Habit

***The date and time for this open rehearsal is May 1st, time TBA. Stay tuned to our website for more details.***

At the center of Habit is a new three-character realist play, commissioned from Jason Grote and set in an apartment. Built around the play will be an installation that fuses TV production, durational performance, behavioral psychology, and theater and asks questions about spectatorship, performance, routine, reality and realism. At the Watermill Center, David Levine and his collaborators—playwright Jason Grote, set designer Marcia Ginsberg, and three professional actors—will develop the work, which will be presented at the Luminato Festival 2010 in Toronto later this year.

Habit is set in a four-walled, fully furnished, functioning apartment (stocked fridge, working stove, plumbing) that is being designed by Marcia Ginsberg and will be constructed inside a project space, with room for audiences to circulate around the outside of the set. Actors will inhabit the set for nine hours a day, performing the play on a loop, communicating only through the dialogue, improvising staging as it suits their needs—if they’re hungry, they’ll cook; if they’re dirty, they’ll wash—and the needs of the characters. Spectators will circulate around the enclosure during exhibition hours, observing the actors through the apartment’s windows, (2-way mirrors) or in a separate room on a live, eight-camera video feed. The “privacy” of the apartment will allow the actors to employ a more “private” acting style—improvisatory, relaxed, filmic—even while they’re in full public view. Sometimes the fight scene happens while someone’s making a sandwich and someone else is taking a piss; sometimes it happens as one person’s trying to watch Oprah and the other one’s about to take a shower—just like in real life.

In the final phase of the project, each of the video iterations will be burned onto DVDs, creating both final documentation of the project and 80-90 unique films.

David Levine’s work encompasses performance, theater, installation and video. His projects, including Bauerntheater and Venice Saved: A Seminar, have been seen at Documenta XII, Gavin Brown's Enterprise @ Passerby, Galerie Feinkost [Berlin], Galerie Magnus Mueller [Berlin], HAU2 [Berlin], PS122, the Sundance Theater Lab, the Vineyard Theater, Primary Stages, the Atlantic, and Cabinet Magazine’s exhibition space. Habit is co-commissioned by Mass MoCA and the prestigious Luminato Festival, Toronto, Canada’s largest visual and performing arts festival, where it will be presented in June 2009.