Brick Summer Theme Festival "Sound Scape"

Photo credits: See Practical information below
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Festival Story:

THE BRICK was founded in 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner. Formerly an auto-body shop, a yoga center, and various storage spaces, this brick-walled garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was completely refurbished as a state-of-the-art performance space. Since then, The Brick has launched, produced and presented hundreds of world-premiere stage works from New York emerging artists and theater-makers from around the globe. The theater company is a proud member of New York’s burgeoning Indie Theater community and informal home to an ever-expanding family of artists and avid theatergoers. The Brick received a 2009 New York Innovative Theatre Foundation Caffé Cino Fellowship Award for being “an Off-Off Broadway theatre company that consistently produces outstanding work.”

Festival Events:

Progrmming 2013:

• Beckett’s Shorts: a live presentation of radio plays, TV plays, and mimes, by Samuel Beckett
  Presented by Cliff House
  Directed by Jesse Bonell, Andreas Hager, Sarah Lucier, Nessa Norich, Liz Rogers, Andy Sowers, & Emma Zbiral-Teller
  
  • Beckett’s Shorts, from Cliff House’s “Consortium of Shorts” series, features a collection of individual companies, directors, and multimedia artists who each offer their own interpretation in a collection of Samuel Beckett’s alternate medium works. Titles include: “Act Without Words 1,” “Act Without Words 2,” “…but the clouds…,” “Eh Joe,” “Nacht und Traüme,” “Words and Music,” and “Quad.”
• Commotion Collage
  Presented by Six of Six Productions
  Written & Directed by Roger Nasser
  
  • Commotion Collage is an exploration into our mundane everyday existence: using elements from the Dadaist Simultaneous Poem (or “Sound Poem”) and ubiquitous sounds that we sometimes take for granted, to help illustrate the stories of individuals who are at a point of confusion in their lives.
• Dante’s Inferno
  Presented by Submerged
  
  • A sound and music driven adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, using live foley sound and electronic manipulations to tell the story of through darkness into light. This highly relevant story of the darker side of human nature is told using movement, masks and bunraku puppetry as well as back wall projections to create the worlds of the different circles of hell. This piece is a total merging of immersive sound design with movement based performance techniques to illuminate the classical text.
• ELE↓↑TOR
  Presented by Tux & Tom Productions
  Written by Chris Chappell, Directed by Patrice Miller
  
  • Through immersive sound design and music, ELE↓↑TOR will transform the stage of The Brick into a dangerously malfunctioning elevator making its way to the 80th floor of the Empire State Building. Coinciding with the centenary of the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s unveiling of his “intonarumori” noise generators at Modena’s Teatro Storchi in June 1913—a signal event in the history of experimental music and sound design—it follows three hapless passengers on a vertiginous and bewildering journey in which soporific Muzak, Industrial Age machinery, and the ominous echoes of the elevator shaft all vie for dominance of the sonic space. The result is a disturbing reminder of both our dependence on and our incomprehension of the technologies that drive the modern world.
• I Am Sitting in a Room
  Presented by 31 Down
  Cast: Maggie Hoffman, Saori Tsukada, Bryerly Long
  
  • Alvin Lucier’s minimalist 1969 recording exploration is performed in the brick walled room of The Brick. Live text dissolves into its resonant frequencies creating a hypnotic drone that is mesmerizing and haunting. 31 Down’s use of interactive lighting and surround soundscapes emphasizes the visceral and disintegrating nature of sound.
• Kamikaze
  Presented by Blote Badgast
  Written by Jeroen Bouwhuis, Directed by Ton Offermans & Eveline Mois
  
  • He fights a giant, he fights a warzone, he fights a spoon, he fights until the end of time. With music and sound as his counterparts and companions he will take you thru a world where at any given time the situation can change. “Never a dull moment.” A mimicry maniac takes to the stage. Come and see this living cartoon figure in the hit show directly form Holland, Belgium and Germany. This humorous show is a cross between music, mime, film, dance and theatre.
• Lameness of a Horse
  Presented by Collective Playmaking
  Written, Directed, & Designed by Jeremy Bloom and Brian Rady
  
  • Lameness of a Horse is an aural and gestural catalog of dying horses, told through theater, live sound art, and movement. We witness performed episodes of individual horses who have been diagnosed “lame”: their gait is stilted, they hobble along, the horse owners’ finances insist that life is too costly. One by one, another horse falls as each of the six composer/performers will at one time emerge as horse and human working through each injury or condition in full medical detail.
• Lighthouse Triptych
  Adapted by Stephanie Lane from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
  Directed by Jamie Watkins & Stephanie Lane
  Composed by Mark Van Hare
  
  • Lighthouse Triptych is a dance-music-theater performance inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse. Seeking to interweave choreography, text, music, and sound, the show addresses the passage of time and our perceptions of chaos versus control. Sound design, in particular, plays a vital role in shaping the world of the piece by creating rich aural environments and communicating complex ideas non-verbally.
• Room for Dialogue: The Actor’s Voice and Responsive Audio Technology
  Written & Directed by Matt O’Hare, Performed by Dan Cozzens
  
  • A presentation and demonstration of the audio application Verser with a performance, which uses the human voice to control sound interactively. It was developed specifically for use in theatrical sound design and plays that focus on speech and dialogue in particular.
• Tangerine EP
  Presented by 13 Chairs
  Written by Tommy Smith, Directed by Tommy Smith, Ben Kamine, & Tom Costello
  
  • A sonic retelling of drugged seduction in Homer’s The Odyssey — filtered through the lens of Internet fetish, Native-American menstrual cycles, and Icelandic volcano rituals for disposing of the elderly – the audio-fueled “extended play” Tangerine EP de-stimulates of the audience’s perception through visual and auditory manipulation.
• The Theoretical Physics of Procrastination
  Written, Performed, & Designed by Christopher Loar
  
  • The Theoretical Physics of Procrastination is a solo performance that explores the relationship between procrastination, creativity and global warming. Using lip-syncing from a live soundscape sequenced / created in real time and video the show will create a unified field and parallel theatrical universes on stage and off, bending time and space to construct a landscape where the performer is both ‘here’ and ‘not actually here.’ As the show unfolds, the performer is simultaneously writing the play and not writing the play as the piece reveals itself to be a talent show submission (judged by each night’s audience) to earn future safe passage away from a likely burned up Earth to a colony on Kepler 22b.
• The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Juila Pastrana, The Ugliest Woman in the World
  Presented by The Fifth Wall
  Written by Shaun Prendergast, Directed by Gyda Arber
  
  • Performed entirely in the dark, Shaun Prendergast’s play tells the entirely true story of sideshow freak Julia Pastrana, who toured the world both in life and in death as “The Ugliest Woman in the World.”

Other Sources:

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Podcast interviews:

• If you like this festival — listen to…
  
  • Jeffrey Lewonczyk, Associate Director of the Brick Theater
    http://kadmusarts.com/podcasts/?p=51

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Practical Info:

Slideshow photo credits:

• In order of appearance
  
  • Kamikaze, Photo by Marga van den Heuvel
  • Lighthouse Triptych, Photo by Carly Hoogendyk
  • Lameness of a Horse, Photo by James Matthew Daniel
  • Julia Postcard Art by Caviglia’s Cabinet of Curiosites_ (The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, The Ugliest Woman in the World)

Venue:

• The Brick
  575 Metropolitan Avenue (between Union Avenue and Lorimer Street)
  Brooklyn, NY

Tickets:

• To buy
• Available online at http://www.bricktheater.com
• Phone 1-866-811-4111

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