About the Performers

Above video from FLATSITTER’s previous VR project Las Olas (The Waves)

ABOUT FLATSITTER and Morning Dew

FLATSITTER is a digital media and performance collective based in Buffalo, NY. Morning Dew is a virtual reality piece by FLATSITTER, the moniker for Buffalo artist Kyle Marler, in collaboration with installation artist David Mitchell, featuring music by Shawn Elliott Lewis and Brianna Battista.

1961: A Canadian folk singer named Bonnie Dobson woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a post-apocalyptic folk song called “Morning Dew.”

She later recalled: “After everyone went to bed, I sat up and suddenly I just started writing this song although I had never written a song in my life.” It’s a love story about the end of the world – told in reverse.

Morning Dew is a virtual reality love song to the apocalypse. 

Due to the nature of virtual reality the performance is to be experienced two-at-a-time. Reservations are encouraged to maintain flow. The installation will  takes place at the Adam Mickiewicz Library and Dramatic Circle, 612 Fillmore Ave. More info on the artist’s at flatsitter.com and david-mitchell.com.

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FROM THE PRESS:

“And, brothers and sisters, “wow” is definitely the word…a virtual reality experience that’s on the weirder side of sublime, that’s eerie and personal and arranged like a beautiful immersive installation.” – Austin Chronicle

“A highlight of the 2016 Satellite Art Show during Art Basel Miami Beach.” – Playboy

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Above video from last year’s Torn Space performance The Gathering (2017).

ABOUT Torn Space Theater and Stations

Torn Space Theater returns to the scenic setting of Buffalo’s Silo City, this year exploring a whole new section of the industrial complex. Collaborating with local artists, technicians, and performers, Stations will swathe audiences in sound, light, and projection design to create a visceral and otherworldly experience.

STATIONS will also feature work by NYC-based sound designer Avi Amon, and gong percussionist Liz Holland, among other Buffalo-based artists, including Brian Milbrand, Kristina Siegel, Justin Rowland and Frank Napolski, among others.

The pre-show VIP experience for STATIONS will feature a serene boat ride on the canal surrounding the scenic grain silos, accompanied by an original soundtrack composed by Torn Space sound designers. This unique perspective of the historic industrial site will provide a fitting prelude to the night’s meditative performance with a wine and hors d’oeuvres reception.

Torn Space Theater is in its 15th season of experimental contemporary performance in residence at the Adam Mickiewicz Library & Dramatic Circle at Fillmore and Paderewski in the heart of Buffalo’s east side. The company was featured in the January 2017 edition of Chance Magazine for its site-specific production, They Kill Things, and Atlantic Magazine’s “The Best Thing My City Did This Year.”

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FROM THE PRESS:

“…an explosion of what “theater” means. More than perhaps any other production in the company’s storied history of pushing boundaries and defying definitions, it forces viewers to rethink and expand their own ideas of what theater or performance can be.” – The Buffalo News

“…conceived on a scale most theatre companies can only dream of.”  – PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

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Above video contains excerpts from the Bridgman|Packer Performance TRUCK.

ABOUT Bridgman|Packer Dance and Truck

Performed inside of a 17-ft box truck, Bridgman|Packer Dance’s Truck brings performance to unusual locations. Through their signature integration of live dance performance and video technology, an ordinary box truck evolves from the utilitarian into a re-imagined space, a micro-world of magical visions and transformation. With constant shifts of context and scale, startling imagery emerges; a house of a thousand rooms, an aquarium, and a leafy hideaway come alive.

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, collaborators in choreography and performance and Co-Artistic Directors of Bridgman|Packer Dance, are known for their work integrating live performance and video technology.  They were awarded a 2017 New York and Performance Award for Outstanding Production (The Bessies). In New York City they have been presented by Lincoln Center, City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts), Central Park Summerstage, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and The Sheen Center. The Village Voice named them “Best of 2016.” More info on the company at bridgmanpacker.org.

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FROM THE PRESS:

“Their fabulous new wordless dramas…bridge time, space, and passion, showing us past and present simultaneously…startling, time-based visual art.”  – The Village Voice

“The boundary between reality and imagination is brilliantly blurred…Welcome to the future of dance.” – Star Tribune, Minneapolis

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Above video of the 600 Highwaymen performance The Fever, featured at last year’s Response Festival (2017). 

ABOUT 600 Highwaymen and Manmade Earth

600 Highwaymen returns to Buffalo after touring their highly-acclaimed audience-driven work The Fever around the globe to work on a new production entitled Manmade Earth, to be presented in its first stage of development November 16-18 at Torn Space Theater. This residency marks the final component of the 2018 Response Festival, Torn Space’s annual series of original contemporary performance by local and internationally-recognized artists. The residency is made possible with the support of the Creative Arts Initiative grant from the University at Buffalo.

Manmade Earth is at the intersection of performance and installation. A guided performance that is created by the attending audience, this piece continues 600 HWM’s singular trajectory of making work both for and by community. The audience that comes together for the performance are the authors of the work. In this piece, an ever-shifting landscape of objects and materials are manipulated by the artists and audience. Manmade Earth examines the evolution of our society; how we come together to create what we could not on our own. Buildings get built, destroyed, built again. How do the structures that we make push us together or keep us apart?

Manmade Earth is at the earliest stages of its development and will be presented after a two week residency working with a local teenage cast, in tandem with an new original piece by Torn Space Theater. For its parallel installation, Torn Space will partner with the UB School of Architecture and Planning, and Christopher Romano, Research Assistant Professor and designer of Light/Station, the newly-installed façade on the renovated studio next door to the Adam Mickiewicz Library and Dramatic Circle. This creative collaboration allows Torn Space to reimagine their recently expanded interior and exterior space.

Both projects are about reconfiguring what performance space means while investigating how the audience engages with performance in different ways based upon their proximity to performance and their ability to actively construct performance.

About 600 Highwaymen
600 Highwaymen is theater artists Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone. Since 2009, the duo’s 8 original works have been seen at The Public Theater, Abrons Arts Center, The Invisible Dog, American Repertory Theater, AT&T Performing Arts Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, On The Boards, Walker Arts Center, Wexner Center for the Arts; and Internationally, at Centre Pompidou and Parc de la Villette (France), Festival Theaterformen (Germany), Noorderzon Festival (The Netherlands), and more. In addition to an Obie Award in 2014 and Zurich’s ZKB Patronage Prize in 2015, Browde and Silverstone were named artist fellows by the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2016. More info on the company at 600highwaymen.org.

FROM THE PRESS:

“One of New York’s best non-traditional companies.” – The New Yorker

“The standard bearers of contemporary theater-making.” – Le Monde

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The third annual RESPONSE Festival, supported by funding from the Cullen Foundation, REDC, Erie County, NYS Danceforce and the Creative Arts Initiative of the University at Buffalo, will continue to bring community and scholarly involvement to the festival experience, with artist talks and select workshops held throughout the season.