New York Premiere
Co-Presented with Dance Theater Workshop and Performance Space 122
For nearly 25 years, the Norwegian art collective Verdensteatret has created original works at the intersection of theater, visual art, music and sound. Their newest piece, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing, is a bewilderingly complex art machine played by performers, musicians, and robots.
In this high-powered performance, company members manipulate an intricate array of kinetic sculptures assembled from the refuse of everyday life—bicycle wheels, scraps of metal, lenses, celluloid film strips, obsolete amplifier tubes and other electromechanical contraptions—to create a constantly transforming landscape of deeply poetic images and sound. Bringing artists of different backgrounds together, the work shows Verdensteatret’s fascination with all kinds of animation–the strange and miraculous activity of breathing life into dead objects, stiff figures, and frozen images. These are not the smooth and seamless computer-generated images we have become accustomed to, but rather images forged through an elaborate system of pulleys and gears, the pulse of electricity, the grinding of metal, the labor of human bodies.
Verdensteatret riffs on the animation filmmakers the Quay Brothers and Ladislav Starevich, the automata and mechanical toys of the 19th century, modern kinetic and conceptual sculpture, the early electronic music (1920 – 1960), among other influences, to create their own unique hybrid of performance, installation and concert.
February 24 - 26 at 7:30pm
February 27 at 5pm
$20
Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
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Press
"And All the Question Marks Started to Sing might be the most extravagant experience Dance Theater Workshop has ever hosted. The hour-long, enigmatic fantasia of theater, music and visual and sound art, created by Norway’s Bessie-winning Verdensteatret collective, commandeers nearly every surface of DTW’s performance space and explodes throughout its air."
– Eva Yaa Asantewaa – Dance Bloggers – 2/26/2011- "And All the Question Marks Started to Sing looks to be one of the more unusual and immersive presentations in recent memory. It may, in fact, manage the feat of putting Verdensteatret on the tip of your tongue." – Mark Peikert – CityArts – 2/22/2011
- "Performed by the Norwegian art collective Verdensteatret ... this production continued the group’s magical explorations into hybrid forms in which performance, installation, animation and sound unite for the good of art." – Gia Kourlas - The New York Times - 2/27/2011
- "...A concert is playing. The musicians, though, are DJs, robots and sinister looking contraptions comprising bicycle wheels and crocodile clips, all casting eerie shadows on the dimly lit, white walls. Utterly mesmerizing, quietly terrifying, the work by the Verdensteatret collective is a must-see..." – Smart Shanghai
Sponsors
- Additional funding for this program is provided by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, and the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Andrew E. and G. Norman Wigeland Fund. This presentation is made possible, in part, by the generous support of Virginia and Tim Millhiser through the David R. White Producers Circle. FuturePerfect received a generous contribution from Charles and Bonnie Granatir in support of this presentation. Verdensteatret is supported by the Arts Council Norway, and The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The live production of And All the Question Marks Started to Sing is a co-production between Verdensteatret, Theater der Welt, Black Box Teater, BIT Teatergarasjen and Avant Art Festival.
