Performing Arts
For reservations call 212.847.9740 or email event_reservation@amscan.org
Blocks/Kloss
Teater Tr3
Saturday, October 23, 2 performances – 11 am & 1 pm
$10 ($7 ASF Members), ages 3+
Which is more fun? Building up or knocking down? Filled with slap-stick humor and a touch of seriousness, Blocks is a happy story about three characters trying to organize their world. Blue overalls inspire choreography that freely mixes the concepts of work and play.
Teater Tre is one of the most active and beloved theater groups in Sweden, performing over 300 shows every year all over Sweden and on their home stage in Stockholm. During the last year the group has been invited to many international theater festivals including Finland, Lithuania, Serbia, France, Italy, Japan, Cameroon, Egypt, Germany, and Australia. Formed in 1979, Teater Tre began as mime-based, visual theater that included text, movement and music, and consisted of students graduating in mime from the Academy of Theater in Stockholm.
See also Kids & Family programs page.
The 2nd Annual Live Action New York
Saturday, November 6, 7 pm & Sunday, November 7, 2 pm
$10 ($7 ASF Members)
Now in its second year, Live Action New York will showcase twenty of the most engaging and up-and-coming Scandinavian and North American performance artists. Featured are a mix of young and emerging artists (including Peter Rosvik, Finland, and Søren Dahlgaard, Denmark), selected for their natural energy, ambition and inventiveness, alongside the experience and quality of internationally-established artists (among them Rita Marhaug, Marilyn Arsem, Johanna Householder, and Tanya Mars). This inter-generational blend of styles goes beyond mainstream contemporary art in an artistically high-profile, thought-provoking, and avant-garde milieu.
About the curator:
Jonas Stampe, the curator and project manager of Live Action New York 09: Scandinavian Performance Art, has established himself on the international performance art scene. As the curator of three performance art festivals in Europe, Infr'Action - Festival International d'Art Performance in Sète, France, Infr’Action Paris and Live Action Göteborg, since 2001 he has presented more than 200 artists from more than 34 countries.
In 2001 and 2003 he was the project manager and curator of the biennial of contemporary art, Ideologia, which in its first edition presented 28 Scandinavian artists and in its second edition 56 artists.
He has been active as an art critic since 1987, writing for different Swedish and Scandinavian newspapers and art magazines on exhibitions on the international art scene and major exhibitions and events like Documenta, the Venice Biennial and the Whitney Biennial of American Art.
He is preparing a Ph.D. in contemporary art history at the University of Lund, Sweden, focusing on post-war European and American art. He has also studied art theory at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris under the direction of Hubert Damisch. Also a theorician, his specialty is European and American post-war art from 1944-1965.
Recently he was selected as one of eight curators of the 10th Open International Performance Art Festival in Beijing, which took place in Beijing in August and September, presenting more than 300 artists. He was also the curator of a delegation of three French artists to the international biennial of performance art LIVE, which took place in Vancouver October 15-31, 2009.
Contemporary Scandinavian Reading Series
Scandinavian American Theater Company
Mondays, pre-reception 7:30 pm/readings 8 pm
October 18, 2010 & January 31, 2011
Additional readings for December 6, 2010 & May 23, 2011 TBA
FREE
Scandinavian American Theater Company (SATC), the first-ever Scandinavian-American theater company in New York, was founded in 2009 by a group of New York-based Scandinavian theater professionals with the wish to introduce a new generation of Scandinavian playwrights to an American audience. SATC’s mission is to present high-quality, cutting-edge productions of contemporary Scandinavian plays and fresh interpretations of the Scandinavian classics, as well as to foster the Scandinavian-American performing arts community in New York.
In their Contemporary Scandinavian Reading Series, SATC presents five plays annually representing Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands).
Co-presented by the Consulate General of Denmark, New York, the Consulate General of Sweden in New York, and Scandinavia House.
For Sheer Love of Me/Rakkaudesta minuun
October 18
Written by Anna Krogerus (Finland, 2005) & directed by Sebastian Nyman Agdur (Sweden). The Northcliff family is slowly falling apart in their large apartment in a wealthy neighborhood. Tina, an interior decorator, and Edward, a TV psychologist, are growing apart, while their ten year-old daughter, Sylvia (named after Sylvia Plath), becomes increasingly lonely and isolated. All these suppressed feelings surface with the arrival of a new neighbor, Sally Peak. The entire family piles their hopes and desperation onto Sally, which leads to an inevitable collision. For Sheer Love of Me is a melancholy, perceptive, compassionate and subtly humorous examination of alienation within a family.
About the playwright:
Anna Krogerus (b. 1974, Kuopio, Finland) got her breakthrough as a playwright in 2006 with For Sheer Love of Me/Rakkaudesta minuun, first performed at the Finnish National Theatre. Both a critical and popular success, it also received the Finnish Critics’ Association Award for Best Play. Krogerus studied literature at the University of Tampere and dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy of Finland (1996-2002). Since 2005, she has worked as resident writer and dramaturge at the Kajaani Municipal Theatre in Finland. Krogerus writes sensitive and complex plays, full of deeply introspective characters, balancing between anxiety and joy.
Pinocchio’s Ashes/Pinocchios aske*
*Guest-starring Jokum Rohde
January 31, 2011
Written by Jokum Rohde (Denmark, 2005) & directed by Henning Hegland (Norway). A prohibition on art and culture has been imposed in the city of Kongstad. Judge Wolff is to implement it, but in the decadent and paranoid universe Rohde has created, he and the other characters become human wrecks. Inspired by the American courtroom genre, the award-winning Pinocchio's Ashes is an expressionistic drama about the role of art in our times and the demonic in human nature. It is a dynamic, gripping story filled with melancholy, poetry and dark humor.
About the playwright:
Considered one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights, Jokum Rohde (b. 1970, Denmark) has been a resident playwright at The Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen since 2008. He got his breakthrough in 1998 with the three-character theater-noir drama Nero. A prolific writer, he followed with nine plays that were produced throughout Denmark and in 2005, he wrote Pinocchio's Ashes for which he was awarded the prestigious Reumert award in the category Playwright of the Year. Pinocchio's Ashes has subsequently been produced at Dramaten, the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as in Norway, Lithuania and Italy.