The Prelude 2018 Festival

Thursday 4 October

At the forefront of contemporary theatre, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center’s annual PRELUDE Festival provides audiences with the opportunity to preview and discuss the upcoming body of work from New York City’s downtown theatre and performance communities. Using archival footage and interviews with artists, scholars, and audience members from PRELUDE 2016 and PRELUDE 2017, this documentary tells the story of this unique gathering of creative minds. Join narrator and festival founder Frank Hentschker in discovering all the different ways we define the performative phenomena known as PRELUDE.

Drinking Brecht is a way of sharing research into Sister Sylvester’s newest piece, Brecht Forensics, by creating cocktails out of the DNA of former Berliner Ensemble members.

All Long True American Stories is an epic play-cycle in which Julia May Jonas reimagines canonical American male-experience plays for other people (mostly women). Developed with director/producer Sarah Hughes and consisting of five new full-length plays, All Long True American Stories creates an epic theatrical event that examines the meaning and mechanisms of the dramatic American canon.

Studio Visits are evening-length hybrid performance events, offering audiences a multi-angled view of the featured artist and their craft. Each Studio Visit includes an introduction by the artist, a presentation of new work-in-process, a critical response essay by a guest artist, and a Q&A. The guest artist for this Studio Visit is Jess Barbagallo.

Friday 5 October

Will They Play Golf on Mars? is an interrogation of the tropes of space exploration, colonization, and Manifest Destiny. Janine Renee Cunningham performs headphone verbatim of Elon Musk and other Space Barons, asking what it means for our society to dream collectively when wealth has been consolidated in the hands of the few?

Please Google Ukraine: Ukrainian-born, Jersey-raised, Brooklyn-based nomad, Artem Yatsunov, visits his homeland after the break out of the Ukrainian Civil War. This is the kinda true, slightly inaccurate, mostly made up and generally genuine story of highway hijackings, uncontrollable revolutions, broken families, and vodka.

(pray) is an utterly absurd yet tenderly sincere exploration of prayer and spirituality as it pertains to the Black female experience. by the end of this tripped out, dance-filled “Sunday” service, we are ultimately left questioning what’s left for humanity to believe in. and if there is anything left, trust Black women to tell you what it might be. because, honestly, how can you not trust a lady in such a fanciful hat?

Works-in-Process are excerpts from new work, in development or recently premiered.

Suicide Forest is a bilingual nightmare play excavating the Japanese-American consciousness and the relationship between sex, suicide, and identity.

Studio Visits are evening-length hybrid performance events, offering audiences a multi-angled view of the featured artist and their craft. Each Studio Visit includes an introduction by the artist, a presentation of new work-in-process, a critical response essay by a guest artist, and a Q&A. The guest artist for this Studio Visit is Diep Tran.

In her book Off Sites, Ferdman examines site-based work being done by contemporary companies and artists who are experimenting with new forms and practices that move beyond the stage. The evening will feature a brief introduction to the book and a conversation with featured artist David Levine.

A duet about what happens in liminal spaces and states, where and when things could go in any number of directions and you’re not quite sure which one is right. Also about what happens in hotel rooms, elevators, car rides, ATM lines, etc., temporary places that are yours to fully occupy. Also about ASMR recordings.

Studio Visits are evening-length hybrid performance events, offering audiences a multi-angled view of the featured artist and their craft. Each Studio Visit includes an introduction by the artist, a presentation of new work-in-process, a critical response essay by a guest artist, and a Q&A. The guest artist for this Studio Visit is Jane Comfort.

Saturday 6 October

Between The Bread is the unmaking of a sandwich. One neighborhood’s conflicting narratives and overlapping eating rituals are dangerously untangled from within the best-pressed 三明治 in Nueva York. The “Loislaida”: amuse-bouche, entrée in idea, digestivo. Eat. Eat already. Do you like it?

Where is the Jazz in the Jazz Singer? How come it’s usually white people who want to deal with blackface? Why was this film so damn popular? (((jazz singer))) is a musical interrogation into cultural appropriation, assimilation, atonement, and the performance of American racial identity. You ain’t heard nothing yet.

Turning Towards a Radical Listening is a DJ lecture-performance, in which poems are written with altered DJ technology. GAZR, a poet who has aligned himself with the histories of black music production so that a larger audience may hear his voice, creates soundscapes in real-time from a wide range of privately recorded conversations.

In Bouquet, Valencia examines authorship by questioning what gets carried into her work through the modes of proximity, relation, and alliance. Sourced from various popular and cultural alliances, this particular ensemble of subjects build a choral surround of references that invite the audience into a dense field of collective reference.

Works-in-Process are excerpts from new work, in development or recently premiered.

Not many know the true story of Bender and Brian. Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall were not the first actors cast in John Hughes’ iconic movie The Breakfast Club. Initially, two other actors played the roles, but were fired after an altercation that occurred while filming the scene when they go to take their jackets off at the same time. This pivotal day was, well, pivotal for our original Bender and Brian, as they went on to live their lives together. This is their story.

In INK, James and Jerome turn their attention to visual art, calligraphy, and illuminated manuscripts to create a love letter to the museum experience—one that is at once an art lecture, a personal essay, a piece of theater, and a live electronic music composition.

Untitled Mobile Unit Project: This long form poem with humor, heart, and music tells the story of a man standing before his town asking them for forgiveness after he has made a deal with a mysterious stranger on their behalf. More than a recounting of events, this piece both engages and implicates the audience in determining the man’s fate.

Works-in-Process are excerpts from new work, in development or recently premiered.

The Art of Luv (Part 6): Awesome Grotto! is a ritual performance based on the Ancient Greek Mysteries of Eleusis and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, channeled through the reperformance of a single unpopular shopping “haul” video posted to YouTube on Labor Day 2013 and later deleted by its creator.

Lincoln in the Bardo with Objects: Graham Sack, Sarah Hughes, John Fitzgerald & Matthew Niederhauser (cofounders of experiential production studio Sensorium) are artists from a variety of backgrounds interested in the intersection of live performance and new media technologies. Since 2016 they have collaborated on several projects exploring new ways to tell stories across multiple mediums, and their PRELUDE presentation will survey their work together.

Virtual Water Fountain: A water vapor video sculpture, family altar, and climate change artifact.

Misogynoir: Being Black is tough. Being a Woman is tough. But being a Black Woman is its own special cocktail of oppression. Using their kaleidoscopic sense of humor to dissect media, society and their own relationship, real-life couple Sam and Tabatha search to discover what’s at the core of misogynoir.

Taxilandia is a site-specific play-within-a-tour of a city. Joining Flako the Cabbie, the audience becomes passengers on a dramatic reunion with Flako’s neighborhood. Featuring poetry and testimonials and an ensemble of neighborhood actors. Taxilandia is a front-row, backseat ride on a quest to save the vital tapestry of community in America.

A Hard Time is an alt-comedy cabaret that blows farewell to the patriarchy amid the absurdities and violence of gender expectations.

Works-in-Process are excerpts from new work, in development or recently premiered.

How do artists stage contemporary theories of the mind and brain? How can thinking about our thinking enrich our art? Amy Cook will provide an overview of the contemporary theories of cognition that impact how we make sense of bodies telling stories onstage and take a closer look at how casting works to build characters.

Based on a true story about the aftermath of a fire in an apartment, Archivist is a theatrical performance with one actor, live music and an original animation featuring puppets. Part personal, part anthropological, it explores the human need for an identity based on the stories we tell about ourselves, the artifacts we keep and the junk we can’t throw away.

Studio Visits are evening-length hybrid performance events, offering audiences a multi-angled view of the featured artist and their craft. Each Studio Visit includes an introduction by the artist, a presentation of new work-in-process, a critical response essay by a guest artist, and a Q&A. The guest artist for this Studio Visit is Che Gossett.

In this brand new book, Tectonic Theater Project opens the doors to its rehearsal room, illuminating the Moment Work process and how it has been used to create some of Tectonic’s best-known plays.

Chameleon is a multimedia performance project that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black people within the American context. Using complexity theory combined with live feed and augmented reality as choreographic devices, this work explores how communities record and affirm their existence through collaboration and protest.

Studio Visits are evening-length hybrid performance events, offering audiences a multi-angled view of the featured artist and their craft. Each Studio Visit includes an introduction by the artist, a presentation of new work-in-process, a critical response essay by a guest artist, and a Q&A. The guest artist for this Studio Visit is Rizvana Bradley.

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based peer produced, open access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world's performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and to develop our knowledge commons collectively. Participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected], or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal/WhatsApp. View the video archive of past events.