Yearly Archives: 2010

3rd Ring Out: Rehearsing the Future By Zoe Svendsen and Simon Daw

The temperature is rising, the Earth is changing and your city is threatened. How will you respond? This is a story in which YOU decide what happens next.

Imagining a world in which nature takes revenge on industrial humanity, 3rd Ring Out takes you forward in time to an emergency planning rehearsal set on your doorstep.

Metis uses live performance, video simulation and interactive computer systems to produce work which responds to contemporary concerns. The result has the immediacy of theatre combined with the thrill of a disaster movie; a fiction rooted in fact.

Check out the Booking section to find out where 3rd Ring Out takes place and for responses to the performances …

via About.

“Recycled Comedy” and the Ambassador Theatre Group

Reprinted from Broadway World: “Mark Rylance Visits Comedy Theatre’s “Recycled Comedy” Exhibit, Runs Through 9/4″ June 17, 2010

Actor Mark Rylance, who will be in the upcoming revival of David Hirson’s La Bête at the Comedy Theatre, visited the theatre’s current exhibition, “Recycled Comedy.” Rylance will be starring in La Bête alongside Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce at the Comedy Theatre from 26 June until 4 September.

The “Recycled Comedy” Exhibition showcases replica costumes from past productions that have played at the theatre made entirely from recycled and recyclable materials. Each costume sits in its own ‘environment’ which is complemented with light and sound. For the past month front of house, management, crew and box office staff at the Comedy Theatre have been working hard to develop and realize the exhibition which promotes recycling and raises environmental awareness.

Rylance, who has a strong interest in environmental and recycling issues, won two Olivier Awards with his roles in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHIN and JERUSALEM. He was also honored with a Tony Award for BOEING BOEING. He served as the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Globe Theatre from 1995-2005.

The Comedy Theatre is owned by the Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG). ATG is committed to achieving the highest standards of environmental performance, preventing pollution and minimising the impact of its operations on the environment.

ATG believes it is both good business practice and our duty to protect natural resources and therefore aim to conserve energy, water, wood, paper and other resources – particularly those which are scarce or non renewable. ATG also aims to reduce waste through re-use and recycling and by using refurbished and recycled products and materials where such alternatives are available.

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A Silver Sheen to . . . well, you know.

Yes. So.

Garbage didn’t work. Natural fibers were rejected. Booming school has apparently been a failure. In the meantime, an ever-increasing parade of oil-soaked birds and the collapse of local industries.
What else can we do but laugh?

If there is a silver lining or sheen or gloss or whatever to the gulf spill, it’s that the insanely large catastrophe has spawned some of the best ecological humor in recent years.

Don’t EVEN try to take that the wrong way.

Pro comedy players like UCB Theater, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report have been defending ecosystems and decrying BP with their sharp and witty tools of trade. Most memorably, The Onion suggests a Massive Flow of Bullshit from BP Headquarters will drown us all.

It’s times like these that laughter literally heals. Which is not to say: it scrubs oily birds. Rather: it keeps ecological massacres such as these from driving you insane.

Go to the Green Museum

Independent Curators International – Experimental Geography

Experimental Geography

Curated by Nato Thompson

The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound works capturing the buzz of electric waves on the power grid. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice, through a wide range of mediums including sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from the poetic to the empirical. The more pragmatic techniques include those used by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in projects made with students and other non-art groups that aim to strengthen peoples’ roles as agents of change in their own environments. See, for example, their map intended to help longshoremen and truckers identify chokepoints in the cargo trade network. In their similarly empirical projects, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, examines the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface. CLUI embraces a multidisciplinary approach that forces a reading of the American landscape (such as the disfiguring effects of culling natural resources from the picturesque banks of the Hudson River), thereby refamiliarizing viewers with the overlooked details of their everyday experience.

Experimental Geography is curated by Nato Thompson, curator at Creative Time in New York. It is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, co-published by ICI and Melville House, that includes essays by Thompson, Jeffrey Kastner, and Trevor Paglen.

ARTISTS

Francis Alÿs, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, kanarinka (Catherine D’lgnazio), Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Lize Mogel, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker, Alex Villar, Yin Xiuzhen

TOURING SCHEDULE

AVAILABLE

Contact us to book this exhibition
April 22, 2011 – December 31, 2011

Freeman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University

Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
January 21, 2011 – April 1, 2011

Museum London

London, Ontario, Canada
October 9, 2010 – January 2, 2011

The James Gallery, The Graduate Center at CUNY

New York, New York
June 24, 2010 – August 27, 2010

The Colby College Museum of Art

Waterville, Maine
February 21, 2010 – May 30, 2010

Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
October 10, 2009 – January 30, 2010

The Albuquerque Museum

Albuquerque, New Mexico
June 28, 2009 – September 20, 2009

Rochester Art Center

Rochester, Minnesota
February 7, 2009 – April 18, 2009

Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University

Greencastle, Indiana
September 19, 2008 – December 2, 2008

TECHNICAL SPECS

via Independent Curators International – Experimental Geography.

BP Keeps Arts Sponsorship as Pressure Grows for Spill Damages – Bloomberg.com

June 18 Bloomberg — BP Plc, which has shed 45 percent of its market value after causing the U.S.’s worst-ever oil spill, said it will keep sponsoring the British Museum, the Royal Opera House, Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

“These are longstanding partnerships that we have with major cultural institutions in the U.K.,” BP spokesman David Nicholas said in a telephone interview yesterday. “They’re completely unchanged, as far as I’m concerned.”

BP Keeps Arts Sponsorship as Pressure Grows for Spill Damages – Bloomberg.com.

Arcola Recieves Green Tourism Gold Award

Arcola Theatre is delighted to announce that it has achieved Green Tourism Award Gold standard. Sustainability Projects Manager, Rachel Carless, and the rest of the sustainability team worked hard to fulfil the rigorous set of criteria set out by the Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS), who came to carry out an audit at the end of April. Arcola is now the first theatre in the UK to achieve a Gold award in Green Tourism and is proud to be recognised as ‘a strong local catalyst in greening North East London (Hackney and surrounding districts)’.

The GTBS, developed by the International Centre for Responsible Tourism and validated by Visit Britain, is the largest of its type in the world, and since 1997 has worked to make tourism and the hospitality industry in the UK more sustainable. The audit covers areas such as energy efficiency, waste minimisation and recycling, use of local produce, and support of public transport, its overall aim to encourage sustainability in business and provide the consumer with a ‘green’ choice.

Attempting to improve on the Bronze Award, received in 2008, the sustainability team had a number of issues to address including improving links with other GTBS members (e.g. Arts Admin), developing better systems for measuring the theatre’s energy use, and sourcing greener cleaning products. In the GTBS’ audit report, special mention was given to Arcola’s success in communicating the green message, in particular through the Green Sundays events and the green notice board up in the café/bar. Reaching the GTBS’ Gold standard is recognition of Arcola Theatre’s ongoing commitment to sustainability and its goal of becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral theatre.

The Green Tourism audit report can be viewed here.

Go to Arcola Energy