Theatre

“Spectacle Theater: Image, Sound, Text” Public Performance

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by Assistant Professor Julie Beth Napolin

Thursday, May 4

Two screenings: 7:30pm and 10pm. $5

Please join the students and instructors of “Spectacle Theater: Image, Sound, Text” for their final screenings and performances at Spectacle Theater, a collectively owned and operated micro-cinema (124 S. 3rd St., Brooklyn).

Multidisciplinary artists from Eugene Lang College have come together to make some sweet dissonance between image, sound, and text. Having spent the semester learning and theorizing the expanses and limitations unique to artistic collaboration, six groups take up their chosen mediums. Stolen and live footage, original and sampled sound, archived microfilms, and live performance are collaged together in dynamic shorts that aim to dispute and reboot historicized modes of seeing, hearing, and analysis in the cinematic surround. Theatrically toppling storied tropes, shifting salient subjectivities, uncovering and rediscovering the assemblage of quotidian experiences in private/ public spaces, these six films and performances are imaginative and galvanizing presentations that update and augment monumental theoretical texts that have come to shape audiovisual perception.

As a bonus for the 10pm show, there will be a live performance at 9pm. Meridians (Julie Beth Napolin) and Lang student Eric Bayless-Hall will produce a live, improvised score for an edit of Antonioni’s Red Desert (edited by C. Spencer Yeh). Their collaboration explores the aesthetics of appearance and disappearance, working through the power of sound and image to appear out of and return to nothingness. The performance is influenced by Stephen Heath’s seminal essay “Narrative Space” in Questions of Cinema as well as the writings of Hannah Arendt on the politics of the public as supported by a space of appearance.

For more information about the individual pieces and tickets (which may be purchased in advance or at the door), please go to the Spectacle Theater website. Seating is very limited.

Present at all screenings will be Dr. Julie Beth Napolin, Assistant Professor at Eugene Lang, Lisa Brenner, Seminar Fellow, and Shiva Addanki, Research Assistant, and co-teacher C. Spencer Yeh, artist and volunteer at Spectacle Theater..

This project is a collaboration with the Civic Liberal Arts Program at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts.