Sitelines 07
LMCC's annual site-specific performance series
When is the New York Stock Exchange a stage? When is the oldest church courtyard in the US an intimate playhouse? When is an entire acre in the middle of downtown a multi-media venue? Only during the Council’s annual Sitelines series. From June 1 to September 14, consider all of Downtown the best seat in the house.
Admission to all events is FREE. Produced in association with The River to River Festival
Martha Graham Dance Company: Steps In the Street and Prelude To Action (from Chronicle, 1936)
Friday-Sunday, June 1-3, 12:30PM
Intersection of Wall and Broad Streets
Martha Graham Dance Company will launch this year’s series with Steps In the Streets and Prelude to Action from the 1936 piece Chronicle, a work created by Martha Graham in response to the menace of fascism in Europe. These two excerpts evoke the devastation that war leaves in its wake but also induces a rallying call to action that suggests a powerful answer. The work is one of the very few dances Graham made which express explicitly political ideas. An all-female cast performs the stark, geometric choreography — percussive, angular, and always visceral — in which the powerful tension of Graham’s early movement is still present today.
Thanks to the New York Stock Exchange
Rising Phoenix Repertory: Fall Forward
June 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29 at 12PM
June 20, 23, 27, 30, 2007 at 6PM
John Street United Methodist Church and its adjacent open-air courtyards at 44 John Street (btw. Nassau & Dutch St)
Fall Forward is a new play written by Daniel Reitz and directed by Daniel Talbott. Its three intimate vignettes deal with the sudden cataclysm that life holds in store for us. Featuring a sexually ambiguous, BlackBerry-obsessed young broker, a grief-stricken woman debating the point of her continued existence, and a reunited couple who reminisce about their past.
Thanks to John Street United Methodist Church.
Tryst and System of Units: Security Zone
Tue-Sun, July 10-15, Noon–6pm, ongoing
Old Slip (btw. Water & Front St.), adjacent to the Police Museum
Opening a new Sitelines effort toward cross-continental collaboration, System of Units, a performance troupe from Siberia, pairs with the New York interventionist performance group TRYST in Security Zone. The two groups first met in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where they performed a site-specific piece last summer. Supported by CEC Artslink, their collaboration melds the playful spontaneous interactivity of TRYST (Paul Benney, Clarinda Mac Low and Alejandra Martorell) with the intensity and rigorous designs of System of Units (Ilya Belenkov and Katerina Basalaeva). The teams join up during a weeklong on-site development process (which is open to the public), followed by a week of full-day performances where the two groups will play off each other and tap into the physical environment, downtown passersby, and the collaborators’ backgrounds for inspiration. Sly alterations of everyday life, outlandish costumes, and surprises will abound.
Co-sponsored by CEC ArtsLink
Lawrence Goldhuber / BIGMANARTS: Whose Broads Stripes
Wed-Fri, July 18-20, 25-27
Two performances daily:
Noon & 12:30pm
Federal Hall National Memorial Steps, 26 Wall St. (btw. Broad & William St.)
Dancer and choreographer Lawrence Goldhuber arrives at Federal Hall with a briefcase and cash in hand. Flanked and tantalized by showgirls dressed in slinky red-and-white gowns and tormented by the searing guitar of Geoff Gersh screaming out Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Goldhuber’s new choreography transports a little Las Vegas to Wall Street in this glam-o-rama.
Reggie Wilson and Andreya Ouamba: Accounting for Customs
Wed-Sat, August 22-25
Two performances daily:
12:30pm & 1:30pm
U.S. Custom House steps, 1 Bowling Green (at Broadway)
A new work created by collaborators Andreya Ouamba, of Senegal, and Brooklyn-based Reggie Wilson and his Fist and Heel Performance Group wrestles with questions of memory and loss. How do people innovate within and against traditions? For displaced and exiled communities, the questions of preservation, continuity, memory and loss have a particularly poignant urgency. In the African diaspora, remembered and stolen pasts and troubled and hopeful presents are mediated by invention, as explored by Ouamba and Wilson and danced by Fist and Heel. Accounting for Customs is part of the Centennial Celebration of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House.
Dean Moss and Ryutaro Mishima: States & Resemblance
Mon-Tue, August 27-28; &
Tue, September 4, 7:00pm
Wed, August 29; &
Wed-Thu, September 5-6, 12:30pm
Elevated Acre, 55 Water St. (at Old Slip) map
Incorporating shadow-play, text, and dance, and set in a field of dots, States & Resemblance is a collaboration between Japanese photographer and video artist Ryutaro Mishima, Indonesian dance and mask artist Restu Imansari Kusumaningrum, and choreographer and New York video artist Dean Moss. A meditation on the pain, beauty, and inevitability of how things, people, and experience pass away, the piece explores how this changing and passing is the most binding aspect of our existence.
BILLSHANNON: Window
w/ DJ Excess, The Step Fienz, VJSelf Control, and Special Guests
Mon–Fri, September 17 –21,
noon
140 Broadway/Brown Brothers Harriman Building; entrance on Cedar Street map
Watching from behind a window overlooking the site, viewers observe Bill Shannon and crew engage with the public space and pedestrian traffic in their freestyle performance that taps into the hip-hop/skateboard tradition of street improvisation. The distance between audience and performers is mitigated by holographic screens and live audio and video mixing by special guests. The multimedia performance features live audio mixing and sampling by DJ Excess.
