STATE-THEATRE #1 LAGOS #2 TEHRAN #5 BEIRUT
Upcoming Events
March 11
SONG OF A SEER
Photo by Impermanence Films
Monday 11 | 3:30pm | Segal Theatre
Canada/France/Haiti | 2018 | 72 minutes | directed by Aïda Maigre-Touchet
French & Haitian Creole with English Subtitles
According to Haitian poet, art critic and actor Dominique Batraville, his Port-au-Prince
bedroom-office-library, while a only a matchbox, contains entire worlds. There he sings,
recites poems and alludes to the struggles and triumphs of his life as a writer and actor.
Photo by TT
Aïda Maigre-Touchet holds a Masters degree in Film, having studied in
Paris and Montreal. Her first film, Kiyukta, earned a special jury prize and
was theatrically released. Her second documentary, the short film Elegy
For Port-Au-Prince received international recognition. Song of a Seer is her
debut feature documentary.
March 11
DANN FON MON KÈR [FROM THE DEPTHS OF MY HEART]
Photo by Raphaël O’Byrne
Monday 11 | 4:45pm | Segal Theatre
Réunion | 2018 | 48 minutes | directed by Sophie Louÿs
produced by We Film (Jonathan Rubin, François Magal)
Creole & French with English subtitles
In Reunion Island, green casuarinas are swept by trade winds. We skim the black sandy
earth until we reach the center and come upon a stage, a “ron,” where poets succeed
one another to deliver their “fonnkers” and perpetuate the Creole language. Their
bodies vibrate, their feet stomp the basaltic soil to invoke the secret tale. The poem
thus becomes the ritual for an identity quest. Tonight is kabar night “Ôté fonnkézer!
Rant dann ron, detak la lang, demay lo kèr!” (Oh Poet! Walk on stage, free your tongue,
untangle your heart!) The texts of these poems have urged us to resist for the past forty
years. Could their panting souls be whispering the possibility of resilience to our ears?
Photo by Corine Telier
Sophie Louÿs is an author and documentary director from Reunion
Island. The practice of giving birth and filmmaking has led her to
various corners of the world (Mali, Madagascar, Easter Island, sub
Antarctic islands). Her current work and research question the
consequences of history and colonization on each of us. Dann fon
mon kèr is her latest film.
March 11
LES DISPARATES
Monday 11 | 5:45pm | Segal Theatre
France | 1999 | 23 minutes | directed by César Vayssié
Non-Verbal | 2019 digital restoration from 35mm negative film
In 1999, through the eye of César Vayssié’s camera, Les Disparates became not a
“video-dance”, a dance film or a musical comedy, but rather a short film, empirical and
intuitive. Cinema allows the integration of dance into reality, the use of its various forms
of expression as the peculiar codes of an ordinary story.
Based on Les Disparates, a performance by Dimitri Chamblas and Boris Charmatz.
Photo © César Vayssié
César Vayssié produces films and performances. His work
sidesteps any classification, between fiction and abstraction. In
1997 at Villa Medici in Rome he produced a full-length movie, Elvis
de Médicis. In 1999, he produced Les Disparates and has since then
regularly worked with Boris Charmatz (Bocal, Levée film). His film
UFE(UNFILMÉVÈNEMENT) received the Georges De Beauregard
National Award and the Audience Award at FID 27th International
Film Festival Marseille 2016. The work of César Vayssié has
been shown at MOMI and MoMA New York, Tate Modern London,
Nanterre-Amandiers, Centre Pompidou Paris and many places
dedicated to visual art and cinema. His last film DON’T WORK has
just received the FIPRESCI PRIZE, the International Association of
Film Critics, at Viennale 18.
March 11
THE CONGO TRIBUNAL
Photo courtesy of Fruitmarket / Langfilm
Monday 11 | 6:15pm | Segal Theatre
Switzerland | 2017 | 100 minutes | directed by Milo Rau
Various Languages with English Subtitles
The war in Congo has caused more than six million deaths over the last twenty years.
The population is suffering, but the offenders stay with impunity. Many people see
this conflict as one of globalisation’s crucial econimic distribution battles because the
country has major deposits of many high-tech raw materials. Milo Rau succeeds in
gathering victims, perpetrators, observes and analysts of the conflict for a unique civil
tribunal in eastern Congo. The documentary film brings these spectacular court trials to
life on the big screen and creates an unvarnished portrait of the largest and bloodiest
economic wars in human history.
Photo by Thomas Mueller
Milo Rau is one of Switzerland’s most acclaimed theater directors.
In 2007, he founded the theatre and film production company
international institute of Political murder (IIPM). He is known for his
documentary films The Last Days of the Ceausescus (2010) and The
Moscow trials (2014). Rau works as a journalist, author and lecturer.
The Congo Tribunal is his third feature length documentary.
March 25
Unofficial Collaborators: Recovering Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. With Polly Thistlethwaite and Liz Snyder
Photo by Mara Valderrama
Monday, March 25
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Lecture, Archive + Performance
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
Polly Thistlethwaite plunges into the archive with her partner Liz Snyder to explore true story representations of Berlin’s queer heroine, raconteur, and museum curator, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. This lecture-performance invites audiences to speculate about the ephemerality and vulnerability of a queer archive, and the consequences of faking one. It is marked by uncertainty, overwhelm, and conflicting curiosities that serious researchers encounter.
The work surveils Doug Wright’s 2004 prize winning play I Am My Own Wife, a thickly documented, staged portrait of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. It engages narratives introduced by Mahlsdorf’s (auto)biography Ich bin meine eigne Frau (written with historian Peter Süß) and the biographical film I Am My Own Woman (English trans.) by Rosa von Praunheim, both produced in 1992.
This investigation is incomplete, and it invites evidence to emerge. It exposes relevant, fabricated, and tangential documentation displayed using vintage and contemporary technologies.
Photo credit Andrew Snyder
Polly Thistlethwaite is Professor and Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY, in New York City. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, while working in academic libraries, Polly also worked with the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the AIDS activist group ACT UP. Liz Snyder is a musician and performer who teaches elementary school music in Brooklyn, New York.
April 8
Fritz Kater’s Heiner 1-4 (Berliner Ensemble) with Brigitte Maria Mayer and Anna Müller. A Celebration of Heiner Müller’s 90th Birthday
Monday, April 8
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Reading + Panel
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
Join us in celebrating in Heiner Müller’s 90th birthday with a reading of Heiner 1-4, by German playwright Fritz Kater. Kater arranged Müller Material on what echoes in play: the love story between the late Heiner Müller and his wife Brigitte Maria Mayer, using interview excerpts on art, theatre, and society from the post-revolutionary years, as well as “a play in the play with a monologue about life, the end and all the rest.”
Photo by Jack Zipes
Heiner Müller (9 January 1929 – 30 December 1995) was a German (formerly East German) dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His enigmatic, fragmentary pieces are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre. He is considered by many to be the most significant German writer for the theatre since Bertolt Brecht.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Brigitte Maria Mayer, born 1965 in Regensburg, is a German photographer, filmmaker, and producer. Her work engages with mythological and historic material and re-contextualizes aspects of modernity, religion, trauma and sexual identities. Mayer works and lives in Berlin.
Photo by Matthias David
Anna Müller completed Cultural Studies in Frankfurt (Oder), worked at a photo agency and is the co-founder of the small independent Berlin Publishing House Herzstückverlag (Heart Piece Publishing).
Photo courtesy of the artist
Jonathan Kalb has taught at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center since the early 1990s. He is the Resident Dramaturg of Theatre for a New Audience and the creator and moderator of the public event series TheaterMatters: An Artists and Critics Review Panel at The Invisible Dog Art Center. He served for six years as Chair of Hunter’s Theatre Department, founded HotReview.org [hotreview.org] (The Hunter On-Line Theater Review) and edited it for 13 years, and has twice received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism as well as the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. He has been a regular critic for The New York Times, The Village Voice and New York Press. He currently writes about theater on his TheaterMatters blog, which may be found at www.jonathankalb.com [jonathankalb.com]
Photo courtesy of the artist
Bonnie Marranca is founding publisher and editor of the Obie-Award winning PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. A recent recipient of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, she has written or edited eighteen books. She is the author Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, and editor of several drama, interview and essay collections, including Conversations with Meredith Monk, New Europe: plays from the continent, Interculturalism and Performance, and Plays for the End of the Century. Her essays have been translated into twenty languages. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar, Bonnie Marranca is Professor of Theatre at The New School for Liberal Arts/Eugene Lang College.
German stage director Armin Petras is the artistic director of Staatsschauspiel Stuttgart. He studied stage direction at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin from 1985 to 1987. In 1987, he co-founded the independent theatre company Medea Ost and staged Heiner Müller’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee 1-3 at Nordhausen Theatre. In 1988, he emigrated to the West Germany and started working as assistant director at Theater am Turm in Frankfurt and Münchner Kammerspiele. Petras is the most important director of plays written by playwright Fritz Kater, his Alter Ego. Petras staged Fritz Kater‘s Zeit zu lieben zeit zu sterben, a play for which the playwright received the Drama Award of Mülheim and was elected “Dramatist of the year“ in an annual survey carried out by the theatre journal “Theater Heute”.
Co-curated with Antje Oegel, Berlin.
April 15
2019 DTSA Booth Award: Honoring Ishmael Houston-Jones
Monday, April 15
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Award Ceremony
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
Photo by Eric McNatt
Ishmael Houston-Jones: choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. He and Fred Holland shared a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. He curated Platform 2012: Parallels and Platform 2016: Lost & Found, both at Danspace Project. He has received a 2016 Herb Alpert, a 2015 Doris Duke Impact and a 2013 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artists Awards. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd.
Houston-Jones’s performance works and curatorial projects attend to the urgent materiality of the sexed, raced, desiring body on stage. As an educator, Houston-Jones has passed down improvisational techniques and practices that are both artistically experimental and that helped maintain and perpetuate experimental dance during periods of embodied and economic crisis. Through the 2009 re-staging of THEM and his curatorial and choreographic work on the Danspace Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Houston-Jones has ensured that a new generation of dance artists inherit the kinesthetic legacy of the early AIDS epidemic’s impact on the New York dance community. He has simultaneously nurtured the development of new work by young dance artists, especially those who are queer and/or of color. In recognition of his outstanding oeuvre as a performer and choreographer, as well as his commitment to the legacy and continuation of experimental performance practices through his curatorial and pedagogical practices, the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association of the CUNY Graduate Center is proud to present Ishmael Houston-Jones with the 2019 Booth Award.
Organized by Ashley Marinaccio and Janet Werther
April 27
Coffeehouse Chronicle: Witkacy
illus. Marta Przybył
Saturday, April 27
LaMaMa Ellen Stewart Theatre & The Downstairs
66 East 4th Street (btw. Bowery & 2nd Ave)
3:00pm Readings + Panel
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
Coffeehouse Chronicle #153 will focus on the work of turn-of-the-century Polish avant-garde playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885 –1939), known as “Witkacy,” who may well have been Europe’s most radical novelist, dramatist, painter, and philosopher in an era when artists competed fiercely to break away from all that had come before. Writing in Polish yet banned in Communist Poland, Witkacy may not have gained the international attention of the Surrealists, Dadaists, or other Absurdists, but his work remains a striking example of modernism.
Witkacy wrote over 30 plays between 1918 and his suicide in 1939. Despite his productivity, he was practically ignored in his time and left behind no direct disciples, yet mysteriously, has gone on to stir up more excitement among young playwrights than practically any other 20th-century writer, Eugene O’Neill notwithstanding. His influence is perhaps amplified by the enthusiasm of European scholars, but his status as progenitor of the Avant Garde is undeniable. His plays were rediscovered in the 1950s and ‘60s, when they were hailed as precursors of the European theatrical movement known as the Theater of the Absurd. Witkiewicz is known for his outrageously extravagant scenes influenced by all kinds of occultisms and philosophical speculations.
This edition of Coffeehouse Chronicles will include a panel discussion about Witkacy with invited guests: Jadwiga Kosicka-Gerould (writer and translator); Krystyna Lipinska-Illakowicz (Lecturer at Yale University’s Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures); Daniel Pinchbeck (writer); Natalia Korczakowska (theater director and Artistic Director of Warsaw’s Studio Theater); and Eri Nox (playwright).
The panel will be moderated by the Director of CUNY’s Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker.
This edition will also include four short stage readings directed by Zenon Kruszelnicki (Gyubal Wahazar), Daniel Irizarry (The Madman and the Nun), Natalia Korczakowska (Narcotics: Peyote), Eri Nox (They).
The afternoon also celebrates GC CUNY’s Segal Theatre Center’s most ambitious publishing project to date: four volumes of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Collected Plays. The anthology represents the very first complete edition of his 23 extant plays in English translation, including The Madman and the Nun, The Crazy Locomotive, The Water Hen, The Shoemaker, They, The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish, The Beelzebub Sonata, and others. Thanks to this major event, Witkacy’s groundbreaking work is finally available to a global audience. The late CUNY theatre scholar Daniel Gerould (1928-2012) provided lively and well-researched translations paired with contextual introductions. The work is edited by Jadwiga Kosicka-Gerould (Gerould’s wife) and Frank Hentschker of the Segal Center. Graphic design and typography are by Grzegorz Laszuk & Anna Hegman; Biuro Warsaw.
La Mama Theater’s Coffeehouse Chronicles is an educational performance series exploring the history and development of Off-Off Broadway from its inception within the Village “Coffeehouse Theatres” of the 1960s through today. Part artist portrait, part creative event, part history lesson, part community forum, its mission is to continue the work of its founder Ellen Stewart by providing a home for personal and intimate engagement with art.
April 29
Harry Newman’s Dry Time
Monday, April 29
Segal Theatre
4:00pm Reading | 6:30pm Panel
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
Heat. The sun bearing down. People in line for food, for water at temporary camps. Elsewhere, a party, as if nothing’s changed in the world. A novelist is being celebrated. Set against a background of environmental collapse and economic crisis in the Midwestern US, Dry Time explores the personal and social consequences of intensifying climate change in an increasingly authoritarian society. Conceived as a narrative symphony, each scene is two scenes that overlap and play out simultaneously, revealing the contrasts and connections of those most affected by environmental events (mainly in patrolled encampments) and those largely untouched by events in their private homes. What happens when they come together?
Written in the early 1990s, Dry Time is most likely the first global warming related play. Considered too distant, abstract, and forbidding at the time, it now approaches realism. Informed by the original UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and other studies, Dry Time builds on the impacts of climate catastrophe already apparent and takes them to an unflinching conclusion.
Photo by Ewa Orzech
Harry Newman’s plays include The Occupation, Dry Time, The Dark, and a translation of Patrick Süskind’s The Double Bass, and have been presented at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, The Public Theater, BACA/Downtown, the Guggenheim Works & Process series, and other theaters around the U.S. as well as, most recently, in Germany. Widely published as a poet, his work has appeared in Ecotone, Rattle, Asheville Poetry Review, and The New Guard, among many other journals. In 2016, a collection of his political poetry, Led from a Distance, was published by Louisiana Literature Press. Before working in theater, Harry studied Chemistry and Mathematics at MIT. More information is available at www.harrynewman.com.
Nathan John Steiger is an Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. His work engages the fundamental problem of understanding the historical variability of the climate system and its relevance to human societies. In particular, he conducts research on the physical mechanisms of severe droughts and other climate extremes. Nathan majored in physics as an undergraduate, doing thesis work in theoretical quantum mechanics. In graduate school at the University of Washington he developed new methods for reconstructing past climate using data assimilation, a technique that fuses climate models with paleoclimate proxy data. He received his PhD in Atmospheric Sciences in late 2015 and came to Columbia University as a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow.
Benjamin Cook is a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York City. His research is focused on improving our understanding of drought dynamics in the paleoclimate record, during the historical period, and in response to anthropogenic climate change.
May 6
The Segal Center & PEN World Voices present WORLD VOICES INTERNATIONAL PLAY FESTIVAL
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center presents World Voices: International Play Festival 2019. As part of the 2019 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, the Segal Center presents play readings with some of the most significant theatre artists from Germany, all connected to the Gorki Theater in Berlin—a safe haven for immigrant, refugee and international theatre artists in Europe.
The International Play Festival generates a conversation on art, politics, dreams, war, and philosophy, meant to give American audiences a rich awareness of the greater global dialogue.
All readings will be followed by a discussion with the playwright. TBC.
2019 Participants:
Nora Abdel-Maksoud, Sibylle Berg, Necati Öziri, Falk Richter, Yael Ronen, and Sivan Ben-Yishai Christopher-Fares Köhler (Artistic Consultant, Gorki) and Dmitrij Schaad.
May 6, 7, 8, 9 PEN World Voices: International Play Festival
May 6 | 6:30pm with leaders of the Gorki Theater, Berlin: Christopher-Fares Köhler, Dmitrij Schaad and Sivan Ben-Yishai
May 7 | 4pm + 6:30pm Sivan Ben-Yishai: Daddy Loves You + Yael Ronen: A Walk on The Dark Side
May 8 | 4pm + 6:30pm Nora Abdel-Maksoud: The Making Of + Falk Richter: Small Town Boy
May 9 | 4pm + 6:30pm Necati Öziri: Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’ + Sibylle Berg: The So-Called Outside Means Nothing to Me
The PEN World Voices: International Play Festival 2019 has been made possible by the support of Susan and Jack Rudin(†), The Hearst Foundation, and Marvin Carlson, Sidney E. Cohn Chair, The Graduate Center CUNY. The PEN World Voices: International Play Festival was conceived, created, and curated by Frank Hentschker since 2007 in collaboration with PEN World Voices Festival.
The 2019 Festival is produced by Mike LoCicero, in collaboration with Frank Hentschker.
Founded by Michael Roberts, Esther Allen, and Salman Rushdie in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, PEN World Voices is the only international literary festival in the world with a human rights focus. It attracts the world’s best-known writers and has garnered broad global acclaim as one of the world’s premier literary events. Since its founding, PEN World Voices has presented more than 1,500 writers and artists from 118 countries, speaking 56 languages. www.penworldvoices.org
Chip Rolley, Director, World Voices Festival, PEN America
Kim Chan, General Manager
May 6
PEN World Voices: International Play Festival The Gorki Theater, Berlin Christopher-Fares Köhler
Monday, May 6
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Panel
Free & open to public. First come, first served
Join Frank Hentschker in conversation with the Gorki Theater’s Christopher-Fares Köhler (Artistic Consultant).
The Gorki Theater focuses on conflicts of a diverse society with attention to themes like migration, queerness, refuge, exile, and feminism. They ask: “What is the place of theatre in a society in transition? What work should theatre artists, faced with a permanent crisis in economy and politics, produce to reflect the severe social and cultural conflicts in our societies on the stage?” Join us to learn more about the unique and groundbreaking vision of one of the important theatres of the City of Berlin.
photo by André Wunstorf
Christopher-Fares Köhler, born in 1987, he was Falk Richter’s assistant dramaturge for productions such as Small Town Boy at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin and to Rimini Protokoll at Theater Oberhausen. He worked for the dramaturgy department at the Münchner Kammerspiele, Theater der Welt Festival 2017 in Hamburg, for the Zürcher Theaterpektakel, the Theater an der Ruhr, the Boat People Project, the Volksbühne Berlin, Münchner Kammerspiele and others. Since May 2018 he has been a dramaturge of the Exil Ensemble at the Maxim Gorki Theater and artistic assistant to the co-director Jens Hillje.
Following panel discussion with Christopher-Fares Köhler, Sivan Ben-Yishai, and Dmitrij Schaad. Moderated by Frank Hentschker.
May 7
PEN World Voices: International Play Festival Yael Ronen and Sivan Ben-Yishai
Tuesday, May 7
Segal Theatre
4:00pm + 6:30pm Readings + Panels
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served
4:00pm Daddy Loves You
Written by Sivan Ben-Yishai
Directed by: Tina Satter
A high speed train approaches an unknown destination through the dark night under the earth. Nine older women are sitting neatly in a row on a bench on the train. The further the train speeds along, the more painful the memories become. The passengers recount the wars they survived, motherhood, sexual abuse and more.
6:30pm A Walk On The Dark Side
Written by Yael Ronen.
Translated by Anna Galt
Directed by Sarah Hughes
When astrophysicist, Immanuel, is awarded a significant prize, his wife, Mania, invites his brother for a trip. Mathias, also an astrophysicist and a rival, brings his girlfriend Magda along, who just attempted suicide. Dark matter against dark energy, structural harmony against a chaos that explodes the system.
Photo by Esra Rotthoff
Yael Ronen, in-house Gorki director, was born in Jerusalem in 1976. She comes from a theatre family and is internationally considered as one of the most exciting theatre makers of her generation. The greatest tool at her disposal is black humor in the framework of historical conflicts. Along with the Austrian Nestroy Theatre Prize and numerous other awards, she received the 2014 Europe Prize for Theatrical Realities.
Photo by Merav Maroody
Sivan Ben-Yishai studied theatre direction and dramatic writing in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem before joining the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio and Centre for Improvisation in Tel Aviv. For the past five years, Ben-Yishai has been based in Berlin, where she works as an author, director, and leader of workshops for dance and performance students. In 2013, Ben-Yishai won the Assitej competition in the category Best Show, Best Play, and Best Direction of the Year in Israel.
Readings followed by a conversation with Sivan Ben-Yishai.
May 8
PEN World Voices: International Play Festival Nora Abdel-Maksoud and Falk Richter
Wednesday, May 8
Segal Theatre
4:00pm + 6:30 Reading + Panels
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served
4:00pm The Making Of
Written by Nora Abdel-Maksoud
Translated by Corinne Hundleby (Panthea)
Directed by Sibyl Kempson
A film director wants to put together a superhero remake, made in Germany. But some crew members aren’t quite ready for the pressure of their roles. A wicked satire about the film business and theatrical ideals, a desperate hosanna to the paradox of acting and an optimistic swan song for roles that no one can really fulfill.
6:30pm Small Town Boy
Written by Falk Richter
Translated by David Tushingham
Directed by Nic Benacerraf
What happens when young men leave the patriarchy behind? Is it possible to be a different kind of man? A different kind of woman? How will we define family, nation and belonging in the future? “You leave in the morning with everything you own… Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away” (Bronski Beat)
Readings followed by a conversation with the playwright.
Photo by Jan Krattiger
Nora Abdel-Maksoud was born in Munich in 1983 and began to study acting in 2005 at the Konrad Wolf Academy of Film and Television in Potsdam. She has worked extensively as an actor for stage and screen, and received the 2017 Kurt Hübner Director’s Award for The Making of. Also in 2017, she was named “Newcomer Director of the Year” by the German theater magazine TheaterHeute.
Photo by Esra Rotthoff
Falk Richter was born in 1969, in Hamburg, where he later studied philosophy and theatre direction. He is among the most important German playwrights and theatre directors of his generation. Since 1994, he has worked at renowned theatres across Europe, staging operas, his own works, and classic plays. Next to the Friedrich-Luft Prize, numerous awards, and a teaching position at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, Richter has been named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
Readings followed by a conversation with Nora Abdel-Maksoud.
May 9
PEN World Voices: International Play Festival Necati Öziri and Sibylle Berg
Thursday, May 9
Segal Theatre
4:00pm + 6:30pm Readings + Panels
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served
4:00pm Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’
Written by Necati Öziri
Translated by Anna Galt
Directed by Ashley Tata
There are moments in which everything comes together. Arda Yilmaz’s
18th birthday, for example, where she searches for the fragments of a
language that recalls memories of childhood in Almanya and a German-
Turkish family history amidst the turmoil of “guest” work and the Turkish
putsch. Above else, Arda is searching for an unknown father. A fade-out
on the last track of the record of your life.
6:30pm And Now, The World!
Written by Sibylle Berg
Translated by Ben Knight
Directed by Andy Goldberg
Evening. A young woman alone in her apartment. Friends Skype her and
send chats, text messages arrive, her mother calls. A few floors below, in
the basement: a man is tied and gagged. Young women’s fears, desires,
and obsessions with success are expressed in their media-saturated lives
–but how do they actually want to live their lives?
Photo provided by artist
Sibylle Berg was born in Weimar and now lives in Zurich. Her columns, novels, and plays are merciless in their narrations of misfortunes and the people that fall into them. She has been honored with multiple awards, including the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize and the Kassel Literary Prize.
Photo by Esra Rotthoff
Necati Öziri, born in 1988, studied philosophy, German studies, and literature in Bochum, Istanbul, Olsztyn and Berlin. Öziri worked as a dramaturg at Gorki Theater and writes short stories and theatre plays. In the theatrical season of 2014-2015, he was the artistic director of Gorki’s StudioЯ. Öziri is currently dramaturg at the Berliner Festspiele, where he directs the International Forum of the Theatertreffen.
photo courtesy of the artist
Dmitrij Schaad was an ensemble member at the Bochum Theatre from 2010-13. In 2011 he was awarded the Bochum Theater Prize and was honoured at the NRW Theatretreffen festival as best young actor. Since the 2013/2014 season Dimitrij Schaad has been a member of the Gorki Theatre’s ensemble. In 2014, the critics in the annual survey from the Theater heute journal selected him as the young actor of the year. At the Gorki he performs in, among others, Der Russe Ist Einer Der Birken Liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees), Das Kohlhaas-Prinzip (The Kohlhaas Principle), The Situation and Denial, all directed by Yael Ronen. He also appears in the recent Gorki production Get Deutsch Or Die Tryin’ by Necati Öziri, directed by Sebastian Nübling. In 2016 he won a student Oscar for the film Invention of Trust, directed by his brother Alex Schaad.
May 13
Screening Performance, Performing Screens: New Projections in Theatre and Media
Photo provided by DTSA
Monday, Tuesday May 13, 14
Segal Theatre
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
May 13 | 4:30pm Panel + Performance | Segal Theatre
May 14 | All Day Panels + Performances | Segal Theatre
The Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association 2019 Conference
Opening Remarks by Edward Miller & Keynote by Sarah Bay-Cheng
In the streets, in our homes, in our hands; in public and private; in work, leisure, and social relations; ubiquitous and invisible, tangible or porous, screens are constructing a new reality. Artistic practices and critical theories are rapidly evolving to address this change of paradigm in communication, perception, and being. Gathering scholars and artists from multiple disciplines around the trope of the screen with its multiple resonances, Screening Performance, Performing Screens will reflect on the many collisions of theatre, performance, film, and other audiovisual media in scholarly, artistic, pedagogical, or performance-as-research works that engage with and challenge meanings of the word “screen,” as both noun and verb. How can historical conceptualizations of screens help us broaden the concept beyond the context of new media and interactive technologies? How has engagement with and on screens expanded or reshaped production and distribution of art and knowledge? In what ways have reception(s), spectatorship(s), and the discourses of marginalization been molded by screens?
Organized by Kyueun Kim, Curtis Russell, Christine Snyder, and Mara Valderrama.
May 16
Japanese Contemporary Theatre Magazine Launch and Panel Discussion
The Cast of KEREN. Photo by Shin Kurokawa
Thursday, May 16
Segal Theatre
4:00pm Panel
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served
American Theatre Magazine’s latest special edition focuses on the Japanese theatre scene today. Join guest editor/curator, Cindy Sibilsky and an esteemed array of panelists including Yoko Shioya (Japan Society), Kumiko Yoshii (Gorgeous Entertainment), Professor Kyoko Iwaki (Waseda University) and others, moderated & hosted by Frank Hentschker. The lively discussion (with photos and video) will explore current trends in Japanese contemporary theatre in Japan and abroad, including: Anime & Manga onstage, non-human entities such as robots and ghosts post-Fukushima, upcoming events, future predictions and more.
Link to American Theatre Magazine Special Edition on Japanese Theatre: https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/theatre-in-japan/
May 16
Pathetic: Staging Women’s Desire with Julia Jarcho and Minor Theater
Minor Theatre
Photo by Minor Theatre
Thursday, May 16
Segal Theatre
6:30pm Reading + Panel
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
“I felt my whole body, and it was burning.”
This June, downtown NYC company Minor Theater presents Pathetic, a new take on Racine’s classic Phèdre at Abrons Arts Center. Racine’s queen destroys everything with her monstrous lust; in Pathetic, neoclassical hexameter meets contemporary teen drama as the heroine becomes a bored mom with an ax to grind. In anticipation of the premiere, OBIE-winning playwright/director Julia Jarcho invites fellow artists to consider what can happen when women’s desire gets a voice onstage. What new forms become possible when women appropriate the conjunction of sex and violence, which has traditionally been directed against us? How do we forge a lustful stage poetics of our own? And come to think of it, who is this “we”? The evening will feature readings from Jarcho’s plays, including Pathetic and Grimly Handsome (2013), and presentations by Kate Benson, Kristine Haruna Lee and Okwui Okpokwasili. Moderated by Frank Hentschker.
Photo by Jennifer Seastone
Julia Jarcho is a playwright and director from New York City with the company Minor Theater. She has won an OBIE for Best New American Play (Grimly Handsome), a Doris Duke Impact Award, and a Mark O’Donnell Award, and has been a MacDowell Fellow and an LCT New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center. Her book Minor Theater: Three Plays is available from 53rd State Press and her first critical book, Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama, is published by Cambridge University Press. She teaches at NYU.
Kate Benson is a writer and performer living in Brooklyn. Her plays include [Porto] (Bushwick Starr and WP Theater), A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes(New Georges and WP Theater), Super Magic Wild Forest, Where Are We Going? and Desert (For Now). Performances include Fondly, Collette Richland (NYTW), Good Person of Szechuan(LaMama and the Public), Nomads (Incubator), I Will Never Love Again (Bushwick Starr), and Variations on the Main (Jack). Writerly affiliations include the Working Farm at Space on Ryder Farm, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission, and the New Goerges Jam. She has an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College.
Kristine Haruna Lee is a Brooklyn-based theater maker whose work navigates non-linear playwriting, auto-theoretical performance text, and promoting arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through ethical and process-based collaborations. Her works include Suicide Forest (Bushwick Starr), plural (love) (Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab), Memory Retrograde (The Public’s Under The Radar Festival), Sugar Shack (La MaMa Club) and War Lesbian (Dixon Place). Lee is a recipient of the Map Fund Grant, Lotos Foundation Prize for Directing, and the New Dramatist Van Lier Fellowship. Her play Suicide Forest is published by 53rd State Press. She teaches playwriting and performance at NYU. harunalee.com
Ásta Bennie Hostetter (member, minor theater) Costume designs for: The Terrifying (Abrons Arts Center), Nomads (Incubator Arts Project), Grimly Handsome (Incubator Arts Project). Recently in NYC: Mrs. Murrays Menagerie (Mad Ones), Usual Girls (Roundabout Underground), Dance Nation (Playwrights Horizon), Bobbie Clearly (Roundabout Underground), The Lucky Ones (Ars Nova). Miles for Mary (Playwrights Horizon), [Porto] (WP Theater), Wolves (Lincoln Center). Other production design includes Reread Another (Target Margin).
Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performance maker. Her work includes two Bessie Award winning productions: Pent-Up: a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic. She was the 2015-17 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts’ Resident Commissioned Artist which culminated with the work, Poor People’s TV Room. Okpokwasili’s latest work was Adaku’s Revolt a shared commission with FIAF and Abron’s Art Center for the 2019 TILT Festival. She frequently collaborates with directors Peter Born and Ralph Lemon. Commissions, Residencies and awards: 10th Annual Berlin Biennale Commission, 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award in Contemporary Dance, 2018 USA Artist Fellow, 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, MANCC Choreographic Fellowship (2012, 2016); NYFA Fellowship in Choreography (2013); LMCC’s Extended Life Program (2013-2016); The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Artist Grant in Dance (2014), Wesleyan ICPP Artist in Residency. Her work has been supported by Creative Capital, the MAP Fund and NEFA. Okpokwasili is a 2018 Hodder Fellow in Dance at Princeton University and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.
Jennifer Seastone has performed with Julia and minor theater on many projects. She has also performed for The Wooster Group, Daniel Fish, Lucy Thurber, Alec Duffy, Thomas Bradshaw, Julia MayJonas and many others. She is also a visual artist and has shown her work in New Zealand and in New York. www.JenniferSeastone.com
Ben Williams is an actor, sound designer, and director. He is a founding member of minor theater with Julia Jarcho. Other frequent collaborators include Elevator Repair Service, Christina Masciotti, Lily Whitsitt, Suzanne Bocanegra, Kate Benson, Sibyl Kempson, Julie Atlas Muz, The Wooster Group, and NYC Players. His original show Mind on Heaven continues to tour. Upcoming: Studio Créole at the Manchester International Festival. Awards for sound design: Obie, Lortel, LADCC. benwilliamsdotcom.com
May 20
New Theatre from Spain with Luz Arcas
Luz Arcas in La Phármaco’s Una gran emoción política 30 © Virginia Rota
Monday, May 20
Segal Theatre
4:00pm Readings / 6:30pm Panel + Performance
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served
New Theatre from Spain presents the works of Spanish contemporary artists
who defy the boundaries between disciplines, including Angélica Liddell, Sara Molina, Marc Caellas, and companies La Tristura, La Phármaco, and Vértebro. Curated by Mara Valderrama, Ana Sánchez Acevedo, Daniel Valtueña, and Alexandra Viteri Arturo.
Positioned at the avant-garde of contemporary stage practices, these artists combine elements from theatre, dance, performance art, and visual arts, blurring the limits of playwriting and performing, and challenging the status of the text as the center of the theatrical experience. The event will feature reading-installations of works curated and newly translated by doctoral students of the Theatre and Performance Department and the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY. The evening will conclude with a performance by dancer and choreographer Luz Arcas.
Luz Arcas is a dancer and choreographer. Since 2009, she is founder and
director of the dance company La Phármaco with Abraham Gragera. She has received the Critic’s Eye Prize for Dance, the Best Female Dancer Award at the Lorca Awards, and she was a finalist for Best Female Dancer at the Max
Awards. Her work explores ideas of ceremony, where all theatrical languages
combine into a discourse led by dance.
Past Events:
- Mar 6
- Mar 6
- Mar 8
- Mar 25
- Apr 8
- Apr 15
- Apr 27
- Apr 29
- May 6
- May 6
- May 7
- May 8
- May 9
- May 13
- May 16
- May 16
- May 20
March 11
DIE NIBELUNGEN
Photo by Nature Theater of
Oklahoma
Monday 11 | 11:30am | Segal Theatre
US | 2016 | 155 minutes | directed by Nature Theater of Oklahoma
English
In 2014 Nature Theater of Oklahoma partnered with Matchbox Festival to make a
new project in the Rhine-Neckar region of Germany. Over the course of the next
year and a half directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska visited ten small local towns,
and wrote their own version of the Nibelungen saga (a story which originates in this
region) and cast it from an acting pool of its citizens and locals. In fall of 2015, they
set off with a movie camera and a core cast of 8 on bicycle to various locations
where they staged and shot a film over the course of 3 weeks, working with local
artists, clubs, church groups, choirs, fire departments, historical re-enactors, office
workers, dogs, and farm animals. Their script called for a dragon, a Viking ship, a
storm at sea, a treasure, a magic cloak which makes people disappear, a trained
German shepherd, a state funeral, a double wedding. They were not at all sure
what they would find. They were surprised every step of the way.
Photo by Ditz Fejer
Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an award-winning New York art and
performance enterprise under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly
Copper. With each new project, we attempt to set an impossible
challenge for ourselves, the audience, and our collaborators —
working from inside the codes and confines of established genres
and exploding them. No two projects are formally the same, but the
work is always full of humor, earnestness, rigor, and the audience
plays an essential role — whether as spectators or — just as often —
as participants in the work. Using readymade material, found space,
gifted properties, cosmic accident, extreme formal manipulation and
plain hard work — Nature Theater of Oklahoma makes art to affect
a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the
site of performance and into the world in which we live.