This is Not a Theater
From conversations with Plays & Players actors, directors, and stagehands from the last forty years, Indian-Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul reproduces that history, and his own experiences researching it, on gigantic illustrative banners, a comic book, and video portraits. Rawanchaikul's participatory and community-based illustrative aesthetic breaks down the barriers between artist and audience with lively humor and the stunning breath of his company's colorful and detailed work.
Audiences can read the comic book based on interviews, listen to a live four-piece band playing music from past productions, view a theatrical installation transpiring in the theater, and listen audio recordings of stories told by past performers at Plays & Players. Serving as a reflection on the community and theatrical productions, This is Not a Theater comprises the history and personality that has inhabited this site from its beginnings to the present.
The Living Newspaper: On Location
“Framed by these historical and political referents, [The Living Newspaper] proposes a discussion around how public empathy is cultivated in the oversaturated program of contemporary news media.” Magenta Magazine
///////
In a video project commissioned by CNN, Push Poll, in the advance of the 2012 presidential election, New York artist Liz Magic Laser investigated the power of polls to influence public opinion and the persuasive effects of the so-called “man on the street” news segments. Laser now extends her ongoing project, The Living Newspaper: On Location, in a series of live focus groups reflecting on the reception of local news coverage.
Laser will recruit members of the audience to join her focus groups that will take place onstage, in real time, and be witnessed by the audience. Culling from a long list of therapeutic, focus group, and even cult-like techniques, Laser produces a participatory environment where the audience becomes members of an ongoing study in interpreting the news. Features discussions with local experts on issues ranging from the school closing crisis to the Philadelphia Eagles.
///////
Liz Magic Laser lives and works in New York City as a performance and video artist. She is particularly recognized for her mixed-media pieces that malleate juxtapositions between the viewer and the viewed; those on and off screen by blurring those distinctions using a quirky selection of elements including elephant costumes constructed from bank advertisements, agitprop theater tactics, and mute commentaries by clowns. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program, having received multiple prestigious grants and has had her work exhibited internationally at MoMA PS 1,The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Pace Gallery in New York, Prague Biennale 2009, Performa 11 Biennial, Mälmo Konsthall, Sweden, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. She is a current resident at New York’s Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space.
