January 12th & 13th, 2024 • 7:30 pm
Glicker-Milstein Theatre • Diana Center • Barnard College • NYC
Program
Ventriloquist Baby
Created by Leeny Sack
Blavatsky Freud Experience
Created by Jon McKenzie, Bryan Reynolds, Saviana Stănescu
Directed by Bryan Reynolds
Performed by Kayla Emerson, Gosia Lorenz, Bryan Reynolds, Emilia Simeonov
Dramaturgy by Jon McKenzie
Music composed and produced by Vinnie Olivieri
Video Design by Jon McKenzie
Lighting Design by Lonnie Alcaraz
Stage Management by Sammie Dasia Moore
Producing & Technical Assistance by Jared Eaton
Talkback
The Event
Provoked by the deep histories of Ukraine, LifeLines explores creativity in dark times, times of war, pandemic, eco-anxiety, and Artificial Intelligence Agencies. Playwright Saviana Stănescu, dramaturg Jon McKenzie, director Bryan Reynolds, and performance artist Leeny Sack set their untimely acts of assembly in basements, studios, and subway stations in order to stage the abyssal, mise en abyme structure of contemporary life, our vita performativa.
LifeLines’ overall structure has four Acts. Act 1, Blavatsky Freud Experience, stages an encounter of Theosophy and Psychoanalysis, offering origin stories. Act 2 features medieval chronicles of the deposed Slavic goddess Mokosh and Jaroslav the Wise, whose Orthodox remains disappeared after World War II. In Act 3, the Greek historian Herodotus meets the Scythian Ice Maiden bearing shamanic powers, while Act 4 speculates on intergalatic bodies as visionary astronomer Carl Sagan shares the stage with astrologist Kyle Thomas.
Each Act stages four Scenes in four modes:
• a stalled nativity drama based on a Slavic folk tale,
• a Rashomon epic encounter between two worldly characters,
• a ritual intervention with totemic object, and
• a cosmic dance of Dionysian release.
LifeLines explores cosmic birthpangs. How to navigate traumatic passages unearthed deep in the geology of morals? From what spacetime to prompt different stagings of cosmogony, different birthings of different worlds? From what place to stage the taking place of place itself, the becoming space of time and time of space, the gathering of contested even incommensurable worlds?
Bios and Info
Jon McKenzie makes media and directs StudioLab at Cornell where he teaches transmedia studios connecting designers, researchers, and community organizations in the US, Africa, and Middle East. He is author of Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance and Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement and also co-curates 14BC Gallery in NYC. labster8.net
Leeny Sack is an interdisciplinary performance artist, poet, and postmodern ventriloquist. She performed her autobiographically-derived and object theatre works throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia, at venues including the Venice Biennale, American Dance Festival, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the first World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors. leenysack.com
Saviana Stănescu is a cutting-edge playwright and ARTivist based in NY. Winner of New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Play, Uniter Award for Best Romanian Play, Marulic Prize, Golden Award, etc, Saviana’s work has been produced/published/performed globally. Associate Professor of Theatre at Ithaca College. MA Performance Studies, MFA Dramatic Writing, NYU. www.saviana.com
Bryan Reynolds (PhD Harvard) is Distinguished, Chancellor’s and Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at UC Irvine, and Artistic Director of the Transversal Theater Company. His plays and musicals have been produced at 71 venues in 19 countries worldwide. He is the author of seven academic books on transversal poetics and performance. www.bryanreynolds.com
Kayla Emerson (BA, UC Irvine) is an actor, dancer, choreographer, producer and member of IATSE 600. She has choreographed and performed with TCC in Romania, The Netherlands, and throughout California, and toured as a dancer with the Grammy-nominated metal band In This Moment. She is co-founder of Toil and Trouble Burlesque, Shakespearean Burlesque company.
Gosia Lorenz is a spiritual life coach, facilitator, and energy healer, as well as a performer, who works with clients and teaches workshops across North and South America, Europe, and Africa on various subjects, especially women’s empowerment, consciousness, psychic abilities, spirit perception and communication, healing, relationships, creativity, and holistic business. www.gosialorenz.com
Emilia Simeonov is a versatile classical violinist and music educator. She is also a passionate improviser incorporating styles from world music to contemporary improvisation. She has performed in NYC Fringe Festival at La MaMa theater, Oslo New Theater, Mostraspelet, Knut Hamsun Festival. She currently teaches applied violin and chamber music at LA City college.
Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz is a UC Irvine professor and head of its lighting program, as well as a professional lighting designer with national and international credits. He is the resident lighting designer for Transversal Theatre Company and a Co-Associate Artistic Director and Resident Lighting Designer for the Great River Shakespeare Festival. lradesigns.com.
Vincent Olivieri (MFA, Yale) has designed on- and off-Broadway, at regional theatres around the country, and internationally. He focuses on new work and his New York credits include design and score for HIGH, contributions to August Wilson’s RADIO GOLF, and productions at The Public Theatre, Second Stage, 59e59, Gorilla Productions, and Art Meets Commerce. He teaches at UC-Irvine. Soundandstage.net
Transversal Theater Company (TTC) is a nonprofit organization of American and European artists based in Amsterdam. Founded in 2003 by Bryan Reynolds, Lonnie Alcaraz, Douglas-Scott Goheen, and a number of other artists, TTC is an experimental theater company known for creating works that explore charged social, cultural, conceptual, and political realities of today through the combined socio-cognitive theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology of Transversal Poetics. transversaltheater.com
StudioLab is a performance design lab connecting research, design, and community orgs, schools, and NGOs working to make a difference in healthcare, human rights, digital equity, and the environment. Founded by Jon McKenzie in the mid 1990s at New York University and now located at Cornell University, StudioLab mixes cultural, technological, and organizational performance to explore practices of experience design and emerging forms of platform performativity. studiolab.world
Thank you!
Special thanks to Chair of Department of Theatre W. B. Worthen and Director of Student Experience & Engagement Department Catlin Michael Wojtkowski and to Barnard College for their generous support.
Extra special thanks to Jim Fealy, Walter Salas-Humara, and Ken Weaver at 14BC and to Alexis Karl at Pratt Institute.
LifeLines Research: Cosmography and Traumaturgy
Transmedia research flows across different media, genres, and platforms to move different bodies in different communities and worlds. Dramaturgical research and rapid-prototyping design for LifeLInes’ different events began near the outbreak of war in Ukraine, after McKenzie and Stănescu discussed seeing portrait photographs of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Professor Hiram Corson in Cornell University’s Uris Library. In the mid-1870s Blavatsky stayed at Corson’s Ithaca home while writing Isis Unveiled, a founding text of modern Theosophy. Corson, a Cornell professor of English and Anglo-Saxon literature, Shakespeare, and elocutionary rhetoric, held that only by reading texts aloud could their subconscious, spiritual dimensions be revealed. Upon our realizing that Blavatsky channeled spirits and herself hailed from near Odesa, other patterns emerged.
Historical and dramaturgical research has been guided by Serhii Plokhy’s deep historical study, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. Tuning in a series of transformative moments — from Herodotus to Jarslov the Wise to our plurally divided present — we decided to stage four paired encounters of eight worlds (hence cosmography) that touch on cosmic birthpangs, creativity in dark times (hence traumaturgy). JM and SS developed LifeLines’ creative concept and 4×4 “exquisite world-child” structure during animated walks in Ithaca’s gorges, zooming intermittenly with Bryan in CA and Leeny in Ithaca to share and generate ideas, images, etc. We seek to reanimate subterranean worlds provoked by the present war and its resonance with other unsettling events, including the pandemic, climate change, and polarizing social platforms.
Confronting generative AI teaching foundational writing classes, McKenzie began exploring Stable Diffusion’s transmediation of words and images, devising from creative walks prompts such as “Blavatsky and Freud receive paternity suits in their offices” and “Blavatsky and Freud train as astronauts underwater” to visualize speculative scenarios. From his training and work in avant-garde painting, video, performance, and interface design, he quickly realized that the platform’s transmedial collage and abductive tweening/animation operations effectively reveal and disrupt the Kantian architecture of empiricism and rationality housing our models of Imagination, genius, originality, and copyright. Students in both writing and design courses shared their explorations.
Via Humboldt and other educators, generations around the world have incorporated Kant’s critical architecture in their studies of the arts and sciences for it structures the spatiotemporal coordinates of our modern world, as well as the research and presentation of modern knowledge (articles, books, data sets) and its legal protection in archives and/or databases. By contrast, copyleft activists Critical Art Ensemble and Electronic Disturbance Theater sometimes distinguish their openly recombinant work as cultural production, while Indigenous media-makers draw on many other cosmogonies and creative traditions. Thus alongside the geology of morals we find rich and strange strata of creativities, originations, and cosmic birthpangs that AI for better and worse potentiality democratizes.
To explore and share our work, we have presented and published LifeLines research elsewhere.
At PQ23/Prague Quadrennial 2023, a major conference and performance festival featuring designers from around the world, we presented our early development work to Performance Grounds: Unsettling Cultural Landscapes & the Spatial Politics of Assembly, an international symposium organized by IRFT’s Theatre Architecture Working Group, with “LifeLines Traumaturgy: Wherewhen Nothing Takes Place but the Place,” a 6-min video.
For the journal La Deleuziana‘s special issue, Making Cosmos: The Tangle Of The Universe, we published a multigenre text, “Cosmography via LifeLines: A Traumaturgy of Making Cures” that describes and instantiates the collaborative structure while outlining a pluriversal approach to dramaturgy and performance.