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- A House in Bali composed by Evan Ziporyn will perform as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival 2010 — tickets are here!!
- 21C Magazine publishes an interview with Samuel R. Delany and Jay Scheib
about the making of Bellona Destroyer of Cities
A HOUSE IN BALI, opera by Evan Ziporyn
October 8-9, 2010: Cutler Majestic Theater, Boston
October 14-16, 2010: BAM Next Wave Festival, New York City
FIDELIO, opera by Beethoven
01/30/11: Saarlandisches Staatstheater, Saarbruecken
BELLONA, DESTROYER OF CITIES, play after Samuel R. Delany's novel Dhalgren
05/11: Institute of Contemporary Arts Boston
PUNTILA UND SEIN KNECHT MATTI, play by Brecht
Dates TBA 2010: Theater Augsburg, Augsburg Germany
PERSONA, opera after the film by Bergman
December 23, 2010: Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston
Writer, director and designer of plays, operas, and installations, Scheib's work has been widely presented in widely in Europe and the U.S. He is Associate Professor for Music and Theater Arts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a frequent Guest Professor for Acting and Directing at both the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria and the Norwegian Theater Academy in Fredrikstad. Based dually in Cambridge and New York, Scheib's recent works include a sold- out run of Bellona, Destroyer of Cities at The Kitchen in New York and a new production of Bertolt Brecht's Puntila und Sein Knecht Matti at Theater Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany.
SIMULATED CITIES / SIMULATED SYSTEMS
Parts 1-3 Introduction
“Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems” is a trilogy of interdisciplinary performance works being developed and produced in residence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Centered on collaborations across disciplines both inside and outside of traditional performing arts idioms, each production re-imagines itself through dialogues with civil engineering and urban planning, computer science and artificial intelligence, and aerospace and astronautics, respectively. “Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems” proposes an investigation of simulation practices as they apply to science and engineering— using the findings in the ongoing development of dramaturgies for new plays. I am interested in telling contemporary stories with contemporary means. Emerging technologies continue to radically change our lives and continue to alter the way in which we perceive changes in ourselves, our social networks, and our environment. I am interested in folding these technologies into performance and exposing and expanding the limits of their expression.
With “Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems” I have gravitated toward science fiction authors who, have made especially humanizing contributions to the discourse of science, technology and engineering through fiction.
The first work in the trilogy, Untitled Mars (This Title May Change) simulated Mars on Earth, coupling transcripts the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah with the science fiction visions of Philip K Dick, Stanislaw Lem and Kurd Lasewitz, as its principle research materials. It was premiered at Performance Space 122 in New York City. The second piece, Bellona, situates Earth on Mars using Urban Planning and conceptual Civil Engineering technologies as a platform to simulate the cyberpunk city of Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction novel Dhalgren. The third work, World of Wires, models Earth in Earth in Earth by borrowing simulation tactics from computer science and artificial intelligence to reinterpret Galouye's novel Simulacron-3 and Werner Fassbinder’s science fiction television series Welt am Draht for live performance.
Under the banner, Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems, each performance is built around collaborations across disciplines in both traditional and experimental performing arts, science and engineering. All three works are currently in development at MIT, representing collaborations with students and faculty from laboratories and research groups across the Institute and beyond.
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Part 1.
Untitled Mars (This Title May Change)
Untitled Mars (This Title May Change) premiered at Performance Space 122 in April 2008 and was honored with an Obie Award for Best Scenic Design. While developing Untitled Mars at MIT, I sought out primary collaborations with research scientists, graduate students and faculty from the Aerospace Astronautics and Anthropology Departments. This resulted in relationships with a variety of space visionaries and space anthropologists from organizations such as The Mars Society, Space X, and NASA. Using both live and filmed interviews with individuals such Robert Zubrin, Zahra Kahn, and Henrik Hargitai, the resulting performance was a part documentary, part science fiction performance about the potential for a sustained human presence on the Martian surface. With footage shot on location at the Mars Desert Research Station and staged re-enactment of actual Mars simulations, Untitled Mars also became a run-away antic story of what might happen should humans establish a society on the Red Planet.
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Part 2.
Bellona, Destroyer of Cities
"You may ask me what place the image of the city of Bellona holds in the minds of those who have never been here. How can I presume to suggest? There are times when these streets seem to underpin all the capitals of the world. At others, I confess, the whole place seems a pointless and ugly mistake, better obliterated than abandoned. The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous place where anything may happen. There is a deceiving warmth that asks nothing. What use does any of us have for two moons? Objects are lost in doublelight, What makes it terrible is that in this timeless city, in this spaceless preserve any slippage can occur. Sometimes it seems as if these walls on pivots are controlled by subterranean machines, so that, after one passes, they might suddenly swing to face another direction. Parting at this corner, joining at that one, like a great maze – forever adjustable, therefore unlearnable." from Samuel R. Delany's, Dhalgren
In Bellona, Scheib combines passages from the novel with original material, movement sequences and live video to trace several intertwining plotlines driven by a group of characters with shifting identities. Set in a city doomed to revise its cataclysms again and again, Bellona, Destroyer of Cities draws on the labyrinthine world imagined by Delany to express the intricate and at times abstract delineations of race, gender and sexuality today.
Scheib’s new work for the stage, like Delany’s monumental novel, is a story about a family struggling to sustain a reality that has long ago become fiction; a young white army deserter from the South who doesn’t believe he is a racist at heart but nonetheless pulls the trigger on a black activist; gangs with strange candy-colored technology roaming the broken streets. And then a newcomer arrives on the scene. She can't remember her name but is determined to become a great writer and in this city that continually reconstructs itself, she learns to write. As the story progresses, we don’t know if the world and her experiences determine her poetry or if her poetry determines the world. Time slips, and the catastrophes happen again and again.
As William Gibson puts it in his foreword to Dhalgren, Bellona is a “recombinant city…a metaphoric Middle American streetscape, transfigured by some unspecified thing or process, where nothing remains quite as it was.” In the Roman pantheon, Bellona is the goddess of war, the destroyer of cities. In this sense, we can see Dhalgren as a parable about the potential for disaster in the modern American city. We think about Detroit and the prospects for renaissance in that demolished urban environment. There may be a lot less people there today than before—but there are still people there. And there are still people who go there. There are people still making art, still inspiring beyond the city’s porous borders. Gibson also wrote that Dhalgren is “a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any multiplicity of doors.” In Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, Jay Scheibcreates something like a time-lapse motion portrait of a city and its people caught up in a permanent revolution, socially, sexually, and racially.
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Part 3.
World of Wires
Inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 science fiction series for German television, Welt am Draht, Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel, Simulacron - 3, and Nick Bostrom’s brilliant paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation;” World of Wireswill bring together researchers from the Media Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labs at MIT to develop conceptions of liveness through a reinterpretation of virtuality. Galouye’s novel chronicles the creation of a computerized simulation of the world—the people, the weather, the movement of markets—that is so like-life that it is almost interchangeable with the real world. In Galouye’s vision, this model holds enormous political and economic potential. In Fassbinder’s adaptation of the novel, it becomes clear just how easily this potential may be subverted. When one of the two scientists who designed the system suddenly goes missing, the other begins a quest to uncover the reasons for his disappearance. Eventually, he discovers that he is himself a part of the simulation that he had been hired to design. Credited as the inspiration for the motion picture, The Matrix, Simulacron-3 is an early critique of both the genius and the fallibility of virtual worlds. World of Wires synthesizes this emblematic tale of our times into scenes in which simulation is regularly migrated into reality, and back. Development begins Fall 2010, for premiere in January 2012 in New York.
Engaging virtual simulation practices from multiple perspectives—computer science, philosophy, electrical engineering, and science fiction in a world which, as Baudrillard suggested, regularly migrates simulations into reality, and vice versa. “World of Wires” with its eclectic mix of forms, will capfive years of work under the banner “Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems.”
Contact Jay Scheib: jayscheib@jayscheib.com
A House in Bali Bellona, Destroyer of Cities Puntila und sein Knecht Matti Addicted to Bad Ideas, Peter Lorre's 20th Century Untitled Mars (This Title May Change) This Place is a Desert, The Power of Darkness Draußen tobt die Dunkelziffer Mozart Luster Lustik Herakles Persona World of Wires Fidelio Women Dreamt Horses |
Bambiland MargarethHamlet Kommander Kobayashi Our Town Lorenzaccio The Demolition Downlown The Making of Americans The Vomit Talk of Ghosts West Pier In This is the End of Sleeping The Medea Falling and Waving The War Plays
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SPONSORSHIP
LEAD SPONSORS OF BELLONA, DESTROYER OF CITIES
The Kitchen with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States; The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts; The Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Office of the Associate Provost and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS
Very special thanks to the following individual contributors: Anonymous, Winsome Brown & Claude Arpels, Elaine Chen, Merry Conway, Lisa Cortes, Shari Frilot & Roya Rastegar, Jennifer Gibbs & Luis Castro, Agnes Gund, Catherine Gund, Mitch Hurley, Leila Kinney, Marty & Valerie Levenstein, Edward McKeaney, Shira Milikowsky, Walter Mosley, Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Therese Selvaratnam, Lucy Sexton, Audry & Alex Weintrob, Jed Weintrob, Kim Whitener, Soon-Young Yoon & Rick Smith
We greatly appreciate the support of all the individuals and institutions listed above. Please consider contributing to the productions of Jay Scheib and Tanya Selvaratnam. Your name will be added to the list above or you may choose to remain anonymous.
To make a donation by credit card, please visit the following link: https://www.thefield.org/ContributionToSA.aspx? Select “Jay Scheib” in the drop-down menu. Or you may write a check made out to “The Field” with “Jay Scheib” in the memo line and send it to: Tanya Selvaratnam; 504 Grand Street, H13; New York, NY 10002
The Field is a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, 501 (c) (3) organization serving the New York City performing arts community. Contributions made to The Field and earmarked for Jay Scheib/Tanya Selvaratnam are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. For more information about The Field contact: The Field, 161 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013, (212) 691-6969, fax: (212) 255-2053. A copy of The Field's latest annual report may be obtained, upon request, from The Field or from the Office of the Attorney General, Charities Bureau, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
Producer of Simulated Cities / Simulated Systems
Tanya Selvaratnam, 1.917. 754.4179
tselvar@aol.com
Worldwide Tour Representation:
(Untitled Mars, Addicted to Bad Ideas, Bellona)
Thomas O. Kriegsmann, President
ArKtype, P.O. Box 1948; New York, NY 10027
http://www.arktype.org, 1.917.386.5468
tommy@arktype.org
for A House in Bali:
Kenny Savelson, Executive Director
Bang on a Can, 80 Hanson Place, Suite 701
Brooklyn, NY 11217 USA, tel: +1 718.852.7755
fx: +1 718.852.7732, kenny@bangonacan.org
www.bangonacan.org
Jay Scheib, jayscheib@jayscheib.com, 1.917.612.2137