Eye of the Puppet

The LAB
2948 16th Street @ Capp Street
San Francisco

Eye of the Puppet
The Case of the Sleepwalking Streetwalker

Gray Area Ensemble takes dictation from the underground once again. This time it's a murder mystery and suspects abound. The day breaks and the town shudders with a murder. Sheila and Pal, who carry the secrets of the night, have discovered a body somewhere near a rickety pier. Detective Esther Longdale has arrived to analyze the residue. With its compelling cast and stylish production, Eye of the Puppet asks, are we dead or alive? Sleeping or awake? The script for this production was generated by the ensemble using round-robin exquisite corpse exercises, and then methodically collaged together by director Adam Ansell. This new language challenges conventional ideas of authorship and narrative.

In the twenty years that Adam J. Ansell has been a theater director, he has developed a unique ability to coax original plays from any group of people, from preschoolers to transgender seniors in recovery. Adam’s poetic, painterly experimental performances that resemble plays, draw on his varied artistic background which includes theater, installation, writing, fashion, music, and painting. Ansell's passion and long-term vision is to integrate disadvantaged communities that have previously been excluded from the arts community.

Performances:
Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 8pm
Thursday, February 26, 8pm
Friday, February 27, 8pm
Saturday, February 28, 8pm
Sunday, March 1, 2pm
Admission by donation, no one turned away for lack of funds.

[text and graphic from The Lab Web site.]

La Nostalgia

The LAB
2948 16th Street @ Capp Street
San Francisco, California

La Nostalgia Re-mix
(Best hits and outtakes for an imaginary bar)
by Guillermo Gomez-Pena and James Luna

Performance: Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 8PM
$10-20 sliding scale admission at the door

"Since the early 90's, Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Native American conceptual artist James Luna have worked in an ongoing project titled The Shame-man meets El Mexican't, in which they challenge stereotypes, assumptions, and lazy thinking about race and culture with a strong dose of melancholic humor and sharp-edged conceptualism.

Last in the series is La Nostalgia, a new collaboration that promises to build on both artists' provocative legacies of performance and installation art. The project researches the cultural, symbolic, and iconographic dimensions of nostalgia both in the Native American "reservation" and the Chicano "barrio," through a series of live performances, writings, photo-shoots and videos.

Gomez-Pena and Luna's current collaboration, La Nostalgia, deals with varying notions of nostalgia and how the term can be used as a mechanism of cultural defense, as a stylistic device, and also as a way of revising the artist's careers in a series of re-enactments. The project was launched last year in San Francisco with two performances. First, the artists staged their own ritual deaths inside coffins and then they engaged in a poetic dialogue at the Headlands Center for the Arts, while Luna cooked an Indian stew and Gomez-Pena played roulette."

[photo from Lab press release.]