a showing of site-specific projects from over 110 Los Angeles artists in unused public outdoor spaces along the entire length of Mulholland Drive’s 21 miles, starting at its east end, at Cahuenga Pass, and resulting with a reception party near the Nike Missile Site in the Santa Monica Mountains. For one day, artists will perform works, display installations, facilitate carpool happenings, host spontaneous readings, and make music in unexpected spaces such as on the sidewalk, between dumpsters, along precipices, as well as inside the audience’s cars as they traverse one of LA’s most iconic streets. The audience can choose how long they want to spend at each spot, whether or not they want to park or get out of their cars, skip spots or drive at different speeds between them. Audience members are additionally invited to car pool with artists and to switch car pools at their leisure. The road concert can also easily be experienced by bus, bicycle and walking. An official map of the day’s events along with project descriptions and other downloadable information will be available to the public starting on December 5 on the event website ().
Los Angeles Road Concerts seeks to investigate the possibilities of LA’s lengthy streets as sites for artistic exploration while using the street itself as a cross-section to observe the city’s diversity of landscapes and people, how the Los Angeles metropolis grew, and the massive in-between and negative spaces it left behind as it expanded. How can we generate a new kind of LA experience, utilizing its car culture to find meaning and bring attention to a collection of less obvious destinations? Additionally, through a wide open call process, Los Angeles Road Concerts brings together art school graduates, working artists, local residents, and other artists, writers, musicians, dancers, academics, etc, to realize a broad array of kinds of interactions with the sites. Participants find unlikely audiences, people who may have never been to a gallery space but who ultimately take great interest in participants’ work.

A dérive is a spontaneous exploration of urban landscapes guided by aesthetic instinct. The Mulholland Dérive invites its audience to drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain of Mulholland Drive and the encounters they find there. The iconic Mulholland Drive begins at Cahuenga Pass and winds through LA’s quiet, affluent Hollywood Hills neighborhoods, past the homes of famous stars, massive mansions, rich baby boomers in convertibles, people sitting alone in their cars at lookouts, cliffs, crossing over the 405 on the Carmageddon-causing bridge, then turning into “Dirt Mulholland” an undrivable six miles through the Santa Monica Mountains, Los Angeles as a distant backdrop on both sides along much of the drive.

Corrie will be stationed at
Barbara Fine Summit Overlook
11801 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, California 91604
12 – 6 PM