Restless Productions NYC is and Obie and Bessie award winning production company, that excavates the theatrical and literary record to engage the past in a dialogue about its life in the present. The dismantling and repurposing of stories that have already been told is a practice in transformation, an attempt to create openings, to find away out and forward. Lead by director Mallory Catlett the company’s past work includes: two site-specific reconstructions of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Richard The Second and a remix of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, called This Was The End and Archive, an installation based on that performance. Currently Catlett is working on M/F Future, pair of pieces inspired by the novels of Doris Lessing (Dead Time of Plenty) and William Burroughs (Decoder 2017) co-produced by the Chocolate Factory and a new opera adaptation of a Janet Frame novel called Rainbird co-produced by Experiments in Opera. The company has received financial, commissioning and residency support from Chocolate Factory, Gibney Dance, Theatre Conspiracy, Stony Brook University, CultureHub, Playwrights Theatre Center, the Collapsable Hole, Mount Tremper Arts, Nancy Quinn, Creative Opportunity Fund, MacDowell Colony, Performing Garage, Barishnykov Arts, LMCC, Mabou Mines/SUITE, Jerome Foundation, Yaddo, NYSCA, piece by piece productions and Creative Capital. Catlett is a recipient of a Foundation for the Contemporary Arts 2015 Grants to Artists Award.
photo © Marina Oriente
DECODER 2017 is a concert series based on the Nova Trilogy that explores the language and prophecy of William Burroughs on the merging of body, media and machine. The performance is generated live by cassette tape DJ and sound artist G Lucas Crane and performer Jim Findlay, who act as both fictional characters and real-time systems operators. Together they play a set list of noisy image meals, kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, and obscene routines that expose our complicity in the systems that control us.
DECODER 2017 has received commissioning support from Chocolate Factory, Gibney Dance and Theatre Conspiracy; a FAHSS research grant from Stony Brook University; and development support from a CultureHub Micro-Residency, Playwrights Theatre Center, the Collapsable Hole, and a Watershed Lab residency at Mount Tremper Arts, with lead support by the National Endowment for the Arts. DECODER 2017 is a Creative Capital project. The writing of William Burroughs is used by permission of The Wylie Agency.