AFTER SPECTACULARITY

In this provocative polemic by the writer and the director of Big Art Group, Jemma Nelson and Caden Manson meditate on the meaning of spectacularity and its relationship to live performance in an age of media, video games, and slipping of the digital and the real. The text will appear in THEATER, Vol. 42, Number 3, scheduled for publication in late October 2012.

THE PROBLEM WITH DANCING

A duet made by Miguel Gutierrez performed with Andrew Champlin where they discuss The Problem With Dancing and then dance about it. Made in 2007 and performed infrequently since then, it pretty much changes every time they do it. But the through-line is that it remains rapid-fire and clever, provocative and silly and mostly it was a clever way for Miguel to figure out how to make out with Andrew those many years ago.

WORK HARD PLAY HARDER
A manifesto by a next generation theatre-maker

Everywhere Theatre Group's Flying Snakes in 3-D!!! prompted a serious and polarizing dialogue about race, theater and class privilege in 2012. In this manifesto, young minority female playwright Leah Nanako Winkler will tackle these same issues with her collaborators while emphasizing the importance of gratitude, respect, strength, vulnerability, communication, diversity and most of all, a sense of play, to keep theater relevant in this Facebook society.

~PLOSION OF IMPS

Mac Wellman’s recent work includes 3 2’s; or AFAR at Dixon Place in October 2011, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (with composer David Lang) at Montclair in the fall of 2006 (and elsewhere more recently), and 1965 UU for performer Paul Lazar, and directed by Stephen Mellor at the Chocolate Factory in the fall of 2008. He has received numerous honors, including NEA, Guggenheim, and Foundation of Contemporary Arts fellowships.

BAD ART & OBJECTHOOD

David Levine's performance work has been seen at MoMA, Documenta XII, MASS MoCA, PS122, the Watermill Center, Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin), Blum and Poe (Los Angeles), Gavin Brown's Enterprise (New York), and the Crossing the Line Festival. He has directed theater at Primary Stages, the Atlantic, and the Sundance Theater Lab. He is a 2012-13 Radcliffe Fellow in Visual Arts, and Professor of Art at Bard College/European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, where he is the Director of the Studio Program.

JAY SCHEIB: UNTITLED ECOLOGIES

Jay Scheib and Co. presents in the form of a manifesto the Epilogue and Synthesis of his Performance Trilogy Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems. After six years of work This will be performed as a brief closing of accounts with a handful of small explosions, a brief lecture demonstration, an avatar and seven diagrams.

LEAVE ME TO MY OWN DEVICES AND I COME UP WITH NAMES LIKE CLUBBED THUMB

Maria Striar is a founder of and the Producing Artistic Director of Clubbed Thumb, an Obie Award-winning downtown theater company which commissions, develops and produces funny, strange and provocative new plays by living American writers. Since 1996, they've produced over 80 new plays. She is also, occasionally, an actress, most recently in Erin Courtney's Map of Virtue, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll.

SCHMOETICS (A POETICS TALK BY TINA SATTER)

Making art is hard. Basically all the time you feel like a self-involved martyr for a cause that no one actually cares about. But then you think deep down that they should care. Cause it is kind of everything. It can matter. Right? I mean, it does matter in lots of ways. It’s some kind of contextual frame for trying to be alive that relies on form and aesthetics and possibility. You keep thinking about why you do it and the ways you do it and how to do it better. It’s complicated.

UNTITLED

Richard Foreman: Over 40 years making theater around the world. 8 books. A MacArthur, Officer of Arts and Letters of France, etc. Now— film: Once Every Day, showing on 6 October at New York Film Festival, Walter Reade Theater

UNTITLED

Faye Driscoll is a Bessie-award winning choreographer and director who has been called "a startlingly original talent" by the New York Times and "the most promising performing artist of her generation" by the Weekly Standard.