Present ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _
62' Center for Theater and Dance Residency
public showings April 11- 12 2025
directed by: Nicolás Noreña
with: Yuki Kawahisa, Geo Kester, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Julia Sirna-Frest, and Timothy Scott
sound design: Robin Margolis
lighting design: Ryan Walters
“Dragon Country, the country of pain, is an uninhabitable country which is inhabitable, though. Each one crossing through that huge, barren country has his own separate track to follow across it alone. If the Inhabitants, the explorers of Dragon Country, looked about them, they’d see other explorers, but in this country of endured but unendurable pain each one is so absorbed deafened, blinded by his own journey across it, he sees, he looks for, no one else crawling across it with him… ”. (Tennessee Williams from I Can't Imagine Tomorrow)
Seconds is an intermedia exploration of suspension of disbelief and a study of staging death through the lenses of comedy, horror, the grotesque, tragedy, ritual, and dance. interweaving performative language from sportscasters, Noh theater, Tennessee Williams, and masked funerary rituals, the performance invites the audience to join in a contemplation of the delicate line between life and death, connecting us with the ancient roots of theater as a spiritual act of collective unbecoming
THE EXPONENTIAL FESTIVAL January 11- 14 2024
touring soon
created and performed by: Timothy Scott and Nicolás Noreña
light design: Daisy Long
sound design: Robin Margolis
assistant to the directors, stage manager and assistant sound designer: Lal Ensari
technical assistant and box office: Deniz Demikurt
THOSE MOVEABLE PIECES is a playful and intimate study of physical forms like a slow dance, a workout sequence, a slapstick routine, a beauty regiment, a superstitious ritual. Taking physical languages that codify daily doings of the body we deconstruct their typical formats and bring them into strange and distorted versions of themselves revealing narratives these forms carry within them and characters crashing against a codified world. Set in a warehouse with moveable seating the audience will establish for themselves the angle and proximity to the action of the performance.
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TOMATO MOUSE GALLERY August 24 - 28 2023
created and performed by: Nicolás Noreña
NOT I is a new original durational solo performance by Nicolás Noreña from 1PM to 9PM daily. The performance will be free and open to the public with outdoor seating, as well as a live stream.
For five days Nicolás will be in residence in a shallow room built in the storefront window of the gallery, viewable from the street outside. The duration of his presence will play with moments of performance and non-performance and subtle shifts between. Transforming space, character, presence and engagement, the performance will be created and evolve in real time, with wild shifts and hilarious transformations. It can be revisited multiple times over the five days as no two moments will be like each other.
Beware of giant tonsils.
Named after the short dramatic monologue by Samuel Becket, this piece draws on the ephemera of Nicolás’ ten years of creating theater with his company The Million Underscores. It touches on what is discarded in the process of making art, the backstage and the undocumentable. NOT I looks into the quiet and personal process of “putting on a show”.
NOT I
THE BRICK theater November 11- 21 2022
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
with: Timothy Scott, Marija Kovačević, Yuki Kawahisa, Madison Mayer, Geo Kester and Rebecca Bird
THE PASSERBY, or not __ even __ anything is a silent twelve track performance album inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Gallery Paintings.
In a constant experiment with entropy, form, and energy we use non-sequitur and non sensical action to jolt the mind into awareness of a truth outside of the pale ordinary logic. . Not- Even- Anything is what taoist philosopher Chang Tzu called a “space” or state of being in which people live freely from narrow identities and dwell in all time and place.
INVISIBLE THEATER
-The Garden-
(this is something Mary Overlie and I talked about and it is something she used to do with her students. We talked about playing with this idea but never came up with scores... I asked her if she could write about it... but to my knowledge she didn't. This is in her honor. Dedicated to her, with love. )
The idea is:
-to play with the degree of visibility of a performance in the public space.
-so that a minimal performance very subtly transforms the space into an invisible theater.
-for the performers... in a way... it is about studying the edges of performance by trying to make performance invisible... blend in the environment.... allowing it to dissolve into daily life.
-we can say: "we will be presenting the INVISIBLE THEATER at this time (5:30 pm) these days (tuesdays and thursdays) at this location (Sasaki Garden between west 3 and bleeker) for half an hour. Then people could show up or not. Now how visible do we want this version to be?
April 20, 22, 27, 29 May 4 and 6
5:30pm
Sasaki Garden, Manhattan NY
Written by: Daniil Kharms
Directed by: Timothy Scott and Nicolás Noreña
Translation from Russian: C. Dylan Basset and Emma Winsor Wood,
Featuring: Hannah Gross, Marija Kovačević, Alessandro Magania, Madison Mayer, Erin Mullin, Nicolás Noreña and Timothy Scott.
Music by: Marija Kovačević
LAPA is a mesmerizing language machine for the theater following Landman’s journey to pluck a newly formed star called Agam The Swan: “whoever tears down this star may choose to be freed from dreaming.” Treating language with the material curiosity of early abstract artists LAPA exposes the border of language and sound, of poetry and meaning. The Million Underscores stage this genre-bending work, modulating between visual composition, soundscape, performance, and choreography, to emphasize the distance between words, objects, sound, and the body. Amidst Industrialization, the human ability to reach beyond the terrestrial, and a decrepit heaven, LAPA is a ballad for the end of dreaming.
THE OBSERVATORY
The Brick Theater August 9
ODC Theater in San Francisco August 19 and 20 2022
created and performed by: Hannah Gross, Timothy Scott, Nicolás Noreña and Erin Mullin
The Observatory is a series of one off performance experiments at the intersection of installation, dance and theater, inquiring into humanity's vastly multifaceted relationship with outer space and the long history of changes and shifts it's had through the ages.
Developed and presented in discrete chapters throughout venues in New York City over the past six years, the piece continuously shifts genres, and performative logics, playing with the limits of the audiences’ perception and imagination. From lunar landings to interplanetary sex, alien ballets to Babylonian texts, from the dramas of 16th century Renaissance scientists to the astronomy hot line of Walter Mercado, the show journeys "where no man has gone before!"
The performers manipulate all the lights, sound , objects and sets from onstage as well as mix improvisation and tightly choreographed material with a constant interest in change and the process of perceptual and conceptual reorganization.
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THE PASSERBY, or where did my soul go is a silent twelve track performance album inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s Gallery Paintings. The piece is a combination of choreography, pedestrian movement and highly technical tableaus that interfere with the normal time signatures that audiences' attentions are accustomed to in the theater. Constructed through spatial-izations of Oskar Schlemmer’s highly formal paintings, and experimental compositions in the electromagnetic energy of the performers, the album transforms every time it is performed through a series of rigorous chance operations.
In a constant experiment with form, chaos and change this piece plays with the subtle frontier between reality and abstraction.
"The History of theater is the history of the trasfiguration of the human form. It is the history of human as the actor of physical and spiritual events, ranging from naïveté to reflection, from naturalness to artifice" (Oskar Schlemmer).
THE PASSERBY, or where did my soul go
THE BRICK theater November 11- 21 2022
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
with: Timothy Scott, Marija Kovačević, Yuki Kawahisa, Madison Mayer, Geo Kester and Rebecca Bird
written and directed by: Nicolas Noreña
performed with: Timothy Scott, Kelsey Larsen, Hannah Gross, Arian Rad, Isabella Uzcategui, Lizzy Kehoe
Two performances happening simultaneously under a thunderstorm in mid august on opposite sides of a racketball court.
He can remember his previous lives, she can foretell the future.
The performance is performed in Spanish by performers whose first language is english.
SsOuLn MlOuOnNa was presented as part of REGION (ES) festival at Maria Hernandez Park in August 2019.
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
written by: Nicolas Noreña and Timothy Scott
1001SUR is a theatrical reimagining of the One Thousand and One Nights as told in a roadside bordello on the frontier between two undisclosed South American countries. It is a journey into the realms of “the exotic,” where layers of wishes, dreams and desires intermingle outside of the limits of reality. 1001SUR is an exploration of transcultural fantasies, an inquiry into the origins of narrative, an ode to Imagination.
created by: Nicolas Noreña and Timothy Scott
A mystical romance, a ballet about human faced with the unknown and the awe, and the fear, and the mystical longing for union with that which is beyond understanding, be it death, exotic far off places, chance, or an intergalactic being. Herds longing for the past, what happens with the spaces that held their previous lives? Do spaces haunt people or do people haunt spaces? A brain-washing spectacular! Subliminal messages! Headphones! A caveman! An alien! A nun! A toothless woman with a lottery ticket! Fruit! Crowds going mad! A ghost! And much more! Stay tuned!
THE THIRD MAN
written and directed by: Nicolas Noreña
created with: Tanya Marquardt, and Timothy Scott
developed and performed with: Tanya Marquardt, Alessandro Magania, Paul Langland
"It could begin all in darkness,
or a man looking straight into a big hole,
big important image...
this is some kind of homo-erotic film noir
some kind of allegory
some kind of surreal vision
it begins all in darkness"
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
created with: Erin Mullin and Timothy Scott
A theatrical fugue for two actors about ancient memories, paradox and the division into the sexes; They were, or they weren't / On an island, or no island / an ocean, or not an ocean / swallowed them up, or not. A man and a woman roam a small confined space, unable to percieve each other, perhaps able to perceive each other, peacefully stuck. The piece loops until every audience member, at their own will, leaves the theater. A meteor fell / or no meteor / A volcano exploded / or no volcano / someone summoned something / or nothing was called / in this Atlantis / or no place
(8) Memories of this Atlantis, or No Place was partly developed through Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program 2016
created by: Hannah Gross, Timothy Scott and Nicolas Noreña
Presented at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art through BOOKCLUB.
A pregnant woman is stuck in The Newsstand, she calls for help. Two eyes dancing. four counts eyes open. four counts eyes closed. A crowd of people. A dance piece sprinkled with existentialism and the mysterious feeling of getting stuck.
Hannah Gross, Timothy Scott and Nicolas Noreña are LEIMAY/CAVE fellows 2015-2016.
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
performed by: Timothy Scott, Hannah Gross, Ethan Fishbane, Erin Mullin and, Nicolas Noreña
"all things instinctively appear to us as though they did exist independently, as though they were endowed with their own autonomous self-existence. Take for example a mountain. From its own side, it ___________ to have an inherent substantiability and massiveness independent of all conditions. It stands there ___________ us: imposing, independent and concrete. But upon reflection we shall slowly become aware that _______ mountain depends for ___ existence upon a variety ___ causes and conditions as well as innumerable _______ __________ _______ ..."
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
with: Jon Fusco, Heather Thiry, Caitlin Hargraves , Zachary Luke, Thomas Skea and Gili Nir
Constant flux: A room with two fridges three stove-ovens, a dishwasher, some blinds, some bathtubs, a broken sink, no windows, a mirror, envelopes with hundred dollar bills, postacards from Hawaii, a stolen painting by a famous artist, high heels, a man and a woman with neck braces, arm slings, leg casts,and head bands. Is her lover coming today?
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
performed by: Timothy Scott, Annick Marie Dall, Nicolas Noreña
Three individual pieces from three different performances are layered on top of each other in an attempt to transpose a sense of natural narrative into space. The back layer is part of Napoleon a piece done in 2009, the middle from Morning to be Changed... done in 2012 and the front layer a piece from (8) Memories of this Atlantis... which will premier in 2014. The audience lights the performance with flashlights like in a excavation-- a reflection on perspective and how we make sense of memories.
Presented as part of AUNTS at Arts@Rennaissance in June 2013.
directed by: Nicolas Noreña
created with: Lizzy Denning, Ethan Fishbane, Jade Fusco and Caitlin Hargraves
with: David Bernstein, Hannah Gross and Timothy Scott
Fragments of a broken Self journey through the 24 hours of a day
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But who are these people?
What is it in their language that is so familiar?
Don't the recognize each other?
Morning to be Changed from the Morning to the Morning, or Belly of the Whale
a portrait in 24 hours or 25 frames
