Spread Art invited New York City based theater group Sister Sylvester to Detroit for a 10-day residency retreat to work on their next project: Come From There.
Sister Sylvester - April 5th - 14th
Sister Sylvester is a Brooklyn-based collaborative theater company that uses performance to investigate the fictions—personal, political, and social—that are built up through language, and the dynamics of power that are created within those fictions. Since 2008, we have made work in both site-specific venues as well as in theaters, with a constant theme of investigating the audience-performer relationship at the heart of our practice. We've made work that is part performance and part rave, in an abandoned convent in Greenpoint; staged work in the cosmic-cavern installation space of artist Kenny Scharf; led audience members through freight elevators and into an old archive library for an immersive re-imagining of The Iceman Cometh. And we have developed work, such as our production Boxman, based on the novel of Kobo Abe, which are built of games and patterns rather than a set choreography, and are able to tour to a different venue every night and adapt to the new environment. We also work in theater spaces: most recently a month-long run of a new work at Dixon Place, and performances at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn.
Sister Sylvester is a Brooklyn-based collaborative theater company that uses performance to investigate the fictions—personal, political, and social—that are built up through language, and the dynamics of power that are created within those fictions. Since 2008, we have made work in both site-specific venues as well as in theaters, with a constant theme of investigating the audience-performer relationship at the heart of our practice. We've made work that is part performance and part rave, in an abandoned convent in Greenpoint; staged work in the cosmic-cavern installation space of artist Kenny Scharf; led audience members through freight elevators and into an old archive library for an immersive re-imagining of The Iceman Cometh. And we have developed work, such as our production Boxman, based on the novel of Kobo Abe, which are built of games and patterns rather than a set choreography, and are able to tour to a different venue every night and adapt to the new environment. We also work in theater spaces: most recently a month-long run of a new work at Dixon Place, and performances at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn.
PROJECT: COME FROM THERE
Come From There is a piece being made simultaneously in Turkey and in the USA. The piece is a
search for stories and forms, for a time where the defining paradigm is a sense of un- belonging, of
rootlessness, of being between cultures. Two directors - one in Turkey the other in the US - have set each other a series of challenges around this problem. In the first phase of the project they will work independently in their respective countries to create two performances, and in the second they will meet in both New York and Istanbul to combine their work and co-direct a final piece. Our piece is an attempt to wrestle with this sense of un-belonging through the lens of three performance makers from the previous generation, each of whom invented forms that became iconic to their place and time. The work of these three performers: Spalding Grey, Ethyl Eichelberger, Reza Abdoh, is the foundation of what we do as a company, and to this genre called ‘performance’ that we are a part of. We want to use the forms they created to see if they can hold contemporary stories – or to find out what we need to do to subvert and adapt these old forms for our contemporary reality. Working with an ensemble cast on what - in the case of the first two - are solo performances gives us the opportunity to complicate the single narratives, exploding these forms with new stories, and creating a performance for our times.
About Detroit Artist Residency Exchange:
Spread Art's Detroit Artist Residency Exchange invites international, national and regional artists to Detroit to develop, create, collaborate, perform, exhibit, present, discuss their work and to engage in the artistic community of Detroit. Spread Art is currently working with numerous Detroit organizations to provide performance, workshop and exhibition opportunities for visiting artists
*