Cleveland Public Theatre will host a return engagement of Darwinii: The Comeuppance of Man March 1-17, 2012, 6415 Detroit Ave, Cleveland. Shows are at 7pm. There is no late seating. Details at cptonline.org
Nearanight Nearing
IF through fate or other forces within or without your control you find yourself in Philadelphia on this First Friday of December, the 3rd, in the evening hours, wondering where to direct your wandering feet and your attentions, please be advised that M. Nearanight will be delivering philosophical flights concerning the history of curiosity and its ramifications upon the chemysteries of nature and this, our illuminated modern age.
photo: Ted Pilonero
The Nearanight Lectures are serial reflections presented at intervals between the hours of 5 and 8 o’clock PM at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.
Parody?
Association for Creative Zoology, Beauvais Lyons
The APS Museum presents a panel on parody with Brett Keyser, Eve Andree Laramee, and Beauvais Lyons, moderated by Linda Hutcheon of the University of Toronto, Sunday September 19, 2010 at 3pm at Philosophical Hall, 104 S 5th St, Philadelphia.
“Darwin’s Minstrel”
In November 2009 The Scientist captured Erasmus Rasmussen alive on the streets of Philadelphia celebrating the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Have a gander:
Darwinii—SOLD OUT—Philly Fringe
Join us for the World Premiere performances of Darwinii: The Comeuppance of Man at the 2009 Philly Fringe Festival, Fridays & Saturdays, September 4, 5, 11, & 12 SOLD OUT at 6:30 PM at the APS Museum, 104 S. 5th St. (between Chestnut and Walnut), Philadelphia, PA. Limited seating. Seriously. Tickets $10 on sale now at the Live Arts-Fringe website, or at the Fringe Box Office, 215-413-1318. Please plan to arrive early as the show begins promptly and 6:30 PM, and there will be NO LATE SEATING.
Images of Darwin, Rhea darwinii, and T. H. Huxley’s skeletons courtesy APS Museum
Created by Brett Keyser and New York playwright Glen Berger, this solo performance features Keyser in the role of Cristóbal, an Argentine man accused of various crimes, including stealing original Charles Darwin manuscripts from rare book libraries around the world. Why? Because he’s convinced he’s the great-great-great-etc… bastard-grandson of the father of Natural Selection. As part of his sentence he must deliver a public apology, during which he digresses, with flamboyant intensity and bawdy humor, into the story of his life, growing up as an orphan in Tierra del Fuego and inadvertently becoming an expert Darwinologist (not to mention an international criminal), exploiting every opportunity to prove his pedigree. The performance is a tango-tinged dance of life, a fresh take on some of Darwin’s ideas about the struggle for survival, sexual selection, the origin of species, and the descent of man.
Darwinii evolved from an initial workshop of improvisation and interplay between Keyser, Berger, and Canadian fellow traveller Ker Wells. The creative team also includes Tracy Broyles of Spiral Q Puppet Theatre on props and costumes, and Laylage Courie of Brooklyn-based Luminous Work, providing the voice of a renowned fictional Darwin scholar.
Darwinii was commissioned by the American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum, and supported in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council.
Sand Reckoning
Appearing at the State of the Nation Festival in New Orleans, 5pm Friday, March 20, 2009, a work-in-progress presentation of Sand Reckoning.
Sand Reckoning is a prose poem, spoken and sung, a saga of people and rivers, canals and bridges, levees and outlets, nitrogen, tailings, and coliform spume… a litany of modern “improvements” upon the oldest relationship in the civilized world. It’s a story of the infra-structurists, the genius architects of that vast inflexible network of transportation and commerce, who bent the natural features of the land to the service of unimaginable wealth and national power. Stumbling into the 21st century on the back of this rusted behemoth, Sand Reckoning asks whether we are reconciled to follow in the well-trodden path of least-resistance, or will we forge anew?
TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia
A eulogy for a buried creek, spoken and sung by the souls that lived and died along its course.
TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS premieres September 5th, 2008 at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, two minutes before local sunset:
Friday, September 5, 7:23pm
Saturday, September 6, 7:21pm
Friday, September 12, 7:11pm
Saturday, September 13, 7:10pm
Each performance is approximately 29 minutes long, ending with the close of civil twilight.
Additional performances commence at 4pm on Saturday and Sunday, September 20th and 21st, and at 1pm on Saturday, September 27th for National Public Lands Day.
The performance takes place on the former site of Dock Creek in Independence National Historical Park, SW block at the intersection of 3rd and Chestnut Streets.
In the middle of this park block between Carpenters’ Hall and the First Bank of the United States there is a small depression in the land, a memorial marking the course of Dock Creek, which was arched over and buried at the end of the 1700’s, after it had become irredeemably fouled by the domestic and industrial waste being dumped into it for over a century. The creek still flows beneath us, as the oldest exit for Philadelphia’s civic effluvia.
It is easy to forget what roils through the pipes below, which is, after all, why it was put down there. But breathing deeply at the sewer grate, performance artist Brett Keyser peels back the layers of this man-made landscape in an evocative “exhumation” of the little tidal creek, an elegy of ebb and flow, of growth and decay, of life, and love, and loss along “The Dock”.
Commissioned by the American Philosophical Society Museum, Keyser’s TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS was conceived as a companion piece to Drawing Dock Creek, a sculptural installation on the same site by Winifred Lutz. Both Lutz and Keyser are artists in residence for the current APS Museum exhibition “UNDAUNTED: Five American Explorers, 1760-2007” through December 2008.
NIGHTJAR APOTHECARY 