New York is Here!
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Councils Sitelines Festival is excited to announce Aaron Rosenblums newest performance installation, New York Is Here!
New York Is Here! will be presented on July 6-8 and July 13-15 at 7:30pm at 32 Avenue of the Americas in Tribeca (at Walker Street, A/C/E to Canal Street Station, meet in the lobby). The performance is FREE. For reservations, please go to www.site-lines.org.
More after the break…
The excitement of the experience truly comes moment to moment out of nowhere. Director Aaron Rosenblums deft use of space forces audiences out of a passivity that has unfortunately become rote in much of the theatre of today.
-Robin Reed, nytheater.com
New York Is Here! is a performance installation that honors the mythology of our great metropolis. Parts funhouse, historical narrative, and performance art, New York Is Here! goes inside the Citys chaos to explore how individual tales form the legend of the mass. The site-specific journey leads audiences through a 5,000 square foot raw space on the ground floor of AT&Ts old Long Distance Building, an art deco historical landmark building.
Task-oriented dances mix with voiced-over text, giving life to a series of vignettes including the Chinese food deliveryman stuck in a Bronx elevator, McGurks Suicide Hall (a notorious Bowery saloon made famous for its singing waiters and prostitutes suicides), the Fulton Fish Market, number-running lotteries, love, baseball, politics and more. Other movement influences include still images sourced from crime scene photographs of the 1930s, early talkie films, law enforcement tactics, and a fishmongers repetitive tasks.
New York Is Here! was conceived and directed by Aaron Rosenblum. Designers include Hannah Price (Scenic), Jason Sebastian (Sound), Carrie Wood (Light) and Wendy Yang (Costume). Performers include Emily Alpren, Jodi Bender, Jennifer Lafferty, Aaron Unger and Elizabeth Ward. George Sebastian plays live piano.
Aaron Rosenblum has been making performance in New York for 5 years. Rosenblum adapted and directed the site-specific Dr. Faustus and the Seven Deadly Sins (2005) at the Chocolate Factory, a performing arts space he co-founded with Brian Rogers of theater et al in 2004. He has worked with over 50 artists, domestically and abroad including Big Dance Theater, David Neumann and David Zambrano. He has been on staff at Dance Theater Workshop and is currently in the production department at St. Anns Warehouse.
New York Is Here! has been shown in progress at Dance Theater Workshop and The Stable in Brooklyn. Sitelines is made possible with lead support from Altria Group, Inc. and the New York Mercantile Exchange. Additional support provided by New York State Council on the Arts, Morgan Stanley, and Harkness Foundation for Dance. Sitelines is presented in association with the River to River Festival.