Madeleine Albright's Toy Theatre comes to La MaMa

Vit Horejs has incorporated childhood toy puppet theatre of US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright's,into the Czech-American Marionette Theatre's new show The New World Symphony: Dvořák in America, running March 10 - Marth 27, 2016 at The Ellen Stewart Theatre.  

As a little girl, the future U.S. Secretary of State used it to put on puppet shows for her family and friends.  She donated this marionette theater to the Czech community in New York City three years ago and it currently resides in Bohemian Hall.

Check out photos of this wonderful piece of history:

And here is a photo of Madeleine's toy theatre as used in the prologue The New World Symphony: Dvořák in America -

La MaMa presents

The New World Symphony: 

Dvořák in America

by Czech-American Marionette Theatre
written and directed by Vít Hořejš
music by Antonín Dvořák
and saxophonist/composer James Brandon Lewis 

March 10 - March 27, 2016
Thursday to Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 4pm

The Ellen Stewart Theatre 
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $25 Adult; $20 Student & Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

6 Questions: Grant Shaffer's 'Gay Arms' in La MaMa Galleria

For the exhibition Gay Arms, Grant Shaffer presents a new body of photographic work. Grant sat down to answer 6 questions about pigeons, The Passion, and working at La MaMa!

The series is documentary in style, with its subjects pulled from the artist’s life. Shaffer describes his artistic process as a means of understanding: “When I’m taking pictures, I think of myself as an alien who’s here for a while, trying to understand the experience of my sliver of life on this planet.  It’s hard to say what my photos and this show are about.  It’s just intuitive.  It’s very personal and at the same time very public. It’s me trying to take in the world and asking people to notice or consider something.”

1. Where did the title Gay Arms come from?
I was taking photos of our two dogs in Tompkins Square Park, and a crazy person started harassing me.  He was yelling things like, "Taking pictures with your queer eyes and your gay arms..."  I was trying to think of a name for my photo exhibit and I decided Gay Arms was perfect.

2. You describe your process as a means of understanding. How does photography as a medium lend itself to this process?
When I look at a slew of photos I've taken, patterns emerge, and I'm sometimes surprised.  The photos help me to understand how I take in the world visually. For example, when I was looking through photos for this show, a lot of the photos dealt with people being thrashed about by wind.  Who knows what that's about, but it starts me down a road.

3. This series captures subjects from your life in a documentary fashion--could you elaborate on how you choose your subjects?
I let subjects come to me.  When I go out and try to force it, I'm usually not happy with the outcome.  I'd rather just go out and have a camera with me – then that "click" happens, when I chance upon something and become a bit obsessed, and that's it for me. 

4. What’s your favorite work in the show?
My favorite work changes.  Right now I like the photo I took of a pigeon standing on a salted sidewalk.  It's very simple, but it's an intense bird.

5. What was the last good book you read?
The last good book I read was The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson

6. What does working at La MaMa mean to you?
La MaMa has a great supportive family feeling.  It doesn't feel like a business trying to sell you something, but a place that's really passionate about the arts.  I feel incredibly lucky to be involved with La MaMa!

Galleria: Gay Arms

February 26 - March 13, 2016

Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday 1 to 7PM, or by appointment

La MaMa Galleria | 47 Great Jones St.

Free Admission

Click Here for more information!

Vít Hořejš goes to Bohemia researching The New World Symphony

 Summer 2015,  director Vít Hořejš  went to Vysoka (in Bohemia south of

Prague) on research trip for the upcoming New World Symphony: Dvořák in America.

Vysoka is where Antonín Dvořák had a summer house and did a lot if composing. You can see the setting includes lots of fruit and nut trees which Dvorak loved. Dvorak's grandson  was there and took Vit on a tour of the grounds and the summer house.

Tickets are now on sale, include La MaMa's 10@$10 tickets, 

which are almost sold out!

La MaMa presents

The New World Symphony: 

Dvořák in America

by Czech-American Marionette Theatre
written and directed by Vít Hořejš
music by Antonín Dvořák
and saxophonist/composer James Brandon Lewis

March 10 - March 27, 2016
Thursday to Saturday at 7pm; Sunday at 4pm

The Ellen Stewart Theatre 
66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $25 Adult; $20 Student & Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

Kikuo Saito (1939 - 2016)

Kikuo Saito, 1967 (Photo by Conrad Ward)

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of artist Kikuo Saito.  

 Prop from Water Play (1976), Photo: La MaMa Archive

Postcard from Toy Garden (1996)

Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1939,  Kikuo was one of the first Japanese artists welcomed into residency by Ellen Stewart at La MaMa where he worked with Tom Eyen, Tom O'Horgan and Robert Wilson among others. His career as an painter was prolific, exhibiting his paintings since 1976 in many group and solo shows and his work is part of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. 

Wine Tree (2012) Oil on Canvas

Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this sad time. 

Services will be Friday, February 19, 2016

2:00-5:00 pm &
7:00 -9:00 pm

Greenwich Village Funeral Home
199 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012

Video Preview: JUPITER (a play about power)

Check out the trailer for JUPITER (a play about power), now at The First Floor Theatre at La MaMa.
JUPITER (A Play About Power) from La MaMa on Vimeo.

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La MaMa presents
JUPITER 
(a play about power)
by Jeremy Pickard  
directed by Simón Adinia Hanukai 

February 11 - 28, 2016
Thursdays - Saturdays @ 7:30pm; Sundays @ 2pm

First Floor Theatre @ La MaMa
74A East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $18 Adults; $13 Students/Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

First Look at JUPITER (a play about power)

all photos by Theo Cote

La MaMa presents
JUPITER 
(a play about power)
by Jeremy Pickard  
directed by Simón Adinia Hanukai 

February 11 - 28, 2016
Thursdays - Saturdays @ 7:30pm; Sundays @ 2pm

First Floor Theatre @ La MaMa
74A East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $18 Adults; $13 Students/Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

6 Questions: Morgan Jenness

Morgan Jenness is the dramaturg for YO MISS: Transforming Trauma Into Art written and performed by Judith Sloan.  Morgan took time out from rehearsals to answer our 6 Questions.  Yo Miss comes to The Club @ La MaMa for 6 performances only from March 4 - 13, 2016.

1. How did you get involved with Judith Sloan’s YO MISS? 

I saw an early performance of it at Nuyorican Poets Cafe and was struck with both the subject matter and Judith's presence on stage.

2. Why do you think this show is important? 

It gives voice to young immigrants and refugees but also reminds us that we are actually all connected (or can be) to these stories and that we can also do something in the world for other people.

3. What is the role of a dramaturg (on this show and/or in general)? 

On a evolving new work like this, one works with the writer/artist the way a book editor works with an author - talking about what can be cut, added and shaped for maximum impact.

4. Who is the dream audience for YO MISS? 

 I think it's a real range and would be nice to have that range in the theater - old, young, various cultural identity backgrounds, theater people, social justice people, teachers and people who have had no experience with theater but understand and relate to the stories being told - with the hopes that they might then tell their own stories.

5. What is the last good book you read? 

Ta-Nehisi Coates BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME.

6. What does working at La MaMa mean to you? 

A life long dream - even when I worked with Joe Papp at The Public, I would always come to LaMama...once sitting out in the street for hours waiting to get tickets to Peter Brook's CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS, LaMama always had a diverse, truly experimental and international vision that I craved - like water.

La MaMa presents
YO MISS:
TRANSFORMING TRAUMA INTO ART

Written, Performed & Live-Sound Engineered by Judith Sloan
Josh Henderson on violin and Andrew Griffin on viola (March 4-6)
Andrew Griffin on viola (March 11-13)
Dramaturgy by Morgan Jenness

March 4 - 13, 2016
Fridays & Saturdays @ 10pm; Sundays @ 6pm

The Club @ La MaMa
74A East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $18 Adults; $13 Students/Seniors

For Info and Tickets: CLICK HERE

Guest Post by Lani Fu co-creator of JUPITER (a play about power)

The Greatest Volcanic Eruption in Recorded History: Three Years of Chaos, One Literary Masterpiece, and the Play That Ties It All Together

The year is 1815. In the East Indies, a colossal volcano named Mount Tambora had been dormant for over 1,000 years. No human alive had seen even a whisper of rumbling. In April that year, the mountain erupted with apocalyptic fury, casing the Earth in volcanic gasses and ash that pierced the stratosphere. The sun-blocking particles of volcanic matter encircled the entire globe in a matter of weeks, plunging human communities into the most dramatic, sudden climatic shift in thousands of years.

For three years following Tambora’s explosion, chaos reigned on Earth. “To be alive, almost anywhere in the word, meant to be hungry.” Flooding rains replaced sunny showers, bone-shattering cold rolled over fallow fields, and drought seized verdant land, turning all withered and dry. Not a corner of the world remained untouched by famine, disease, dislocation, and unrest.

In the turbulent summer of 1816, Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin) and her lover Percy Shelley were ensconced at their lakeside villa on near Geneva. The ravaged world around them served as the inspiration for Shelley’s greatest work, Frankenstein. Confined to their cabin by the terrifying weather, which their neighbour Lord Byron described as fierce “as an earthquake’s birth,” they amused themselves by sharing ghost stories. The 19 year-old Mary was struck by the vision of a horrifying phantasm, pieced together by eager, unknowing hands, deadened flesh stirring with faint pulses of warmth and life. Behold a monster carved in hazy imagination from the tall, foaming waves of Lake Geneva and the shattering lightning which surrounded Shelley’s waking days.

Shelley’s classic novel is inextricably enmeshed with the story of a world in ecological breakdown. The people of a blighted Europe moved through heart-wrenching stages of destruction. Children were abandoned or killed by desperate mothers. Roving mobs of people, barely human in their suffering, scoured the frozen fields for rotten food and waged bloody battles. The Monster of Frankenstein was made in their likeness: he bears the same shape as the deformed and diseased masses, and faces the same fear and hostility as the refuges of this global food crisis. The eruption of Mount Tambora offers us a vivid model of our world thrust into a sudden climate crisis, throwing into startling focus the interdependence between human systems and the natural world.

Exactly 200 years after Shelley first dreamed of her Monster, born in a storm wrought from global climate change, Superhero Clubhouse and Kaimera Productions adapt themes of Shelley’s story to imagine a new kind of monster, in JUPITER (a play about power), premiering at La MaMa E.T.C. in February of 2016. The modern world faces its own climate crisis, with promised consequences no less devastating than the Mount Tambora explosion. The story of JUPITER is set into motion by a man named Joe who undertakes a radical action, isolating himself from human society in order to embody his vision of world that is seemingly unattainable. By removing all fossil fuels from Earth in one fell swoop, he seeks to reanimate humanity, doing what no individual has ever had the power to do: redefine what it means to be human in a world facing a global climate crisis fuelled by our own tragic flaws.

Sade said, “Nature permits everything, and authorizes nothing.” Nature breeds monstrosity as often and as easily as it breeds beauty. The ambiguous and paradoxical nature of the Monster in Frankenstein resides in the fact that good and evil are relative positions. In JUPITER, Joe, like Frankenstein, sets the stage for his creation, Humanity, to discover its way into being, devoid of inherent goodness of evil. His monstrosity lies in his ability or lack of ability to relate to human codes and signifiers, to harness language as access, as his medium of truth. Joe creates an open channel of communication between himself and his creation, relinquishing any semblance of power he may hold over the progress of her discovery. We watch as Humanity grapples with the chaos of a world with its spine removed, trying to build herself into a being that can not only survive the horrors of the present, but alter the monstrous elements of her nature that would inevitably herald the drastic consequences of ecological collapse.

Two centuries ago, a volcanic explosion altered the climate of the world, plunging it into global turmoil. The fictitious story of a Monster and his creator was forged from the human drive to find principle and control in an unprincipled nature. Today, JUPITER interrogates a world on the brink of an impending climate crisis of a similar scale and scope. The play tells the story of Humanity, thrust into a new existence overnight by a man who had the power to do the impossible. It asks if this radical act, done in the name of the greater good, was ethical or even right. Did he create a monster, or did he create hope? In our age, where often it seems our very nature is at odds to our long-term survival on Earth, is it possible for a new kind of human to emerge?

Lani Fu is a NYC-based theater artist and First Mate of Superhero Clubhouse. She is a writer, performer, director, and producer. She has led and collaborated on projects about contemporary consumerism, globalization, and the environment in Sri Lanka, Morocco, Turkey, and the United States with the support of the Center for 21st Century Studies. She is a co-creator of the SHC production, JUPITER (a play about power), premiering at La MaMa in February, 2016. She is currently performing in the premiere of A Foreign Body by Neena Beber and directed by Theresa Rebeck.

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La MaMa presents
JUPITER 
(a play about power)
by Jeremy Pickard  
directed by Simón Adinia Hanukai 

February 11 - 28, 2016
Thursdays - Saturdays @ 7:30pm; Sundays @ 2pm

First Floor Theatre @ La MaMa
74A East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $18 Adults; $13 Students/Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

First Look: The New World Symphony - Dvořák in America

The World Premiere of Czech-American Marionette Theatre's New World Symphony - Dvořák in America comes to The Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa from March 10 - March 27, 2016.  

- - - - - 

La MaMa presents

The New World Symphony: 

Dvořák in America

Czech-American Marionette Theatre 
written and directed by Vít Hořejš
music by Antonín Dvořák and saxophonist/composer James Brandon Lewis

March 10 - 27, 2016
Thursdays - Saturdays @ 7pm; Sundays @ 4pm

The Ellen Stewart Theatre @ La MaMa
66 East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $25 Adults; $20 Students/Seniors; ten $10 tickets are available for every performance (advance sale only)

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

Behind The Scenes at ORESTEIA: AGAMEMNON

  Behind the Scenes at Orestia: Agamemnon from La MaMa on Vimeo.

Director Zishan Uğurlu talks about her upcoming production of ORESTEIA: AGAMEMNON, a rare opportunity to see this classic text performed in its native Greek (with English super-titles). ORESTEIA: AGAMEMNON comes to The Ellen Stewart Theatre for four performances only February 18 - 21, 2016. 

La MaMa presents ORESTEIA:  AGAMEMNON
a co-production of Eclipses Group Theater and Actors Without Borders
Directed by Zishan Uğurlu
Greek Translation by Dimitris Dimitriadis
English Translation (super-titles) by Robert Fagles

February 18 - 21, 2016
Thursday - Saturday @ 7:30pm; Sunday @ 4pm

The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10003

Tickets: $25 Adults; $20 Students/Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

Gallery Opening: Alexis Myre

Last night, February 4, 2016, was the opening reception for Alexis Myre's solo show: Power of Limits.

Artist Alexis Myre with Gallery Director Matt Nasser

La MaMa presents

ALEXIS MYRE:

POWER OF LIMITS

February 4 - 21, 2016

Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday 1pm to 7pm

or by appointment

La MaMa Galleria

47 Great Jones Street

(between Bowery and Lafayette Street)

New York, NY 10003

Free Admission

For more info: CLICK HERE