A quarterly showcase for short, in-progress, just beginning or just finished performance works.
7pm, Free
Following the August debut of Workshorse with superb performances by Joey Heinen and Tullah Sutcliffe, this much-needed showcase is back for a second round. Curated by Cara Krippner and Colleen Harriss, and presented by The Soap Factory, Workhorse offers artists the chance to share work at an early stage and gain useful feedback from their peers in an informal setting.
Featuring an immersive video installation, DIY computing, and loosely scripted but highly interactive theater, November's installment hinges on the theme of audience participation and interaction. Participating artists:
Siddarth Saikia will show an expanded version of Waterbody, a multi-channel video installation created earlier this year. Using projected underwater footage of patients being guided through therapeutic exercises in a pool, Waterbody creates an immersive environment by the arrangement of four screens in a square, which allows audiences to move in and out of the cube. As audience members explore the installation, their shadows are incorporated into the video's moving images via the arrangement of the screens. Waterbody's second showing at Workhorse will expand the original work from two channels to four, and introduces atmospheric sound as a new element of the installation.
Born in New Dehli, Siddarth Saikia is a senior at Macalester College, where he has shown Waterbody and other video works as part of the Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies department. He also helped create Open Set Collective, a group of experimental video artists who share criticism, footage, and create collective work.
Anthony Tran will present Touch Screen, an interactive installation that tracks, analyzes, and re-creates the varied movements of two hands on a table. As each pair of participants explore the surface of the table, their movement is processed and projected back onto the table in the form of corresponding, moving dots. Using small LED lights as wearable light outputs, hacked wiimotes as sensors, and a motion-sensitive sound vibration system, Touch Screen’s custom-engineered system of inputs and outputs is an experiment in DIY computing. Touch Screen attempts to recreate the simple sense of touch through machine mediation.
Originally from New York City, Anthony Tran is a third-year student at Macalester College where he studies Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology.
Ellis Isenberg will present Enormous Sun Group Therapy: Rise of the Half-Child, a theater work using audience participation to enact a therapy session between a Half-child, a Nutritionist, a Physical Therapist, and Big Sexy. Playing with Workhorse's focus on experimentation and audience interaction, the work is designed to be quickly adapted using new actors and audiences. Creating unpredictable circumstances within the scripted piece, all actors will be selected one day before the performance, and coached by Isenberg using simple techniques including pre-recorded voice, ad hoc special effects, and experimental visualization and breathing.
Ellis Isenberg is a graduate of Bard College (NY), and lives and works in New York, where he has created collaborative theater works with Dome Theater Company (NY), presenting plays in varied non-traditional settings, using non-actors and experimental acting techniques. He has also presented writing works at the St. Mark's Poetry project.