Time Out New York - Theater - June 17-24, 2004

Space cases

The scrappy and site-specific Peculiar Works Project loves making scenes in public

By David Cote

Most Off-Off Broadway groups would kill to have their own space. Some, like GAle GAtes in
Dumbo and Chashama on 42nd Street, luick out with donated real estate, but both those locales were eventually sold to commercial interests, and the groups either
disbanded or relocated. The three artists behind Peculiar Works Project, however, don’t want the financial burden of a venue. “It would have to be free,” group member Ralph Lewis says. “If it meant having to pony up rent every month, I’d much rather be a vagabond.”

Nomadism has become the modus operandi for Peculiar Works founders Lewis, Catherine Porter and Barry Rowell, who, for years, have been finding nontraditional performance spaces and mounting site-specific theatrical events involving scores of artists. “We know other companies who own space and spend so much time trying to rent it out,” says Porter. “They become landlords, not artists. But also, aesthetically, we’re interested in “waking up” a space, turning it into something you never would have guessed it could be. You step off the elevator and you’re into a surreal landscape.”

Peculiar Works doesn’t have a monopoly on site-specific theater, whose roots go back to 1960s happenings and the paratheatrical experiments of Jerzy Grotowski. More recently, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the group En Garde Arts staged works by Reza Abdou and Jonathan Larson in the Meatpacking District and Wall Street, respectively. And last year, Lincoln Center presented Deborah Warner’s The Angel Project, a city-wide spectacle that guided audience members through an astonishing series of indoor and outdoor tableaux from Roosevelt Island to Times Square, ending in the Chrysler Building. Clearly, Peculiar Works operates on a fraction of Lincoln Center’s budget, but it shares the same impulse: to make theatergoing an adventure.

The 11-year-old group’s latest venture is In Praise of Folly: the Don Quixote Project, located on the sprawling 13th floor of a Tribeca office building at 40 Worth Street. Miguel de Cervantes’ early-1600s novel has been broken up into 15-minute episodes staged by 15 theater and dance groups in rooms and hallways throughout the floor. In all, the organizers estimate that 100 artists will take part in the event.

As producers and de facto stage managers for the event, Lewis, Porter and Rowell certainly have their work cut out for them. Prior to the show’s opening, a visit to the eerie, deserted office-floor performance found the three actors, writers and directors sitting amid a riot of chairs, curtains, video monitors, lighting equipment, and innumerable unidentifiable props that artists had lugged to the space to set up their stages and installations. Come opening night, the office (formerly housing the Teachers’ Retirement System of the City of New York) will be filled with dancers, actors and puppeteers, each contributing a fraction of the Quixote story to the evening. Participants include professionals like Michael John Garcés (Light Raise the Roof) and hot new director Alexandra Aron (Three Seconds in the Key), in addition to rising writers such as the award-winning fringe playwright Alec Duffy.

Some rooms have been filled knee-deep in shredded paper; another is strewn with hay and Oriental carpets; yet another space contains schoolroom desk chairs and McDonald’s wrappers (the title of this rather freely adapted segment is “The Tale of Our Hero’s Visit to a McDonald’s Restaurant with His Trusty Squire, Sancho…”). A dance piece, augmented with puppetry, dramatizes the Don’s windmill jousts.

Given the diversity of styles, will the Quixote plot—supposedly the unifying thread in all this—become lost? Rowell, a playwright himself, says that they still want to tell a story. “There’s enough narrative to take you from piece to piece, but some of it is more abstract,” he admits. “We try to keep it balanced. If you like traditional performance, you’ll have something that you can hang your hat on; if you like it more abstract, you’ll have that as well.”

Mostly, though, the artists of Peculiar Works just don’t want to be fenced in by the typical 99-seat theater. “I hate black boxes!” Lewis cries with mock horror. “These shows are a way to not be trapped in a black box, and just go wild.”

In Praise of Folly: the Don Quixote Project is playing at 40 Worth Street.

by Roberto Dominguez

Inviting more than 100 artists from different performance genres, asking them to create individual pieces based on “Don Quixote” and then showcasing the works in a massive Manhattan office space might seem an impossible dream.

Or at least like tilting at windmills.

But Peculiar Works Project, a theatrical company specializing in site-specific performances, set out on such a quest to follow that star more than three years ago. The result is “In Praise of Folly: The Don Quixote Project,” a new work that re-imagines Miguel de Cervantes’ 400-year-old novel about the adventures of everyone’s favorite delusional
Spanish knight.

Set in a 30,000-square-foot Tribeca office designed to resemble 16th-century Spain, “Folly” has artists from theater, dance, music, video and puppetry provide interpretations of Cervantes’ timeless tale.

Many of the participants are Hispanic, including directors Michael John Garces and Ruth Sancho Huerga, choreographer Yanira Castro and actor Fernando Maneca.

“We didn’t specifically reach out to Latino artists, just artists we knew and loved,” says Catherine Porter, PWP’s co-artistic director. “But since some of the pieces are bilingual or use the Spanish language, we felt it was important to bring Latino artists on board.”

In the three-hour show, opening Thursday on the 13th floor of 40 Worth St., a guide brings an audience from room to room. Within each space is a different type of performance, 14 in all, that runs just a few minutes and corresponds to specific chapters from the novel.

“We thought it would be fun to take a classic text and put that into one of the site-specific
touring events that we do,” says Porter. “The story of Don Quixote is perfect because it’s episodic and picaresque,” she says. “He traveled to different places and experienced different adventures, and because of his madness he had these whimsical visions we thought would translate well to theater and music and dance.

“Instead of office cubicles, we saw a surreal Spanish landscape,” adds Porter. “It was difficult, but it’s the thing we do.”

IBL News (Spain) - Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Hoy, jueves, 3 de junio tendrá lugar en el Instituto Cervantes de Nueva York la presentación a la prensa especializada y a los medios culturales y artísticos de “In Praise of Folly. The Don Quixote Project”, un proyecto del grupo neoyorquino “Peculiar Works Project”, apadrinado por el Instituto Cervantes. El evento reúne a numerosos artistas norteamericanos y latinoamericanos del campo de la performance, teatro, danza, música y artes plásticas. Se realizarán 16 obras basadas en diferentes capítulos de las dos partes de El Quijote.

“In Praise of Folly. The Don Quixote Project” se retransmitirá en directo, a partir de las 18.00, hora de Nueva York, a través de su pagina www.cervantes.org.
REDACCIÓN, IBLNEWS “In Praise of Folly. The Don Quixote Project” es una aventura específica que nos traslada al mundo fantástico de ilusión y de errante caballero de la novela clásica de Miguel de Cervantes. Incluyendo aportaciones de campos artísticos tan diversos como la performance, el teatro, la música, el vídeo y el arte de instalación, este acto toma vida en forma de un viaje multigeográfico, pluridisciplinar y plurilingüe que logra trasladar la España
del siglo XVI al Nueva York en el siglo XXI.

A las 17:30 h. (hora local de NY) de hoy 3 de junio se hará una recepción en el jardín, donde se desarrollarán tres de las performances más visuales del proyecto, cuya inauguración general será el 12 de junio en el edificio de oficinas del bajo Manhattan.

Previamente, a las 18:00 h., tendrá lugar una mesa redonda en la que especialistas en la novela de El Quijote disertarán sobre el personaje central de la obra y discutirán sobre los desafíos de la interpretación del Quijote. Entre los ponentes estarán presentes Catherine Porter, productora principal del proyecto; la protagonista de la última traducción del Quijote al inglés, Edith Grossman (glosada elogiosamente por Carlos Fuentes en el New York Times), el crítico de teatro Marion P. Holt, y el director de la Foundation for Iberian Music de New York University Antonio Pizà.

PROGRAMA
Performances que tendrán lugar en el jardín el 3 de junio

The First of All Hacks - Book I, Chapter 1
Written & directed by Yanira Castro
Installation: Charles Houghton
Featuring: Peggy Chang, Nancy Ellis, Andrew Meggison, David Sangali

A Demise of Dueling Minds - Book II, Chapter 64
Choreography by Nicole Cavaliere/Cavaliere Players
Music: Vin Scialla
Dramaturg: Bill Augustin
Installation: Lester Grant
Costumes: Lauren Keating
Featuring: Ria Mae Binaoro

Stealing Pears - Book II, Chapter 74
Conceived, adapted & directed by Gabriel Shanks
Adapted texts by Salvador Castillo, Nick Mathews, St. Augustine, the Bengali Women of India, Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Chaucer, Cervantes, and the Upanishads
Additional text & adaptation: Frank Blocker and Christina Gorman
Lights: Erik C. Bruce
Costumes: Shannon Maddox
Featuring: Frank Blocker, Roger Calderon, Salvador Castillo, Avi Glickstein, Janice Herndon, Mitchell Horn, and Shannon Maddox.