2014 undergroundzero festival July 7-20
Independent, Site-Specific, ZERO Budget Live Arts AT:
and Ella Lounge, 9 Avenue A, and Numerous Site-Specific Locations throughout NYC
Paul Bargetto – Artistic Director and Executive Producer
Layna Fisher, Lead Producer, Heather Benton, Producer, April Sweeney Producer, Connie Hall, Producer, and Robert Avila, Associate Curator in a co-production with: Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center
The undergroundzero festival returns to lower Manhattan for its sixth incarnation on July 7 – 20, 2014 for two weeks of ZERO Budget site-specific live arts. This is a collective gesture of disobedience, a radical act of generosity, and a (last) hurrah for the downtown underground.
BUY TICKETS HERE
MY LAST CAR
by Susan Bernfield Directed by Mia Rovegno
Tuesday July 8, Wednesday July 9, Monday July 14 at 7:30 PM @ Ella Lounge 9 Avenue A, NYC BUY TICKETS
New York City all-star playwright Susan Bernfield (Stretch, Tiny Feats of Cowardice) has a message for you: “This is a solo piece (with music) about a thing. It’s the car I drove, mid-way through junior year till the day I left for college. ’66 Mustang, V6 (V8s are cooler), my dad found it in the want ads and threw a bike rack on the back (not cool). Its steering wheel, its brakes, the gearshift, the defroster, the doors, the radio (AM). The effort it took to turn that steering wheel, brake those brakes, shift those gears, open those doors, the noise it made. The streets I drove on, the places I drove, the songs I sung along to (AM). No power steering, no power anything.”
common ground -a meet the artists talk show with all the artists of the 2014 undergroundzero festival
Tuesday July 8 and Tuesday July 15 at 9:00pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez – 107 Suffolk Street
Festival Director Paul Bargetto hosts common ground, the weekly festival talk show with the artists of the 2014 undergroundzero festival. Meet the artists, in a late night gathering with strong opinions and cool drinks! FREE
Studies For Frantic Beauty, Borders, and untitled solos
by LEIMAY Shige Moriya and Ximena Garnica with Masanori Asahara, Maximilian Balduzzi, Andrea Jones, and Baptiste Denient.
Thursday July 10, Friday July 11, Saturday July 12 at 8pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez – 107 Suffolk Street -La Tea Theater – BUY TICKETS
LEIMAY will be presenting a series of studies for four works in development: Frantic Beauty, Borders and two untitled solos by company members Masanori Asahara and Andrea Jones.
Frantic Beauty explores the hard power of beauty, through the prism of dreams and frenzied desire. Can the quest for beauty sabotage the future, and betray our best intentions? In Borders, LEIMAY looks at borders as protective barriers and as points of contact and exchange. In this project, the artists raise questions of how our choices and strategies for making connections – affecting, and being affected – can create states of nourishment and growth, or states of stagnation and isolation. Masanori Asahara’s solo explores the idea of the in-between, while Andrea Jones asks questions of death and the boundaries of the flesh.
Voices of justice and of consanguinity…
by Concrete Timbre Ann Warren, Manuela Lechler, Robert Morton, Nancy Greening, Christopher Hall, Ivy Adrian, Lillian Redl, Patrice Miller, Emma DeGrand, Aleksandra Miglowiec, Christopher Poeschl, David A. Green, Telma Bernardo, Kamaria Williams, and Kyoko Oyobe
Wednesday July 9 at 1:00pm @ Fraunces Tavern® Museum 54 Pearl St (Free at the door), July 12 at 7:00pm, July 13 at 6:00pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez – 107 Suffolk Street –Abrazo Interno Gallery BUY TICKETS
On July 9 1776, five days after America separated from England, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in New York City. Concrete Timbre recreates the Declaration along with other original compositions reviving revolutionary ideas with contemporary relevance through music, text, and visuals in a multidisciplinary exploration of freedom, independence, free-thinking, and relationships with genres ranging from jazz to poetry to electro-acoustic to classical.
The Intrinsic Value Project
curated by Paul Bargetto with Delaram Kahrobaei, Heather Jeanne Denyer, Molly Rice, Heather Benton, & Maryam Zaringhalam
Wednesday July 9, Thursday July 10 at 7:00pm, Friday July 11 at 7:00pm, Saturday & Sunday July 19, 20 at 5pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez – 107 Suffolk Street – Abrazo Interno Gallery BUY TICKETS
The undergroundzero festival presents its second series of performative lectures curated by artistic director Paul Bargetto. This year, theater artists and scientists will combine to create a series of performative lectures exploring the intrinsic values of art and science.
THE INTRINSIC VALUE PROJECT # 1 Wednesday July 9 at 7:00pm and Thursday July 10 @ 7:00pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez
A meeting at the crossroads – science, performance and the art of possibility BUY TICKETS
A panel discussion created by Delaram Kahrobaei and Heather Jeanne Denyer with artists Phil Soltanoff, Tony Speciale, Esther Neff, Nick Benacerraf, Gretchen Van Lente, Gus Schulenberg, and Scientists Joel Hamkins, Roman Kossak, and Davida Smyth.
Are theatre and the arts vital to life here and now? Does science creatively address the larger questions of our time? This panel will bring together distinguished scientists and theatre professionals to answer these questions. They will consider how both areas are intrinsically valuable to society and investigate the performative possibilities when the two fields overlap.
THE INTRINSIC VALUE PROJECT # 2 Friday July 11 at 7:00pm @ Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center
Rounding to ZERO
Artistic Director Paul Bargetto offers a scientific/archeological examination of intrinsic value, debt and the legacy of slavery.
THE INTRINSIC VALUE PROJECT # 3 Saturday July 19 and Sunday July 20 at 5:00pm @ Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center
Chasing Immortality: An Interactive Performance-Lecture exploring the Intrinsic Value of Science and Art
What do a biologist specializing in cracking the genetic code and a couple of theatre artists/ educators have in common? Is there a place where their intrinsic values overlap? What are intrinsic values anyway? Can science and art mutually support one another to address the great questions of the human condition and make sense of the universe? Or are they doomed to inhabit their own lonely cultural spheres? Actress Heather Benton , playwright Molly Rice and Scientist Maryam Zaringhalam take the plunge.
No Place To Hide
by Judith Malina & The Living Theatre with Judith Malina, Brad Burgess, Leah Bachar, Michaelangelo De Serio and the Living Theatre Company
Wednesday July 9th, 16th 8:30pm @ Tompkins Square Park Band Shell Circle, Thursday July 10th, 17th 8:30pm @ Washington Square Park-Garibaldi Statue, Friday July 11th, 18th 8:30pm @ Highline Park – 12th Street, Saturday July 12th, 19th 8:30pm, McCarren Park, North End Field FREE
The Living Theatre, recently evicted from their home on Clinton Street, will take it to the streets and parks of Lower Manhattan with No Place To Hide, a primer on the new surveillance state. At a time when surveillance is a household topic, the Living Theatre’s new production No Place To Hide asks about the reasons, methods, and history of hiding, and takes the audience on a journey through a secret perspective on New York. Challenging political, philosophical, and moral spheres of concealment, the play questions the boundaries between the private and the public.
Duchamp Duchamp! (My Dinner with DD)
by Group Art Tangent with Mona Hurri, Jules, and Madeleine Baker July 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20 at 6:30 pm @ site-specific venues – All tours start at Clemente Soto Vélez – 107 Suffolk Street
Renowned French art historians Mona Hurri, Jules, and Madeleine Baker will reveal (through interactive lecture, performance, and art archeology) the life and work of the little known, but widely influential artist, and theoretician Duchamp Duchamp. Less known than his sister Suzanne Duchamp and his three brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp, André Duchamp also known as “DD” then Duchamp Duchamp, was a butcher and delicatessen owner before turning to the field of art to challenge his famous brother Marcel. He developed a unique and widely dispersed polymorphic work, and developed a theory of art, which became the seeds for the Art Tangent movement, one of the precursors of the Constructivists. The curators of this program will organize “a series of events around his personality, in various places (delicatessens, dry cleaner’s, museums, art galleries, etc.) to share our knowledge of this man who has for too long remained in the shadows.”
CENTER FOR MAROONED CITIZENS
by panoplylab
Saturday July 12 1:00pm – 8:00pm @ The New Museum 235 Bowery – Sunday July 13 1:00pm – 8:00pm @ ABC No Rio 156 Rivington – Monday July 14 4:00pm to 8:00pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center 107 Suffolk St- Tuesday July 15 4:00pm to 8:00pm @ Abrons Arts Center 466 Grand St. FREE with suggested donation
CENTER FOR MAROONED CITIZENS is a site-specific public tarot and amateur psychiatry society that gathers information by reducing formal methodologies to performative, arcane interactions. A booth-like “center” will be placed at four different locations in Lower Manhattan across four days, open to the general public. Results will appear online as infographics and texts dealing with the problematics of information ecology, especially the division of living cultural and social systems into calculable components that can (supposedly) be used to plan for the future of the Lower East Side at large.
LONEtheater (teatroSOLO)
Matías Umpierrez (director/playwright/producer)
Friday July 11, Saturday July 12, Sunday July 13, Friday July 18, Saturday July 19, Sunday July 20. Five locations – 8 performances per day for one audience member at a time
BUY TICKETS AND MORE INFORMATION
Argentinean theater director, filmmaker and conceptual artist Matías Umpierrez brings LONEtheater (teatroSOLO) to New York City for its North American premiere. He will (re)create his site-specific, urban intervention throughout NYC in five different locations for one single audience member at a time. The performance will take place simultaneously on the gigantic stage of the city of New York and in the most intimate of individual encounters. In each of Umpierrez’s works boundaries are crossed within the individual mediums to create a dialectic between cinema, theater and urban interventions in a novel fashion. Both audience and critics alike have praised his projects for breaking established models and allowing spectators to enjoy new experiences.
LONEtheater (teatroSOLO) explores ancient theater forms of storytelling and the ways the solitary journey opens limitless possibilities for the city itself with its multitude of passing strangers who become unwitting performers and collaborators in the piece. The solitary audience member will encounter actors who will take him/her into intimate scenes as the line between performer and audience member will blur and become interchangeable; where the spectators will play themselves, as in dreams. LONEtheater (teatroSOLO) is a piece that seeks to emancipate the spectator from his own role and has been developed in various cities around the world including: Graus Pyrenees, Spain (March 2013); Buenos Aires, Argentina (May 2013); and São Paulo, Brazil (September 2014).
Created by Matías Umpierrez (director/playwright/producer), Ben Mandell (assistant director), Charlotte Arbogast (production stage manager), SELR (producer), Brenda Werth, Patricia Masera, Ben Mandell, Charlotte Arbogast (translators), made possible with the generous support of Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto República Argentina, and Colgate University, with performances by Gustavo Ranieri, Debbie Saivetz, April Sweeney and others
Destroyed Monster
The Institute for Aesthetic Modulation (IFAM) with Alicia Mikles (performer/co-director) Robert Scott Thompson (composer), Daniel Green (writer/designer/director)
Monday July 14 at 9:30pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center 107 Suffolk St – Back Lot BUY TICKETS
IFAM, The Institute For Aesthetic Modulation, a nine-time Mermaid Parade award winner, presents a performance installation loosely based on the Japanese Noh theater piece “Monster Nue”, with structures, costumes and body-puppets made almost exclusively of old automotive parts.
Broken City: L.E.S. by PopUP Theatrics
Created by Ana Margineanu (Director) Tamilla Woodard (Director) and Peca Stefan (Playwright) Wednesday July 16, Thursday July 17, Friday July 18, Saturday July 19 – three shows daily at 7:00pm, 8:00pm, 9:00pm
International site-specific pioneers PopUp Theatrics (Hotel Project, Long Distance Affair, INSIDE) present Broken City: The Lower East Side Prologue – an intimate theatrical exploration of the post immigrant, post working-class neighborhood of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This urban safari will guide nine audience members at a time on a people-watching expedition that blurs the line between theatrical event and real life. Come chose your own adventure (sort of) and navigate the broken story trails left behind by people among the places of the Lower East Side. Created and conceived by PopUP Theatrics with collaborator Peca Stefan, Broken City: L.E.S. is the pilot program of PopUp Theatrics’ series of intimate urban explorations dedicated to New York City. Wear comfortable shoes and bring an umbrella! Audiences will be notified of starting location prior to the performance after purchasing tickets online.
Seagullmachine by The Assembly
with Ben Beckley, Nick Benacerraf, Edward Bauer, Stephen Aubrey, Jess Chayes, Emily Louise Perkins and more…
Tuesday July 15, Wednesday July 16 @ 7:30pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center 107 Suffolk St – Flamboyan Theatre BUY TICKETS
The Assembly, creators of critically-acclaimed HOME/SICK (undergroundzero 2012), return with a preview of their new work-in-progress, Seagullmachine. A mashup of two seminal meditations on Hamlet–Anton Chekhov’s groundbreaking tragicomedy The Seagull and Heiner Müller’s postmodern classic Hamletmachine–this genre-smashing original work explores what it means to become trapped in your own illusions, and the radical transformations sometimes needed to shake you out of them. Drawing from how artists of previous generations defined and justified themselves, Seagullmachine explores what exactly today’s “emerging artists” are emerging into.
WALT WHITMAN OPERA
Howard Pflanzer (writer/adapter/director) Constance Cooper (composer), Beth Griffith (singer), Tomoko Sugawara (harp), George Tynan Crowley, (actor, as Walt Whitman)
Thursday July 17, Friday July 18, Saturday July 19 at 7:00pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center 107 Suffolk St – Abrazo Interno Gallery BUY TICKETS
Downtown poet and playwright Howard Pflanzer (On the Border, Cocaine Dreams) and composer Constance Cooper conjure Walt Whitman through his poems and the operas that inspired and influenced his poetry in WALT WHITMAN OPERA an evening of spoken word and music. Walt Whitman loved opera, and he often haunted the long vanished Park, Bowery, and Chatham Square theatres where he exalted in the operas of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. Part recitation, part sung, and part remix, this hybrid performance celebrates New York City’s most famous poet and the 19th Century opera superstars who inspired him.
PARADISE NOW? RE//MIX Living Theatre
by Komuna//Warszawa with generous support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw
Thursday July 17, Friday July 18, Saturday July 19 at 7:30 PM @ Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center 107 Suffolk St – Flamboyan Theatre FREE (with reservation)
The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now! is one of the most important performances in the history of political theatre. Independent Polish theatre pioneers Komuna//Warszawa bring re-mix theory to this iconic production to see what has changed in theatre and politics in the 45 years since its premiere. What is the truth in artistic engagement? Does participatory art make sense? How does art change the world?
How to Survive in a Hostile Temperate Environment
by Delphine Jonas
Saturday July 19 3:00 pm, Sunday July 20 2:00pm @ Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center 107 Suffolk St – Abrazo Interno Gallery FREE
French artist Delphine Jonas presents her conceptual performance installation How to Survive in A Hostile, Temperate Environment. In the piece, a group of volunteer performers are trained to “exercise their ability to stay alive” through improvised actions directed by a computer program. This immersive experimental project has the utopian aim to contribute to the “broadening of individual and collective consciousness”.
playgroundzero curated by Saviana Stanescu
with Saviana Stanescu (curator and host), Maxie Mettler (playwright), Claire Moodey (playwright), Lacy Post (director), and Dan Roeder (director)
Sunday July 20 at 1:00pm and 3:00pm @ ELLA Lounge 9 Avenue A BUY TICKETS
Playwright and scholar Saviana Stanescu returns to curate playgroundzero, a series of works-in-progress and script-in-hand performances of bold, provocative, thought-inducing new plays. This year’s theme is QUEER STORIES and the focus is on young writers. The readings are followed by talk-backs with the artists moderated by Stanescu. Life of a Gay Teen by Maxie Mettler is a fictionalized docudrama based on discussions with gay and transgender teens written by a playwright who is exploring hir own identity. femme pathos by Claire Moodey, directed by Lacy Post, is family psycho-drama investigating memory, mothers, and a rejection of hysteria. In a forest of hungry ghosts, the queer ingenue asks, “What is insanity without the patriarchal landscape?” These projections from a homunculus daughter drive a refracted anatomy lesson.
latenightzero – after hours lounge and dance party
Tuesday July 8, Wednesday July 9, Thursday July 10, Tuesday July 15, Wednesday July 16, Thursday July 17 at 10pm, Sunday July 20 @ ELLA Lounge, 9 Avenue A FREE
Kick up your hoofs and shake a leg at the undergroundzero festival post-show lounge at ELLA, our favorite down low club on Avenue A. After catching a show, come mingle with the artists, have a drink, or late night dinner, then dance all night to the musical stylings of the festival artists and guest DJ’s from around the world.
Radio Free POZNAN with Piotr Tkacz
Wednesday July 9, Thursday July 10 FREE
As part of our latenightzero program, Piotr Tkacz, a Poznan-based musician, DJ, journalist and promoter, will present a wide selection of polish contemporary experimental music in four parts. Two are dance-oriented and beat-driven, consisting of techno, house and rhythmic noises woven together for an unusual vision of club music. Two others are conceived as radio broadcasts and include experimental electronics, (post-)industrial, free improvisation, avant-garde compositions and abstract hip-hop.
undergroundzero 