La MaMa Blogs: January 2020

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

6 Questions for Hideki Noda of ONE GREEN BOTTLE


Renowned Japanese theater artist Hideki Noda comes to La MaMa with ONE GREEN BOTTLE.  Hideki wrote, directs and stars in the show that begins performances on February 29, 2020.  Hideki took time out from rehearsals in Japan to answer our 6 Questions about that show and working at La MaMa.


1. What inspired you to write ONE GREEN BOTTLE?
I wrote a sort of portrait of a disconnected family on a self-destructive course. It parallels to a portrait of our society that faces the issue about over consumerism and too much technology in a ‘selfie’ community.

2. What does the title mean?
The song of “One Green Bottle” shows that Ten green bottles hanging on the wall becomes no green bottle by accidentally falling one by one. When I listened to this song for the first time, I thought that it symbolizes our community all over the world. In an environmental way, a spiritual way and a physical way how many bottles are we diminishing form ten bottles to?

3. Who do you play in ONE GREEN BOTTLE?
I play a role of Boo.(the wife of this family)

4. Why is cross-gender casting important to the show?
Male actor can think of a role of female in a family and a society through a role of female he plays. And female actor vice versa.

5. What is the most difficult thing about directing a show you are also acting in? 
For instance, when I’m performing as an actor, I come up with the new idea as a director. I can’t stop the show. Then after the show, I totally forget the fantastic new idea as if you realize that you forget everything after you wake up when you believed you dreamt an amazing dream.

6. What does working at La MaMa mean to you?
My legend of the theatre, Shuji Terayama (Japanese director)’s production was performed at La MaMa. I have known the name of La MaMa since I was in my teens. Also, the name of La MaMa has been a legend for a long time. I feel so honored to perform at La MaMa.
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La MaMa in association with
Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and NODA・MAP 
presents 


Written and Directed by Hideki Noda 
English Translation adapted by Will Sharpe 
Featuring: Hideki NodaLilo Baur and Glyn Pritchard 

February 29 - March 8, 2020 

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

Tickets: $35 Adult; $30 Student/Senior Tickets 

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

Monday, January 27, 2020

Behind The Scenes at Fandango For Butterflies (and Coyotes)

En Garde Arts' Fandango For Butterflies (and Coyotes) begins performances next week, Thursday, February 6th, at La MaMa.  Take a look behind the scenes during rehearsal for the show and book your tickets now!






All photos by Maria Baranova


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La MaMa presents


An En Garde Arts Production 
Directed by José Zayas 
Written by Andrea Thome

On the eve of city-wide ICE raids, a group of immigrants gather in an undisclosed community center in NYC for a fandango. As fear encroaches — fear for family left behind in their home countries, fear for loved ones in the middle of their dangerous journey to New York, fear of leaving the sanctuary of the community center simply just get a bag of ice — a sense of camaraderie builds between the participants. Strangers become friends, friends become family, and the fandango plays on.

The performances will be in English and Spanish with supertitles, making it fully accessible to Spanish and English-speaking audiences. 

February 06 - February 15, 2020


The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East 4th Street
(between Bowery and Second Avenue)
New York, NY 10001

Tickets: $25 Adults; $20 Students/Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE


Friday, January 24, 2020

6 Questions: Lilo Baur of ONE GREEN BOTTLE



Lilo Baur comes to La MaMa in  Hideki Noda's ONE GREEN BOTTLE which plays The Ellen Stewart Theatre from February 29 - March 8, 2020.  Lilo is in Tokyo now rehearsing the show, but she took time out to answer our 6 Questions.  

1. Who do you play in ONE GREEN BOTTLE?

I play the part of Bo who is a traditional Japanese theatre master. A man who is full of tradition .

2. You are a new member of the cast, what was it like stepping into the show now?

I know Hideki for 25 years and I trust him as a director. I always wanted to play with him.I never saw the play on stage so we are still exploring during the rehearsal period.

3. What is the 'message' of the show? 

The non communication and the break down of a family, everyone for themselves. What are/were their values. 

4. What is your favorite part of the play?

I don’t have a favorite part because I love the theme of the play ,we are lost without our technophilic devices.

5. What is your favorite social media platform and why? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or something else?

None.

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

La Mama is a venue which is worldwide known. It’s a wonderful opportunity to play in that theatre.


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La MaMa in association with
Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and NODA・MAP 
presents 




Written and Directed by Hideki Noda 
English Translation adapted by Will Sharpe 
Featuring: Hideki NodaLilo Baur and Glyn Pritchard 

February 29 - March 8, 2020 

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

Tickets: $35 Adult; $30 Student/Senior Tickets 

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Karen Malpede's OTHER THAN WE Has Been Published



Karen Malpede's OTHER THAN WE premiered at La MaMa in the Fall of 2019 and we are proud to report that the play has just been published by the Egret Imprint of Laertes Press, a non-profit publisher and performance rights are now available.

Laertes is an independent press committed to literary translation — to the furthering of that particular art. Our aim is also to relay works from far and wide, in any genre, that render the full human weight.

Click here to order an Acting Edition of OTHER THAN WE.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

6 Questions: Glyn Pritchard of ONE GREEN BOTTLE



Actor Glyn Pritchard comes to La MaMa in February in Hideki Noda's ONE GREEN BOTTLE.  The company is currently remounting the show in Tokyo prior to coming to New York, and Glyn took time out from rehearsals to answer our 6 Questions about the show, social media and working at La MaMa.  Performances start on Saturday, February 29 in the Ellen Stewart Theatre.  


1. Who do you play in ONE GREEN BOTTLE?

In One Green Bottle I play ‘Pickle’. The daughter of the family.

2. What is it like to remount the show with a new cast member? 

I’ve remounted shows with new cast members before. Including another show with Hideki. I find the beginning of the process quite difficult. Your use to doing the show in a certain way that works, so there’s a “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” sort of feeling.

But of course the new performer bring their own life and interpretation to the part. And once you let go and run with it you discover new things within your own performance and even in the play itself.

3. What is the most difficult part of the play for you? 

The most difficult part of the play for me, and I think this is true of all the plays I’ve done, and especially this show, is the beginning, the first time you step into the play and in front of the audience. You have a small window of time in which to convince the audience(and yourself)that you are that character. You need to feel that you have done that in order to perform the rest of the play with any confidence.

4. What is ONE GREEN BOTTLE about to you? 

To be honest, I’ve never given it much thought. I much prefer people who have seen it to tell me what it’s about. And going on what people have told me, it’s about too many things to give just one of them centre stage.

5. What is your favorite social media platform and why? 

My favourite social media platform is Facebook. I think it’s a generational thing. People around my age tend to go with Facebook as it was one the first one we started using back in the day. Most young people wouldn’t be seen dead on it. Instagram is a very close second. I find it more relaxing. People tend to use it in a positive way. there’s no ranting to be had on it.

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

To my shame, prior to One Green Bottle being invited to perform there, I had not heard of it. Reading about La MaMa and It’s founder Ellen Stewart was a revelation. It’s ethos is everything I believe making Theatre should be. It has echos of The Royal Court Theatre here in London. With its emphasis on writers, and to provide a home where artist can experiment and have, as George Devine the founder put it, “the right to fail”.

And with having read all about all the great artist that have passed through it’s doors, it truly is a great honour for us to have the opportunity to perform there.


_____



La MaMa in association with 
Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and NODA・MAP 
presents 

ONE GREEN BOTTLE 

Written and Directed by Hideki Noda 
English Translation adapted by Will Sharpe 
Featuring: Hideki Noda, Lilo Baur and Glyn Pritchard 

February 29 - March 8, 2020 

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

Tickets: $35 Adult; $30 Student/Senior Tickets 

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

Monday, January 13, 2020

Magic Agency Chapter 4: Bro-Tox — A Response by Stephanie Vevers)



1
To me a clarity rang out in the piece I saw. It contained concerted effort to go through to where “men” can find spaces in which to begin to re.imagine maleness and the enactment of maleness.

2
No pandering or aiming at segments of the audience. In a sense “men” is a category that stands in for any of us.

3
The extensive incorporation of dance, the male nudity, still or moving; the unstinting mop/mother sex scene, unparalleled, and ways of engaging with what constitutes male sexuality and male vulnerability are key, putting it out there on the page/on the stage. Rather than seeing it as performing/putting into view "toxic masculinity,” as posited in a blurb, I see it as posing that as an opening.

4
We already know about our perverse culture; so, how to see through it, to the existence of possibility, seems as compelling as further delineating its corrosiveness –– i.e., the endgoal, as theater, was not to show toxic-ness, but rather to create an inversion chamber, an apparatus of seeing. 

5
Being a work about two brothers, means it is not me-too, but (reaching back to the soil/fundament of feminist consciousness-raising of the 1970s) perhaps it embraces the profound awkwardness, the gut membranes, of such endeavors, spearing an elusive us-too for men and seeking to expand all of our discourse.

6
This is reinforced by the men-only 2-man cast and mainly 3-man collaboratively-engendered production, raising the question, Must the other gender be out of the room, if men are to re-evaluate maleness?

7
Beyond such interpretations of its meaning, the form of the work is composed of a greater arc, bringing theater, dance and text into a whole. At once both cryptic and overt, of both intellect and physicality, its tempo is similarly a mind-body puzzle, between shock and reverie.

8
The rigor in all the portrayals by the two opposing actors is liberatory, and its starkness is related to that.

9
Neo-burlesque, reclaimed by contemporary women dancers and performers, seems to me to be a precedent and influence, or having rhyming rationales. Burlesque as I have glimpsed it in Brooklyn, takes women's agency as a given and benevolently may assume shared pleasure is possible. Though in life shared pleasure is often fraught or impossible, this problematic situation may be suspended during the burlesque show. Here, it's quite another scenario, also tackling the impossible.

10
Bro-Tox is relentless and abrasive on the surface while of a rich braid of elements, sources and echoes theatrically. The “flaying” of male armor, the play's palette of disrobing, gives a chance to shed sentimentality and is rather “zazen-like” in making us “return to the breath” again and again. Perhaps the corrosiveness of the brothers makes us extra-willing to own our seated pose.

11
The shape of the loft-theater space and seating of audience also, through some chance, had echoes of a zazen group, arrayed in 2 facing rows, as with a Buddhist temple hall's theater and regalia, duel and drama of cutting through sloth and delusion, in between. The initial actions, offstage; preparation of space by vacuuming carpet; chair as throne; self vs altar, heighten this echo. Though per the “plot” the characters are dissolute, even abject, heraldically the characters are like profane and sacred guardians in their fierce energy.

12
While holding Samuel Beckett, O’Neill, clowning, Greek tragedy or classic 70s-to-now avant-garde theater, TV’s Loud family or Survivor; underpinnings that might include Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann’s vaginal scroll or harness drawings, or Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed,” Bro-Tox is willing to collage its pastiche in which plot and speech are almost calligraphic, and give the audience the satisfaction of performing quite a bit of the peristalsis of making out the story.

13
The violence and startlingness within the play, become strokes that bring out a fullness and amplitude –– in effect it evokes a necessary question about the violence within our own over-simplifications of national and global and local ethics: how can we move beyond reductive “zero tolerance” to apply our full cultural, aesthetic, and societal capacities to our encounters with the current moment?

14

I am appreciating how the personas of the characters are elaborated while also being pared back, in such a way that audiences can see themselves, also stripped of their own usual trappings.
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Stephanie Vevers came to NYC in her early 20s, and for a decade saturated herself in the avant-garde film, dance, theater, poetry and visual art of downtown’s Soho, East Village and Tribeca and frequented and participated in art spaces such as Printed Matter, Collective for Living Cinema, Poetry Project, Millennium Film Workshop, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds; Nam Jun Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and dancing Lucinda Childs in the luminous Kitchen in SoHo, squares of foam for seating; at Franklin Furnace, John Berger, John Cage, and a "dance class for poets" with Yoshiko Chuma, and at La Mama, Mabou Mines, and Theodora Skipitares. This formative immersion in art for art’s sake impelled ongoing curiosity and questioning: Currently a favorite dilemma is our human gut microbiota –– science or culture? How can we all as creative thinkers be part of translating microbiome research into public health, good food, new and revived cultural practices.


After a sold-out run in Fall 2019, MAGIC AGENCY CHAPTER 4: Bro-Tox returns for 3 performances!

La MaMa presents


Written by Jonas Kyle and Sean Lewis
Featuring Jim Fletcher and Sean Lewis
Sound by Forrest Gillespie
Set Design by Jonas Kyle
House Manager: James Gittens
Stage Manager: Holly Stefanik

January 17 - January 19, 2020

Friday at 8PM; Saturday and Sunday at 5PM


47 Great Jones Street Studios
47 Great Jones Street

(Between Bowery and Lafayette Street)

New York, NY 10012

Tickets: $20 Adults/$15 Students/Seniors

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Video Preview: AMAL


Direction and dramaturgy by award-winning theater artist, Teo Castellanos, written and performed by military/war veterans Combat Hippies, with a head bangin’ original AfroRican Punk soundtrack, produced by DJ Brimstone 127 and live percussion by Angel Ruben Rodriguez Sr. AMAL examines the impact of war with equal parts humor and urgency. It explores the quest for meaning, purpose and identity sought through enlisting in the military and shares the unifying experiences of combatants and noncombatants as people of color. Tough and tender, AMAL relays stories of veterans’, refugees’ and civilians’ adjustment to life after war. This all-Puerto Rican theater company, places Puerto Rico’s colonial status, cultural and military heritage center stage. AMAL was originally developed for MDC Live Arts at Miami Dade College.

Part of Reflections of Native Voices at La MaMa

January 9 - 10, 2020 - 3 Performances only

For Tickets and Info: CLICK HERE