Dance: Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe (Australia) MEETING

"Two performers share space with 64 robotic instruments. A relentless stream of activity unfolds, where the bodies enter states of heightened physical and mental agency, with all actions carried by the meditative pulse of the machine beat. 

MEETING reveals a fascination with the articulation of the body and mind in motion. A choreographic study stripped to the bare essentials, the work pairs Hamilton’s compulsive choreography and unique physical grammar with Macindoe’s obsessive machine-making practice." 

MEETING composes the body, space and robots into a riveting choreographic soundscape flooding your eyes and ears with technical mastery at its finest.

“MEETING is a quietly rich encounter between man, machine, motion and sound that rewards your attention with mesmeric human feats and meditative sonic patterns.” – Ian Abbott, Writing about Dance

Choreographer, Director and Performer: Antony Hamilton
Instrument Design & Construction, Composer, Performer: Alisdair Macindoe

Dance: Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo (NYC) "Custodians of Beauty"

http://www.ps122.org/custodians-of-beauty/

"For decades in the humanities, various arguments have been put forward against beauty. Where do we find beauty today and does it need our defense? Bessie Award–winning choreographer/director Pavel Zuštiak and his Palissimo Company examine beauty and its intrinsic relationship with art through minimalist movement, sensuous abstraction and potent stage imagery. 

Drawn from a dark Eastern European dance-theater aesthetic, this richly postmodern dance/live music event casts the human body as a sculptural form, an emotional trigger, or a political symbol. In an age when humanity, disenchanted with itself, seems to have rejected the necessity of beauty, Custodians of Beauty asks us to look again, beyond the surface, to see differently."

“Plunges headlong into questions about what is ‘beautiful’ by interrogating sources like Plato, Pope Benedict XVI, and of course, the dancing body.” – Time Out New York

Dancers: Nicholas Bruder, Emma Judkins, Justin Morrison

Pavel Zuštiak is a NYC-based director, choreographer and performer, born in the communist Czechoslovakia and trained at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. His works for stage and public spaces merge the abstract aspects of dance with nonlinear qualities of “theatre of images” into multidisciplinary pieces rich in evocative imagery and piercing emotional resonance. Zuštiak is the 2015 Bessie Juried Award winner for his “poetic layering of movement and visual imagery, conceiving the stage space as a decentralized world in which the corporeal body is the focus and canvas for a wide range of human expression,” a 2015-17 Princeton Arts Fellow, the recipient of 2013 LMCC President’s Award for Excellence in Artistic Practice and 2012 NEFA/NDP Production and Residency Grants, 2010 Guggenheim Fellow and 2014, 2009, and 2007 Princess Grace Awards Winner. His 5-hour trilogy The Painted Bird received a 2013 Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Production. www.palissimo.org

Theater: Real Magic by Forced Entertainment, COIL Festival 2017

Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic

Caught in a world of second-chances and second-guesses, variations and changes, distortions and transformations, Real Magic takes you on a hallucinatory journey, creating a compelling performance about optimism, individual agency and the desire for change.

In Real Magic, Forced Entertainment create a world of absurd disconnection, struggle, and comical repetition. To the sound of looped applause and canned laughter, a group of performers take part in an impossible illusion – part mind-reading feat, part cabaret act, part chaotic game show – in which they are endlessly replaying the moment of defeat and the moment of hope.

Time Out New York calls it like it is: "Finally, the buzziest company coming to COIL is Tim Etchells’s long-lived Forced Entertainment, who bring Real Magic, a deconstructed cabaret act that will likely be one of January’s most confident pieces."

“Beckett meets trash TV” – Nachtkritik(Germany)

Director Tim Etchells

Devised with and Performed by Jerry Killick, Richard Lowdon and Claire Marshall

Forced Entertainment Creative Team Robin Arthur, Tim Etchells (Artistic Director), Richard Lowdon (Designer), Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor.

Film: Manifesto at the Park Avenue Armory

Artists discuss their personal revolutions with, through, and against the art of their ages.

Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/arts/design/12-faces-of-cate-blanchett-a-chameleon-in-the-armory.html?_r=0

Theater: Hundred Days (Under the Radar Festival)

Conceived by Abigail and Shaun Bengson
Book, Music and Lyrics by Abigail and Shaun Bengson
Additional Material by Sarah Gancher
Directed by Anne Kauffman

Featuring Abigail Bengson, Shaun Bengson, Colette Alexander, Geneva Harrison, Jo Lampert, and Reggie D. White

Hundred Days is the uncensored, exhilarating, and heartrending true story of how Abigail and Shaun Bengson met and fell in love, and how that love unleashed their terror of mortality. With magnetic chemistry and anthemic folk-punk music, the Bengsons explore the fundamental question of how to make the most of the time that we have.

Hundred Days was created by Abigail and Shaun Bengson with their collaborators Anne Kauffman and Sarah Gancher.

American folk/rock duo The Bengsons have performed their music worldwide. Theatre and Dance:You'll Still Call Me By Name (NYLA), Anything That Gives Off Light (Edinburgh Theater Festival),The Place We Built (The Flea), Iphigenia in Aulis (CSC). Upcoming: Sun Down, Yellow Moon (Ars Nova, Women’s Project), The Lucky Ones (Ars Nova), and a LCT commission.

Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/theater/hundred-days-review-under-the-radar.html?_r=0