Pleasure on the Fly: NY Times Review on Stopped Bridge
Posted January 31, 2012 at 2:48 pm
by Claudia La Rocco, NY Times
If Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams and William Gibson had gotten together, maybe become a little drunk, and decided to pull a literary all-nighter, the resulting collaboration might have had something of the flavor of John Jesurun’s “Stopped Bridge of Dreams.”
The 75-minute production, which is being presented by La MaMa, evokes numerous authors, and is inspired by the floating world stories of the 17th-century Japanese writer Saikaku Ihara. Yet the voice here — mad, poetic and unsettling — is entirely Mr. Jesurun’s.
To the extent that the performance situates itself anywhere beyond the unstable rush of contemporary existence, it is in a modern-day house of pleasure operating within a jet as it streaks from one port of call to the next. The audience sits lengthwise in La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, flanking a spare set that is dominated by two large, rotating video screens, so that the field of action has something of the claustrophobia of a long flight. READ MORE >>
Gimpel The Fool/The Lady and The Peddler Review
Posted January 27, 2012 at 9:22 pm
by Paulanne Simmons, CurtainUp
Gimpel the Fool, now in its New York premiere at La Mama E.T.C, adapted, designed, directed and performed by Howard Rypp, is based on a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by Saul Bellow. It is about a fool who is easily manipulated by his more cynical and sophisticated neighbors. He is tricked into marrying the town slut and accepting the children she has with various lovers as his own. He takes her abuse for many years and even mourns her after she dies. READ MORE >>
Around the World in bed – Stopped Bridge review
Posted at 9:17 pm
by Scott Stiffler, The Villager
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | Like the uncertain fate of a traveler on standby, the takeaway from John Jesurun’s first production at La MaMa in a decade varies largely according to what they’ve got to offer on the particular night you decide to show up. Best, then, not to be tethered to the notion that somebody’s out to get you just because you came expecting a direct flight and ended up in a holding pattern. READ MORE >>
Martin Denton reviewed Stopped Bridge
Posted January 25, 2012 at 5:10 pm
by Martin Denton, nytheatre.com
Stopped Bridge of Dreams, the new multimedia performance written, designed and directed by John Jesurun at La MaMa, is a hallucinogenic, sense-assaulting, dreamlike hour and a quarter in the theater. The Ellen Stewart Theatre has been arranged with tennis-court-style seating, with audience against two opposite walls and the actors and action in the center between them. The set is a long table with two different cloths covering each half (they seem to be complements of one another); bisecting the table is a wall or screen. Above the table are two screens on which are projected images—sometimes live video feeds, sometimes pre-recorded monologues, and most of the time ambient background footage of the airplane we’re in flying through a night sky. At the sides of the playing space are a few items of furniture and costume pieces; a live camera operator and his equipment is visible at one end of the space. The cameraman and the actors shift location and occasionally change costume in full view of the audience; it should be a distraction but like all of the rest of the constantly shifting environment of this play (for the screens and the table are moved numerous times during the show by the actors) it is in tune with one of the main ideas of Jesurun’s work, which is to keep us constantly caught up in a mutating perspective. Nothing is absolute or certain in this world. READ MORE >>
Backstage Review on Stopped Bridge
Posted at 5:08 pm
by Nicole Villeneuve, Backstage
In the 17th century, Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku began writing stories of the pleasure seekers of modern life, hedonistic consumers of art, entertainment, beauty, and sex. The tales became known as “ukiyo zoshi” or “floating world stories,” a name that relied on a subtle play on words. The word for “floating” in Japanese sounds similar to the word for “sorrowful,” a winking reference by Saikaku to the isolating, sometimes even tragic sentiments that hid behind the comic mask of the urban circus. READ MORE >>
Stopped Bridge of Dreams Review – Lighting and Sound America
Posted at 2:12 pm
by David Barbour, lightingandsoundamerica.com
To those of you who think of projections as the cutting edge, I give you John Jeserun, who has been exploring the intersection between live performance and video for three decades. (Among other things, he’s the author of Chang in a Void Moon, a serial for the theatre, which kicked off in 1982 and now consists of 60 episodes and counting.) He’s a fearless, go-for-broke, take-it-or-leave-it artist, one of a community of theatrical iconoclasts who thrived in the ’80s and now seem scarce as hen’s teeth. Undaunted by the many cultural shifts that have unfolded since his early days, he’s still at it, currently with Stopped Bridge of Dreams. READ MORE >>
Somebody’s Done Them Wrong
Posted January 19, 2012 at 1:47 pm
By Ted Merwin, The Jewish Week
Beware a woman with a past! Such is the lesson of a double bill of plays arriving downtown from Israel this week, based on a pair of classic short stories from Jewish tradition by Nobel Prize-winning authors. In the first, a dramatization of I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” a credulous orphan is persuaded by his wife, the town prostitute, that he is the father of her children by other men. In the second, a dance-theater piece inspired by S.Y. Agnon’s “The Lady and the Peddler,” a traveling Jewish salesman moves in with a bewitching customer only to realize that she is a vampire who has devoured her previous mates. READ MORE >>
Memorial Mass for John Wessel
Posted January 18, 2012 at 12:18 pm
La MaMa’s long time Board of Directors member John Wessel passed away on December 9. There will be a Memorial Mass in Celebration of the Life of John.
Saturday, January 21, 2012 at 10:30am
Church of St. Francis Xavier
46 West 16th Street, New York City
(Between 5th and 6th Avenues)
From New York Times obituary
WESSEL–John C. John C. Wessel, formerly of NYC, died at home on December 9 in Pennsylvania from ALS. Born in St. Louis in 1941, a Graduate of the Goodman School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he spent five seasons at the St. Louis Municipal Opera and two seasons on Broadway with Phoenix Rep. He served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela 1966-68, worked for the Arts & Education Council of St. Louis, as Director of the Staten Island Council on the Arts, at the New York State Council on the Arts, and as regional representative for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977-84. In 1979, he met William C. O’Connor, his joy, strength, and love for the next 33 years. They were married in 2008. They moved to Rome, Italy in 1985 and opened the Wessel O’Connor Gallery, then relocated to New York by 1987. In addition to his husband, survived by siblings Ginger (and John) Williams of Chicago, Tom (and Susan) Wessel of Ironton, MO, Jerry (and Joan) Wessel of Poplar Bluff, MO, and Edward Jr. (and Babette) Wessel of St. Louis, by numerous nephews and nieces, and eight O’Connor siblings. Memorial Mass January 21 at St. Francis Xavier Church 46 W. 16 St., NYC at 10:30am. Donations in his honor may be made to La Mama ETC, 74A East 4th St., New York 10003
Jason Zinoman reviewed In the Solitude of Cotton Fields
Posted January 11, 2012 at 4:43 pm
A Seller and a Buyer in a Puzzling Exchange
by Jason Zinoman, NY Times
“In the Solitude of Cotton Fields,” a visceral adaptation of a French play by Bernard-Marie Koltés, portrays a high-octane, sexually charged meeting between a dealer and a client, where the goods exchanged are unclear, but the high stakes are not. On another level, this production, staged in Polish with English supertitles by Radoslaw Rychcik, is about a confrontation between theater and rock concert. The rock concert wins.
This show at La MaMa E.T.C. opens in smoky darkness as a band called the Natural Born Chillers lays down a pounding bass line while two silhouetted figures dance. The Dealer (Wojciech Niemczyk) does a ferocious, fist-punching twist, while the Client (Tomasz Nosinski) shrinks and unfolds his body in a repeated violent motion. READ MORE >>
Alexis Reviewed by Ben Brantley
Posted January 5, 2012 at 6:25 pm
Back to the Barricade, Antigone
by Ben Brantley, New York Times
The dialogues keep multiplying and echoing, contracting and expanding, blurring and zooming into focus. In the raw and resonant “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy,” one of the opening works in the Under the Radar festival of experimental theater, conversation is hardly limited to the words exchanged by the actors on the stage of the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa.
This invigorating portrait of youthful rebellion in contemporary Greece (and, by extension, around the world) by the Italian troupe Motus finds the present arguing with the past, and the past roaring back at it. Computer-generated visuals wrestle with the sort of primal, physical performance that is as old as theater itself. And art and the realities it is supposed to represent keep squaring off and wondering if they really have anything to say to one another. READ MORE >>
Cinema Fury
By Big Art Group
January 6 – January 7, 2012 at Friday 6 - 8pm, Saturday Noon - 5pm
A live art installation with an open, experimental structure in which performance is interwoven with installation, in which format and process are exposed, created by the Big Art Group. Everyone who attends performs, in one sense or another, as people do at a party; everyone dances, interacts, observes, and changes the course of the evening through their presence. During the course of the evening, we dj music, we deliver text, we make a video piece that is available in limited addition— but the real performance is the gallery audience as activators and how they assimilate and transform the space.
George Ferencz (#105)
January 28, 2012 at 3pm
George Ferencz is celebrating his 30 year association with La MaMa. As a resident director he has directed 32 productions and is in his 14th season as curator of the Experiments Playreading Series. Ferencz’s first production was MONEY (a jazz opera) and his most recent was CONJUR WOMAN (a blues opera). In between were THE TOOTH OF CRIME, SHEPARDSETS (with Max Roach) and GHOSTS (with Genji Ito). As curator of Experiments, he conducted 140 concert readings of new plays, directed Experimenta, a festival of 6 plays from the Experiments Series and heads for a 4th season the Shadow festival celebrating Black History Month.
Chemistry of Love
January 23, 2012 at 7:30pm
By Jill Campbell, directed by George Ferencz
This is a substantial re-write of a play read last season about the Art community.
Featuring Matt Luceno, Rod McLucas,Kim Merrill & Jenne Vath
Meredith Monk in Conversation
January 23, 2012 at 7:30pm
“She may loom even larger as the new
century unfolds, and later generations
will envy those who got to see her live.”
- Alex Ross, The New Yorker
Meredith Monk, recently named Musical America’s 2012 Composer of the Year, will perform various selections from her wide repertoire, and talk about her work as a composer, singer, director/choreographer, and filmmaker, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater.
Monday Nights at La MaMa celebrates La MaMa Alumni who has been instrumental in making La MaMa the leading experimental arts organization for 50 years, and supports artistic residencies at La MaMa to ensure that future generations of artists will have a creative home at La MaMa.
Hieronymus
January 20 – January 29, 2012
Friday & Saturday at 10pm
Sunday at 5:30pm
Written and Directed by Nic Ularu
A visual performance that recomposes from a puzzle of situations the life and work of Hieronymus Bosch, revealing the condition of the artist in relation to society and his private life. Using elements of black theater, video projections and giant puppets, Hieronymus recreates Bosch’s grotesque and tragic imaginary, in a fantastic universe that incorporates the sacred, the profane, the symbol and the metaphor of his paintings.
Stopped Bridge of Dreams
January 20 – February 5, 2012
Written and directed by John Jesurun
Wednesday – Saturday at 7:30pm
Sunday at 2:30pm
**Opens on Friday, January 20.
Visit the show website for more information!
“the voice here — mad, poetic and unsettling — is entirely Mr. Jesurun’s.” “finely calibrated text” – NY Times
“He’s a fearless, go-for-broke, take-it-or-leave-it artist, one of a community of theatrical iconoclasts who thrived in the ’80s and now seem scarce as hen’s teeth…it’s an accomplished piece of work.” – Lighting and Sound America
“New surprises keep unfolding in origami fashion …” – Backstage
John Jesurun’s Stopped Bridge of Dreams unfolds inside an anonymous globe-circulating jetliner- a modern age pleasure palace operated by a mother and son. Inspired by 17th Century Japanese writer, Saikaku Ihara’s “floating world” stories Stopped Bridge of Dreams features a variable nightly series of revolving playlets and characters. Jesurun weaves text, video, music and live internet feeds to reflect the anxiety of spiritual and sexual dislocation of contemporary life. Featuring Obie-winning actress Black-Eyed Susan.
This production is made possible through the support of National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, The Ford Foundation, The Coca-Cola Foundation, The Curtis W. McGraw Foundation, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Materials for the Arts
Stopped Bridge of Dreams from La MaMa on Vimeo.
The Lady And The Peddler and Gimpel The Fool
January 19 – January 29, 2012
Thursday – Saturday at 7:30pm
Sunday at 2:30pm
Also Sunday, Jan 29 at 7:30pm
Tickets $18
“The Lady and the Peddler” runs 55 mins; “Gimpel the Fool” runs 50 mins; one intermission.
La MaMa will present a double bill comprised of the Nephesh Theatre productions of two plays based on works by Nobel Prize laureates. “The Lady and the Peddler” by S.Y. Agnon, adapted by Yosefa Even-Shoshan and directed by Geula Jeffet Attar, is a dance theater piece featuring actor Victor Attar as the Peddler and dancer Ilana Cohen as the Lady. “Gimpel the Fool,” a monodrama from the story by Isaac Bashevis Singer as translated from the Yiddish by Saul Bellow, is adapted for the stage, directed and performed by Howard Rypp.
“Gimpel the Fool” is a theatrical adaptation based upon the classic story by Nobel prize laureate I B Singer, translated from the Yiddish by Nobel prize laureate Saul Bellow. This treasure from the Yiddish literature portrays Gimpel’s steadfast belief in God and human goodness in the face of betrayal and ridicule has inspired audiences throughout the world. It premiered at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival has toured festivals and been presented on campuses in England, Scotland, Czech Republic, Austria Armenia, Russia, the U.S. and Canada and in Egypt and Israel. .Quotes from the Reviews:”A tight production of high standards. an art form on its own terms!”- Edinburgh Guide “FIVE STARS… Uplifting… Best of the Fest” -Winnipeg Free Press “While touring internationally he has honed his character to a T !”- C.B.C.”Maybe Gimpel is a fool but not for those who came to see the play ; They all left a little wiser and without a doubt a better person. The play inspires the wish to believe in kindness and human goodness. If Art has a purpose- it is to awaken these kind of feelings” -Festival LUDI -Russia
“The Lady and the Peddler” is based upon the 1943 short story by S.Y. Agnon, the sole Israeli Nobel Prize winner for literature. The fable depicts a Christian woman, living in isolation in the woods, who buys a knife from an itinerant Jewish peddler who stumbles upon her house and takes shelter there from a storm. He is ensnared by her charm and hospitality, moves in and has sex with her, only to learn that she has devoured her previous lovers.
The Plot is the Revolution
January 9, 2012 at 7:30pm
Co-Presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and La MaMa
Motus (Italy)
Dected by Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò
With Silvia Calderoni and Judith Malina (The Living Theatre)
Performed in Italian with English supertitles.
The Living Theatre’s Judith Malina and Motus’ Silvia Calderoni create an encounter between two Antigones – spanning generations and experiences – united in the belief that theater can incite political transformation.
Monday, January 9th at 7:30pm (One night only)
Body Duet
January 7 – January 10, 2012
By John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Company
Saturday, January 7 at 11am
Monday, January 9 at 3pm
Tuesday, January 10 at 1pm
Free admission
Body Duet is an energy-packed, highly physical dance featuring two spiritual and witty performers, New York’s Bessie Award winning Michelle Boulé and one of Ireland’s outstanding male dancers, Philip Connaughton. Choreographed by John Scott with music by dynamic US duo BLACKFISH and lighting by Eric Würtz. Body Duet celebrates the ecstatic feeling of being together, of losing fear and inhibition, and trusting togetherness. A work packed with passion, poetry, rage, humor, artistry, grace, fun – and dance.
Body Duet is an assault of dance.
Body Duet is a recovering or adjustment of circumstances.
Body Duet is three sections;
One part is a furious athletic dance of moving, beautiful bodies.
One part is a sort of rage or fight.
One part is lyrical and more formal and slightly sad.
Choreography by John Scott
Performed by Michelle Boulé and Philip Connaughton
Lighting by Eric Würtz
Music by BLACKFISH (James Everest + Joel Pickard) www.blackfish.bandcamp.com
“Ghost Dog” by Sans le Systeme www.jgeverest.com
Commissioned by Kilkenny Arts Festival, Ireland.
In the Solitude of Cotton Fields
January 5 – January 14, 2012
Co-Presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and La MaMa
Stefan Zeromski Theatre
Directed by Radosƚaw Rychcik (Poland)
Performed in Polish with English supertitles.
All songs are about love, and they’re all like wolves. Backed by live music from the Polish cult band Natural Born Chillers, this interpretation of late French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès’s In the Solitude of Cotton Fields imagines a raw encounter between a Dealer and a Client with the swagger of an Eastern European punk-rock concert.
Last seen at UTR 2010 with Versus, Rychcik is emerging as one of the young directors to watch in international theater for his use of an intense acting technique and simple yet specific stage design.
Thursday, Jan 5, 4:30pm
Friday, Jan 6, 7pm
Saturday, Jan 7, 7pm
Sunday, Jan 8, 7pm
Monday, Jan 9, 7pm
Thursday, Jan 12, 9pm
Friday, Jan 13, 9pm
Saturday, Jan 14, 9pm