PS21 Announces Winter Programming and Welcomes Four New Board Members (October 13, 2021)

PS21 Announces Winter Residencies and Performances and Welcomes Four New Board Members

For more info:
www.ps21chatham.org
518-392-6121
info@ps21chatham.org

PS21’s eclectic programming continues this winter in our Black Box Theater. Designed for performances in all seasons, our flexible theater’s Black Box configuration is conceived as a home for intimate-scaled productions. Its flexible floor-plan, state-of-the-art LED lighting, and sophisticated sound system make it an ideal environment for innovative work in all genres. In addition, the green room, dressing rooms, kitchen, and nearby artists’ housing have established PS21 as a sought-after venue for residencies by theater and dance companies. PS21 has hosted residencies by performing artists and creators since 2014, when Parsons Dance and the Jamal Jackson Dance Company inaugurated this key element of our mission: to foster creativity, encourage collaboration among artists who work at the intersections of dance, theater, film, video, sound, and performing arts, and connect us with the ever-evolving national and international arts landscape.

International Contemporary Circus: U.S. Premiere, Phasmes and Hêtre, a double bill by Compagnie Libertivore (France), December 21—22, 7 pm

French circus company Libertivore will perform Phasme and Hêtre on December 21–22, 7 pm. Written and choreographed by co-founder Fanny Soriano, the two works are visually arresting displays of aerial and earthbound movement, poetic, metaphysical, and muscular, inhabiting the region where dance and acrobatics merge. Soriano’s circus choreography induces a slow metamorphosis of humans and organic matter, as performers confront nature, accompany it, dodge it, collide and merge with it, highlighting the physical potential of the acrobatic body. Tickets are $45 for non-members, $30 for PS21 members, and $20 for children under 18. Click here for more info and tickets.

In Phasmes, a mysterious mass of two acrobat-dancers faces us in an obscure light. This human chimera mutates, moves and interacts with its environment, eliciting animal, mineral and plant like motions. An intimate evolution ensues, whilst the spectator is captivated by optical illusions and morphing apparitions: a galloping headless creature becomes a delicate insect, which in turn becomes a creeping form of alien architecture. We soon discover that the entity is in fact two bodies behaving as one, unfolding and recoiling, creating abstract and evocative figures. The performers, inverting natural forces with games of balance and symmetry, enthralled by the multiplicity of possibilities, search for a common center of gravity. They explore, through their sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting desires, a world full of illusions.

A 25 minute solo dance and acrobatic performance exploring the vital need for solitude, Hêtre is a harmonious and hypnotic melee between an extraordinary apparatus and a young woman in the midst of a metamorphosis, in which she gradually moves away from the real world and enters a forest of mysteries and dreams.

BUY TICKETS HERE

Residency of French Author and Director Pascal Rambert, with Actors Jim Fletcher and Ismail ibn Conner

From December 6–11, celebrated French author and director Pascal Rambert will be in residence at PS21, rehearsing his 2007 monologue The Art of Theater with Jim Fletcher and the continually evolving With My Own Hands  (1993) featuring Ismail ibn Conner. Nicholas Elliott, who has translated numerous Rambert works as well as theater pieces by Olivier Py and others, will assist with the English versions. The residency takes place ahead of their fully staged presentation at PS21 as part the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in January 2022, with public performances on January 14—15, 22—23.

The Art of Theater, composed in 2007, is a manifesto about the nature of dramatic acting, spoken by a single actor (Fletcher) who addresses, not the audience, but his dog, who patiently attends to his master’s voice. The audience, in effect, eavesdrops on the monologue. Fletcher, who co-starred with Kate Moran in Rambert’s two-character Love’s End (Clôture de l’Amour), previously appeared at PS21 in 2019, in the title role of Compagnie l’heliotrope’s Pollock.

Rambert wrote the original version of With My Own Hands for Eric Doye in 1993; it premiered on a rooftop at the Université de Dijon. Since then, he has adapted this protean meditation on the human condition, a soliloquy uttered by a wounded psyche on the brink of suicide, for a series of settings and performers, including the American actor Kate Moran in 2007.  At the time, he said, “I wrote this text to be played by both men and women, young and old.” At PS21, Conner, who has performed widely in Centre Dramatique National Orléans’ production of Jean Genet’s Splendid’s and many other theatrical works, will embody the role of protagonist of this searing, enigmatic monologue. Read more about the artists and works here.

Residency of Actors Jim Fletcher and Katiana Rangel, with Cellist Lori Goldston, Rehearsing and Developing Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Jim Fletcher will return for a second residency from December 11–17, rehearsing Sarah Kane’s landmark, gritty, controversial play Blasted (1995) with actor/director Katiana Rangel, who founded theater company Untitled 29 in Brazil, and who is well versed in Sarah Kane’s work, having translated, co-directed, and performed in Kane’s Psychosis 4.48.  Joining Fletcher and Rangel is cellist, composer, and improviser Lori Goldston, who will be performing the work’s score. Goldston has performed and collaborated with the likes of  Nirvana on MTV Unplugged, and worked with a long list of musical heavyweights from David Byrne to Cat Power. A work-in-progress showcase is scheduled for December 16, with a full staging later in early 2022.

In Blasted, Three people are in a war zone, a young woman, a middle-aged journalist, and a soldier. Amidst the battlefield, the foul mouthed journalist and young woman nest in a hotel room, witnessing the destruction that is not only occurring outside, but gradually happening in every level of their relationship, physical space, and bodies. Outside and inside blend into one another and the horror of that reality feels like a dream through Sarah Kane’s innovative and direct style of writing. Read more about the artists here.

PS21 Welcomes Four New Board Members

PS21 is thrilled to welcome Judith Albert, Sarah Chalfant, Louis Hedgecock, and Leslie Lassiter to our board. Distinguished professionals in the fields of architecture, finance, law, and literary agency, they all share PS21’s commitment to expanding the audiences for original contemporary performing arts and artists in the Hudson Valley and beyond.

Judith Albert is Board Chair of Cornerstone Capital Group, which develops and manages investment strategies whose goals are to combine environmental and social impact with financial performance. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School who has studied and worked in Latin America, her career has taken her from the Ford Foundation to corporate law at Paul Weiss, investment banking at JP Morgan and Bear Stearns, and Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), a community of business leaders who promote sound environmental policy to grow the economy.Judith serves on the boards of Inside Climate News and the North Chatham Library and is on the finance committee of the Latin American Studies Association. Since 2015, she has taught a course in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at The New School.

Sarah Chalfant is a Director and board member of The Wylie Agency, a global literary agency with offices in London and New York. Educated at the University of Cambridge, she divides her time between the UK and the US and has a home in Livingston, NY.

A native of Texas, Louis Hedgecock graduated from Rice University with a BA in Architecture, Art, and English and received an M.Arch. from Columbia. A practicing architect for over forty years, he designed hotels and office buildings in New York, Asia, and elsewhere, was managing partner for BBG-BBGM and Director of Hospitality for HOK Architects. Louis and his late husband Jerry Croghan began spending weekends in Columbia County in 1982’ ten years later they bought a house in Spencertown, which is now his principal residence. A trained pianist and vocalist, Louis’s deep interest in contemporary classical music aligns with PS21’s commitment to this protean body of work. “I am thrilled that PS21 provides an almost unparalleled opportunity for contemporary performing arts in the Hudson Valley and Berkshires.”

Leslie Lassiter, who recently retired as Managing Director head of the Entertainment Practice at J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Los Angeles, had a career spanning more than forty years in leadership positions in investment and private banking with Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan, which she joined in 2000. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Scripps College and a M.B.A. from the University of Chicago and served on the Scripps Board of Trustees for 15 years. Leslie has also been a board member of the United Way of Los Angeles, The Ojai Music Festival, River LA, and is the chair of the Board of  Directors of The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. She first discovered Columbia County over twenty years ago and has made a second home in Hillsdale in 2004.