Thank you to Bobby McElver for his expert sound engineering; Jeff Larson, Andrew Dinwiddie, and Caleb Hammons who make CATCH happen; and to everyone at The Chocolate Factory for an amazing night.

Lizzie Simon of The Wall Street Journal also gave this great account of Jason Grote’s experience at CATCH 50.

Each week in Curtain Raisers, we invite a local theater artist to attend a show of his or her choosing and discuss the results. On Saturday, the experimental playwright Jason Grote opted to see “Catch 50,” an evening of performance at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. Mr. Grote wrote for the first season of NBC’s “Smash,” but is known in the theater community for his plays “1001″ and “Civilization (all you can eat).” He’s currently working on a musical adaptation of “1001,” as well as a commission for Seattle’s ACT Theatre about the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a commissioned adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time” for Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

It was an unlikely interaction between members of two of the theater community’s more prominent camps. Mr. Grote pointed out that the landscape of new stage work is to a large degree divided between the playwrights, whose productions begin with a director and follow a well-worn hierarchy to the stage, and devised-theater artists, who build shows collaboratively, often with multiple texts, often with movement and music, and always through means of experimentation. But there are some playwrights—like Erin Courtney, Mac Wellman, Anne Washburn and Mr. Grote—who travel between the camps, borrowing from the tools and fruits of experimentation to reinvent the well-made play.

This is what brought Mr. Grote to Queens to see “Catch 50,” a curated smorgasbord featuring some of the city’s finest choreographers, performance artists, and devised-theater makers.

On view were mostly excerpts and works-in-progress. “This would be the equivalent of playwrights having staged readings,” he said. “It’s not text-based, so you need something like this.”

“Catch 50″ was actually the 50th iteration of a performance series that began in 2003. On Saturday night there were five lineups—one for every hour from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., with each act finishing in under 10 minutes.

But the performances were rich. Among the acts in the 9 p.m. show that Mr. Grote attended was Andrew Schneider’s unnerving physical and technical tour de force exploring the maplessness of life.

“Obviously this person is a skilled actor and mover,” Mr. Grote said. The evening continued with separate works by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, co-artistic directors of the venerated downtown company Big Dance Theater.

Ms. Valk choreographed a dance for Mr. Lazar set to Bach, in which he moved around like the most casual of clowns—gesturing, hitting a pretend bat, laying on the floor enjoying a pretend cigarette.

“I can watch Paul Lazar forever,” said Mr. Grote. “I think he’s so appealing.”

Is he making fun of contemporary dance? “He is, in a gentle way. He’s making fun of himself first and foremost.”

It called to mind for Mr. Grote a certain movement vocabulary that has become a hallmark in New York-based devised work, a kind of dancing performed by nondancers that repurposes ordinary, everyday movement.

“It’s actually extraordinarily difficult,” he said. He had written some of it into “Civilization,” and seen it performed masterfully by the company Clubbed Thumb in New York, though less so in other parts of the country, where getting it right was “the biggest headache in the world.” Done badly, he said, looking like there was a stink in the room, it’s like “some variation of jazz dance.”

Ms. Parson choreographed a new solo for Tymberly Canale. Set in a mythical Austria, the piece was equal parts whimsical and ferocious, and Ms. Canale brought the show to an intensity it hadn’t to that point reached.

“There’s this way that actual, genuine, true beauty surprises you,” said Mr. Grote.

Across the evening, one could hear a tone of envy in Mr. Grote’s affection for devised theater. “One thing I love,” he said, “is that it isn’t conceived in a vacuum and shoehorned in. It was intended for the performer who performed it and in the space it was in.”

He admitted he feels more generosity for the work than he does for straight playwriting. “I tend to be extremely critical, like, how did they get this big production with this s— script? I can get lost in devised work more. There’s not that narcissism of small difference.”

But if he was being completely honest, he’d been a bit distracted during “Catch 50.”

“I spent half the time thinking: What can I write for Kate Valk now?” he said. “I was thinking about letting her do anything she wanted to any of my plays.”

]]> http://andrewjs.com/blog/archives/285/feed 0 http://andrewjs.com/blog/archives/260 http://andrewjs.com/blog/archives/260#comments Fri, 16 Mar 2012 21:10:24 +0000 andrew http://andrewjs.com/blog/?p=260 I’ve been playing percussion and singing backup vox with the new super-funky AVAN LAVA for the past year.  Here is our new music video for the addictively dancy track It’s Never Over off the new EP release, FLEX FANTASY.

Download It’s Never Over for FREE!

Official Music Video of “It’s Never Over” by AVAN LAVA
UPCOMING SHOW @ BOWERY BALLROOM NYC!!
THURSDAY, MARCH 22ND W/HOUSSE de RACKET!!!
BUY TICKETS @ http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0000482DB661C57B
Directed by Spencer Dennis
Written by AVAN LAVA & Vanessa Walters

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“The Creators Project is a global network dedicated to the celebration of creativity, culture and technology.  Each week we chat about the tools of the trade with one outstanding creative to find out exactly how they do what they do. The questions are always the same, the answers, not so much. This week: Andrew Schneider”

I was thrilled to be able to give this interview about my Solar Bikini with BBC’s Claire Bolderson yesterday afternoon.

Download audio file (BBCinterview.mp3)

Also available as a podcast here.

Slow news day it is then. You can read the archived notebooks from the k.log here.

photo: Robert Caplin for The New York Times

The distinctive shaftway connecting the two levels of the Chocolate Factory in Queens is the theatrical gift that keeps on giving. It’s only a matter of time until some enterprising artist eschews this Long Island City theater’s larger stages and makes an entire show in the confines of that brick-lined space.

Last Friday night, Andrew Schneider climbed, slid and threw himself out of (and sometimes down) the passageway during his new evening-length solo, “Wow + Flutter.” He was all over the place — literally and metaphorically — using a harness, interactive projections and custom-built, wearable electronics. Gadgets, almost nonstop babble on themes both esoteric and mundane, numerous pop-culture images and even a brief Michael Jackson dance created a sort of technological id, governed by, to take Mr. Schneider’s words slightly out of context, his “internal head speed.”

The audience was pressed against this id, since Mr. Schneider chose to place the stage area lengthwise in the narrow, white rectangular room. In this he evoked another technologically minded artist, John Jesurun, who last fall at the Chocolate Factory used the same spatial configuration and different multimedia smoke and mirrors to create a hauntingly claustrophobic experience.

Mr. Jesurun, of course, has been at this game for decades. By comparison, Mr. Schneider, who does multimedia and video work with both the Wooster Group and Fischerspooner, is just getting going. He is an engaging performer, but “Wow + Flutter,” which suffered from a self-consciously labored script, didn’t quite live up to the promise of an immersive, altered experience.

Still, there were nice touches throughout. Christine Shallenberg’s lighting included assaultive bursts, cool blues that flooded the space as if it were under water, and sleek, white tubing affixed to columns and facing Mr. Schneider. Grainy black-and-white video periodically gave glimpses of activity in the downstairs space, including ghostly dances. Kate Valk’s lips, via one of two video monitors hanging from the ceiling, had a sultry, sometimes creepy cameo as “This Girl,” the remote object of Mr. Schneider’s distracted, self-involved affection.

Mr. Schneider used scientific riffs, Omar Zubair’s live sound effects and a barrage of spliced video (often controlled by his muscular gestures, like sharp air punches done while wearing electronic-enhanced gloves) to hold forth on time, space and experience after death. Yet he kept returning to a quieter meditation on masculinity and the desperate need for attention. Beneath all the wow and flutter of this boy and his toys is the naked need to please.

photo: Paula Court

Grab tickets for the LA run here.

TWG will bring NA to NYC in March and April for a run at the newly renovated Jerome Robbin’s Theatre inside the Baryshnikov Art’s Center.  Buy those Tickets here.

Do not miss this!

When everything, all information is all accessible, and all at the same time and all simultaneously; order, ordinance does not matter. Linear time as we know it is indifferent. Things poke holes in the present moment from other places. The whole of everything is now in one frame. Everything at once. All the time. Flattened out. With a meat tenderizer.

Click here to watch an early excerpt from WOW AND FLUTTER.

The Chocolate Factory is awesome.COME!  

To purchase lots of tickets, (or just one), click here.