JUDAH MAHAY (United States)
Discipline: Literature
In Residence: January 18-30, 2010
Judah Mahay crafts stories that take science to plausible extremes or reality to the magical. He was born and raised in the little fishing village of Talkeetna, Alaska, where his parents homesteaded. Since going to college in Boston, he as lived in Japan, worked as a sailor in Chicago, traveled Europe, got married in South Carolina, and now lives tucked into the woods of Hamptons, NY. This journey and all the points in-between have provided him with a unique perspective on life, culture, and society. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook Southampton. Visit judahmahay.com or download his smartphone app for iPhone or Android.
COLLABORATION TOWN (United States)
Discipline: Theatre, Performance
In Residence: January 18 – February 28, 2010
The celebrated ensemble theater company CollaborationTown returns to Watermill, deriving inspiration from the Morality Plays, primarily of the Medieval and Tudor periods, in a contemporary American environment. The didactic nature of the source plays, coupled with their utter lack of humor, makes them ripe for parody. CollaborationTown’s experimentation led them to the theatrical creation of a new self-help movement, Momentum: The Teachings of Ezra. Like all morality plays, the theatrical company represents a force, or church, that sets out to save the audience’s souls. CollaborationTown becomes MOMENTUM.
THE CONSTANT REALITY THEATRE (Iceland)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: February 9-28, 2010
The February Radio Drama was an ongoing radio project produced by The Constant Reality Theater—an Icelandic company founded by the visual artists Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir and Ragnar Kjartansson and musician Davíð Þór Jónsson. It was in production starting on February 10, 2010 at the Watermill Center as part of its residency program, with Ásdís as the writer, Davíð the sound producer, Ragnar the choreographer, and all three as the actors.
ANU PRODUCTIONS (Ireland)
Discipline: Music, Sound Art
In Residence: February 9-28, 2010
For this new work, the Irish artists’ collective Anu Productions takes as their point of departure Ireland’s canonical 10th century text, Fingal Rónáin, determining connections between the work and other tales from around the world—chiefly, the Phaedra myth. The result: the first staging of Fingal Rónáin, which has never been performed in Ireland, despite being part of the Irish canon for over a millennium. Rather than simply adapting the text into a play, Anu worked to boldly re-imagine it, creating a new work that straddles the world of theater and visual art.
ANDREAS HIRSCH (Germany)
Discipline: Music, Visual Art
In Residence: March 20 – April 4, 2010
The Cologne-based musician and visual artist Andreas Hirsch, aka TreeSpeedMusic, brought to Watermill a peculiar instrument he has been developing: the Palmonica, an electrified palm tree leaf that produces sounds akin to the thumb piano’s. During his spring residency, Hirsch collected sounds from the area surrounding Watermill and integrated them into a musical performance featuring his innovative instrument, contact and condenser microphones, effect pedals and other tools. This video is from his open rehearsal on April 1, 2010 – filmed and edited by Carlos Soto.
KEVIN DOYLE (United States)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: March 20-26, 2010
Kevin Doyle and his company Sponsored by Nobody developed ATM or this is [not] new york, a new play that investigates New Yorkers’ interactions with their city’s homeless population and the shifting demographics and values these encounters reveal. The piece is an installation that simulates the automated teller sections of banks, where the city’s homeless have long masqueraded as “doormen” for bank patrons in return for change, and which, ATM suggests, serve as modern-day confessionals.
DAVID LEVINE (United States)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: April 14-29, 2010
Habit is set in a four-walled, fully furnished, ranch house, designed by Marsha Ginsberg, with room for audiences to circulate around the outside of the set. The “privacy” of the house allowed the actors to employ a more “private” acting style—improvisatory, relaxed, filmic—even while they were in full public view. Sometimes the fight scene happened while someone was making a sandwich and someone else was taking a piss; sometimes it happens as one person tries to watch “Oprah” and the other is about take a shower—just like in real life.
GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH (Australia)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: April 14-29, 2010
The work of Australian artist Georgie Roxby Smith challenges the relationship between analog and digital systems, questions materiality and explores new possibilities of virtual reality software. In Reality Bytes, she extracts and re-injects her Second Life avatar into physical space so that her work exists on a kaleidoscope of planes: “in world,” within a body of physical sculptures, as ephemeral projections in space; and as recreated performances by both humans and avatars. The effect is that of a hall of mirrors, in which viewers occupy multiple realities at once.
CHRISTOPHER ROTH (Germany)
Discipline: Film & Video
In Residence: May 4-15, 2010
Christopher Roth and Georg Diez’s 80*81 is a unique project that combines their distinct disciplines to recreate historical events of 1980-1981, when the world’s cultural, political, and economic landscape changed dramatically in ways that are still apparent today. Roth and Diez have been collaborating with philosophers, scientists, astrologers and politicians in their investigation of those years and are publishing their findings in eleven books over the course of the project.
ANDRE GINGRAS (The Netherlands)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: May 25 – June 20, 2010
In his award-winning work, André Gingras strives to push dance to the limits of extreme physicality, working with other movement forms, such as break dancing (in the Bessie-winning CYP17), capoeira (in The Lindenmeyer System) and free-running (The Autopsy Project). He has also always sought to work in an interdisciplinary fashion, working with text and theatrical situations, video, animation and installation as important components of his choreographic vision. His work has appeared in a number of prestigious contexts, including the Venice Biennale. Gingras has been a collaborator of Robert Wilson since 1993.
SOBER & LONELY (International Collective)
Discipline: Performance, Multidisciplinary
In Residence: May 31 – June 20, 2010
Robyn Cook and Lauren von Gogh have been collaborating as Sober&Lonely since 2005. They carry out their transnational, multi-disciplinary, experimental performances in the form of a blog at soberandlonely.com. The posts, mostly comprised of photos, represent a constant dialogue between the two far-flung artists, although it’s often difficult to tell which artist is the creator, and which the addressee, of any given entry. The geographic distance between them is often palpable, as in a picture of two people on a beach with the headline, “This is where I waited for you, but you never arrived.”
STARY MWABA (Zambia)
Discipline: Visual Art
In Residence: September 19 – October 16, 2010
Stary Mwaba works represent his unending restlessness search for material comfort, spiritual and emotional fulfilment through the journey into self discovery. He has experimented with different media, in the process dealing with themes such as identity issues and many others. He has also created art works in form of wall murals in a inquiring, investigative, experimental and research- minded way on universal themes such as Human Rights, Politics etc, collaborating with other artists both locally and internationally on projects that engage with the public.
COLIN GEE (United States)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: September 18 – October 16, 2010
Trained as an actor at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, Colin Gee was a principal clown in the Cirque du Soleil production, Dralion.
MICHAEL DUDECK (Canada)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: October 5 – November 5, 2010
Michael Dudeck WITCHDOCTOR is a trans-disciplinary artist and cultural engineer whose work spans multiple media and forms including performance art, video/film, drawing, sculpture, web-projects, publications, text-work and installation. He has performed exhibited lectured and screened video works nationally and internationally including major galleries Pari Nadmi Gallery (Toronto), and John Connelly Presents. Dudeck’s work was featured in the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus Artist directory (surveying 500 artists below the ages of 33 (Phaidon Press) and was chosen to exhibit in AA Bronson’s notable exhibition AA Bronson’s School for Young Shamans, at John Connelly Presents in New York. Dudeck’s work involves inventing his own religion and presents aspects of that religion in installations, rituals, performances, video works and publications.
ERIN LELAND (United States)
Discipline: Visual Arts
In Residence: October 19 – November 5, 2010
Erin Leland is a performer, photographer and writer with an MFA from The University of Illinois, Chicago. In the Spring of 2010, Susanne Ghez curated Erin into the New Insight exhibition at Art Chicago, a competitive annual survey of work from twelve graduate programs nation-wide. Erin has also shown with Swimming Pool Project Space, Gallery 400, and Iceberg Gallery in Chicago.
Her writing is often the backside or equivalent to a photograph, placed within sight of other installed stories and pictures. Leland treats the camera as a performative tool. The action of taking a photograph is a way to negotiate the private and public, and to capture this line in construction. Photography is a performance that questions what is allowably seen.
ALEXANDRA SACHS (Germany)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: November 10-24, 2010
Alexandra Sachs is a German choreographer / scenographer based in Zurich (Switzerland) and New York City. She worked as a production designer for films, studied design, completed a master in Scenography and has a degree in Choreography. Her work is situated between the visual and the performing arts while focusing on creating a dialogue between the two.
CHOKRA (United Arab Emirates)
Discipline: Performance
In Residence: December 1-18, 2010
CHOKRA is a performance artist from the United Arab Emirates. His multi-dimensional performances integrate multi-lingual rap rhymes uttered in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Pashto, Bengali and English, live surrealistic visuals combined with digital and analogue sound, an algorithmic processing of electronic operatives via custom software and a heightened build of the theatrical with transnational costume. CHOKRA’s performances also accelerate the hyper sensory with an epic propagation of aromatic scent, Emirati oud, neon pyromania, brilliant hues in exploding pigments, crushed gold and powdered sandalwood.