| |
"
Named "Best Genre-Bending Theatre" by New York Press, Stolen Chair is a theatre laboratory dedicated to the creation of playfully intellectual, wickedly irreverent, and exuberantly athletic original works.
Stolen Chair’s work recycles and reinvents old genres and stories to discover new ways to challenge and delight contemporary audiences. Centred around the vision of resident playwright, Kiran Rikhye, and resident director, Jon Stancato, the company nurtures intensive, long-term collaborations between performers, designers, dramaturges, and musicians.
Since it founded in 2002, the company has created twelve critically-acclaimed original productions.
Stolen Chair’s “Unholy Hybrids” are a series of works which tackle contemporary taboos through the lens of irreverently inappropriate styles, like the recent Theatre Is Dead and So Are You, a raucous vaudeville about death and dying.
The company has also developed the CineTheatre Tetralogy, four original plays fusing classic American film styles with classic European playwriting styles, including Kill Me Like You Mean It, a film noir as Ionesco might have written it.
Also Stolen Chair Theatre Company developed “PlayGround Community Project “, which is a Community Supported Theatre or (CST), an innovative new way of connecting theatre-makers and theatregoers adapted from Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), where members literally give seed money to a farm in exchange for a season's worth of harvested produce.
In Stolen Chair's PlayGround, members invest "seed" money in the theatrical process and reap their share of a season's worth of creative "harvests," in the form of monthly member meet-ups which present works-in-progress and thematically linked cultural and education events.
The CST concept has been profiled in American Theatre magazine, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts (CSPA) Quarterly and the pilot season was the focus of the documentary and the book We Are No Longer Strangers.
The PlayGround members will join the company in the world of Stolen Chair's 14th original work, Cut Paste Corset Perfect, a new collective creation freely inspired by the Victorian art of photo-collage exhibited at the Met’s recent "Playing with Pictures." In this curious art form, Victorian women took small photos (cartes de visite) of family members, friends, and other intimates, cutting and pasting them into literally fantastical settings where scale and societal rules are equally defied. In these sometimes whimsical, sometimes nightmarish Lewis Caroll-esque collages, Victorian women played in an imaginative (and subversive!) space free from the corseted confines of their everyday lives. Like the Internet, sampling, and mashup culture have blurred the boundaries between what is "original" and what is "derivative," Cut Paste Corset Perfect seems a particularly relevant exploration for this cultural moment.
Also, PlayGround members will get exclusive access to the project’s development, from its first creative retreat to its world premieres. Which will include, Work-In-Progress: Open rehearsals, staged readings, rehearsal excerpts, and more. Guest speakers: A private audience with some of the art world’s hottest scholars and the collage world’s most exciting artists. Cut Paste lab: Make your own old-school photo-collages and share them online Movie night: Sample Victorian period pieces and cinematic collage experiments. Victorian Valentine’s Party: Grab your waistcoat and corset and make love like it’s 1865.
In recognition of the company’s “sustained excellent work...which demonstrates the power of theatre in surprising ways,” Stolen Chair was named one of NY theatre.com’s "People of The year 2005" and was New York Press’ "Best of Manhattan 2007." The Man Who Laughs (CineTheatre I), has been published in The New York Theatre Experience’s Playing with Canons, and Kill Me Like You Mean It (CineTheatre II) and Kinderspiel were each published in independent volumes by United Stages.
The Stolen Chair Theatre Company,
64 East 94th St, #6G
New York, NY 10128
USA
thechairs@stolenchair.org
http://www.stolenchair.org/index.html
Here are few videos reflect some of their work.