GREAT BARRINGTON, MASS.: Mass Live Arts (MLA) has announced its lineup for the 2015-16 festival. The third annual festival will include a world premiere by the ensemble Radiohole, a return performance by Andrew Schneider and Joseph Silovsky’s Send for the Million Men, as well as a Wooster Group film retrospective.
“Our programming this July features some of the most thrilling and innovative artists making work today, as well as a film series from one of the most influential American companies of the last century,” said Ilan Bachrach, MLA’s founding artistic director in a statement. “More exciting still is that many of these performances were made here in the Berkshires at Mass Live Arts, meaning that not only does our audience get the first look, but also that their presence is an important part of its creation.”
YOUARENOWHERE (July 9–11) by Andrew Schneider kicks off the festival’s live performances. This newest work from Schneider questions space and time through live performance, media and theatrical sensory overload in a hyperactive scenic environment.
Next is Joseph Silovsky’s Send for the Million Men (July 16–18), about the notorious execution of Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, wrongly accused of robbery and murder in the 1920s. Silovsky’s reenacts the trial using text, cutout puppetry and video games, with music by Catherine McRae and video design and performance by Victor Morales.
Finally, the Brooklyn-based collective Radiohole will present the world premiere (and MLA co-commission) of its newest show Tarzana (July 23–25). The show is described as a “Thoughtful consideration of otherness, isolation, transgression, and alienation takes place within parody and camp; Superman and his friends, all trapped in the [Bottle City of Kandor], wonder how and why to leave.”
The festival’s resident artists, Fay Driscoll and Heather Fisch, will also have work-in-progress performances of their work. Driscoll will develop the second installment of the MLA commission Thank You for Coming, a work of dance theatre. And Fisch will show an evening-length piece which will later be seen at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in August.
MLA’s film series will have three installments, all of them of vintage Wooster Group performances: showings of Rumstick Road (1977), a night of show excerpts from old and new productions including Hamlet (2007), Early Shaker Spirituals (2014) L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…), The Crucible (1984), the satirical musical North Atlantic (1983) and the company’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1992), and a screening of House/Lights (1999). Screenings will be on July 6, 13 and 20.
Mass Live Arts is a festival of experimental theatre and performance taking place at the Daniel Arts Center of Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington. MLA is dedicated to presenting bold new works of contemporary and experimental performance in the Berkshires.
