The weather is turning colder and 2010 is drawing to a close, which means the giving season is upon us. We write now asking for your support in keeping The Tank a flourishing space for emerging artists in Manhattan in 2011.

To donate, visit www.thetanknyc.org/membership

In 2010, The Tank brought you over 600 shows by more than 1,000 artists, and challenged and delighted 16,00 audience members from New York City and around the world.

Even in the face of increased rent and diminishing funding from foundation and government sources, The Tank continues to provide New York’s most adventurous artists a space to create and present work at little or no cost to them, and provide our audiences cutting-edge art at remarkably affordable prices. As the price of entertainment continues to soar, The Tank still offers an average ticket price of only $7.00. We need your support to keep it that way.

As a challenge to the entire Tank community, several generous supporters are sponsoring a one-to-one donation match. Every dollar donated to The Tank between now and the end of the year, up to $5,000, will be matched. That means that your generosity will go twice as far.

At The Tank, we know that you have many choices as to where you direct your tax-deductible donations for the year, and appreciate you choosing us as one of the charitable organizations you decide to support as the year comes to an end.

To donate online, visit www.thetanknyc.org/membership

Or you can donate via mail by sending a check to:
The Tank
354 West 45th St.
New York, NY 10036

Thank you so much for your past support and we hope to see you at The Tank soon. Join us for The Tank Holiday Party Potluck on December 20th from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm or check our website, www.thetanknyc.org, for all of our exciting upcoming programming.

Happy holidays!
Sincerely,

Suzan Eraslan
Programming Director

This month, we’re bringing you Anton Chekhov’s rarely performed Ivanoughdirected by Andrew Neisler. In 1887, Anton Chekhov was commissioned to write a four-act comedy. In typical Chekhovian style, the play centers on a debt-ridden, Russian landowner whose wife contracts Tuberculosis. Instead of taking care of her, Nikolai Ivanough falls in love with the daughter of his moneylender. Hilarity ensues. Come witness how Chekhov masterfully evokes pity for his philandering hero.

We’re ecstatic to debut our third music video produced by Kate Freer and Dave Tennent at Room 404 Media! Inspired by music videos of the 90′s, these will be projected during our production of Ivanough to create a dream world for our characters. All music in the videos comes from the public domain and have been arranged by Drama Desk nominee Adam Cochran. The video for “Ain’t We Got Fun” takes place during a big party scene in the play, a party that everyone wishes they had attended. Unlike the previous two videos, there is no specific source video from the 90′s but it carries the same old timey revival in the style of The Dresden Dolls–akin to Neisler’s vision to revive 123 year old Chekhov play!

Missed the first videos? Click to watch “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

Ivanough opens TONIGHT at the Tank! Presale tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/121154

The Cast:
Alex Fast as Ivanough
Liz Alderfer as Sasha
Claire Rothrock as Anna
Andrew Farmer as Dr. Lvoff
Preston Martin as Michael Borkin
Dylan Lamb as Paul Lebedieff
Jessie Barr as Zinaida
Kate Weber as Martha
Jabari Brisport as Matthew Shabelski
Michael Lister as Kosich
Jaclyn Backhaus as Avdotia

With new original re-orchestrations by
Adam Cochran, Barrie McClain, Jo Lampert, and Preston Martin

And featuring the choreography of
Ben Hobbs and Ani Niemann

This month, we’re bringing you Anton Chekhov’s rarely performed Ivanoughdirected by Andrew Neisler. In 1887, Anton Chekhov was commissioned to write a four-act comedy. In typical Chekhovian style, the play centers on a debt-ridden, Russian landowner whose wife contracts Tuberculosis. Instead of taking care of her, Nikolai Ivanough falls in love with the daughter of his moneylender. Hilarity ensues. Come witness how Chekhov masterfully evokes pity for his philandering hero.

We’re ecstatic to debut our second music video produced by Kate Freer and Dave Tennent at Room 404 Media! Inspired by music videos of the 90′s, these will be projected during our production of Ivanough to create a dream world for our characters. All music in the videos comes from the public domain and have been arranged by Drama Desk nominee Adam Cochran. We’re proud to bring you the opening number for the show! Our video for “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” draws inspiration from The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” and features Preston Martin as Michael Borkin. Chekhov never looked this good. Missed the first video? Click here to catch up!

Ivanough opens TOMORROW at the Tank! Presale tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/121154

The Cast:
Alex Fast as Ivanough
Liz Alderfer as Sasha
Claire Rothrock as Anna
Andrew Farmer as Dr. Lvoff
Preston Martin as Michael Borkin
Dylan Lamb as Paul Lebedieff
Jessie Barr as Zinaida
Kate Weber as Martha
Jabari Brisport as Matthew Shabelski
Michael Lister as Kosich
Jaclyn Backhaus as Avdotia

With new original re-orchestrations by
Adam Cochran, Barrie McClain, Jo Lampert, and Preston Martin

And featuring the choreography of
Ben Hobbs and Ani Niemann

This month, we’re bringing you Anton Chekhov’s rarely performed Ivanoughdirected by Andrew Neisler. In 1887, Anton Chekhov was commissioned to write a four-act comedy. In typical Chekhovian style, the play centers on a debt-ridden, Russian landowner whose wife contracts Tuberculosis. Instead of taking care of her, Nikolai Ivanough falls in love with the daughter of his moneylender. Hilarity ensues. Come witness how Chekhov masterfully evokes pity for his philandering hero.

We’re ecstatic to debut our first of three music videos produced by Kate Freer and Dave Tennent at Room 404 Media! Inspired by music videos of the 90′s, these will be projected during our production of Ivanough to create a dream world for our characters. All music in the videos comes from the public domain and have been arranged by Drama Desk nominee Adam Cochran. The video for “Pretty Girl” draws inspiration from Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” and features Liz Alderfer as the lonely Sasha. Watch her make her big entrance! Chekhov never looked this good.

Presale tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/121154

The Cast:
Alex Fast as Ivanough
Liz Alderfer as Sasha
Claire Rothrock as Anna
Andrew Farmer as Dr. Lvoff
Preston Martin as Michael Borkin
Dylan Lamb as Paul Lebedieff
Jessie Barr as Zinaida
Kate Weber as Martha
Jabari Brisport as Matthew Shabelski
Michael Lister as Kosich
Jaclyn Backhaus as Avdotia

With new original re-orchestrations by
Adam Cochran, Barrie McClain, Jo Lampert, and Preston Martin

And featuring the choreography of
Ben Hobbs and Ani Niemann

Six ReVision events took place one night a month between January and June 2010. Each evening featured six to seven collaborations in live-video and performance art, at The Secret Theatre in Long Island City Queens. The series emphasizes live-media interactivity, challenging digital media artists to present work outside of “traditional” exhibitions in film festivals and galleries. Video artists have access to multiple projectors and CRT monitors, and innovative presentations included the use of 3D viewing technology, projections onto the floor, and projections onto the bodies of the performers themselves.

Live-media artists used creative technology tools to trigger cues, alter tempo, and synchronize their performance with other live participants. Many works explored camera-based interactivity where on-stage performers can influence and co-create the visual presentation in real time. Participating artists received free rehearsal space to develop new work at FMT’s performance lab, and access to FMT’s blue screen/black box video studio and post-production facilities. FMT provides full technical and promotional support for the event and documents the live collaborations in photo and video. Documentation, including full-length video of the collaborations is maintained online.

Save the date! The Tank presents a run with Forward Motion Theater on January 14th, 2011.

Office gymnastics meets daring Antarctic exploration in the unlikely setting of a Hartford insurance office in this inventive and funny piece. Masters of movement, Split Knuckle Theatre, have performed their original, fascinating works internationally and will bring the World Premiere of Endurance to The Tank November 4th, 2010.

Trapped in Antarctica with no hope of rescue, the great British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton kept 27 men alive for two years in the most inhospitable climate on earth. Ninety-five year later, in the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, Hartford insurance man Walter Spivey, struggling to save his employees’ jobs, relives Shackleton’s story. Can one of the greatest leaders in human history inspire him to conquer the corporate world? Two survival stories collide in this inventive and surprising adventure where desks become ship decks and four actors become dozens of characters in a story that spans 95 years and 8000 miles.

Buy tickets for Theater @ The Tank Presents: Endurance

Public Domain #1: Philoctetes by Sophocles directed by Garrett Zuercher

The Tank blog welcomes Kevin Laibson, theater curator for The Tank and artistic director for Full Circle Theatre Company, as well as co-executive producer for the Public Domain theater series.

The Tank asked me to write a blog about the Public Domain series that they are producing in conjunction with Full Circle. Since they’ve been so good to me, and I love attention, I happily obliged. Full Circle wanted to start a readings series as cheaply as we could. This left us with two options: new works or classics (it’s starting to become clearer why there are so many small theater companies with the words “new works” or “classics” in their mission statements, right?). New works are wonderful – the lifeblood of the theater, blah, blah – but it’s awfully hard to consistently find great new stuff, and even harder to convince people to come out to stuff totally on faith. As we started poking around the classics arena, we found ourselves talking a lot about how cool the concept of public domain intellectual property is. If a piece of art exists for long enough it belongs to all of us – there’s something sort of beautiful and amazing about that. It’s easy to forget that the creation of a piece of art is ostensibly a service for the people – I love that with enough distance from creation, it is released in to society for us to do with as we please. So we wanted to highlight that. Some of the greatest works ever created are ours to mess with for the sake of saying new things.

So. We picked 7 plays from different points in history and all over the world, and 7 directors with vastly different aesthetics, and we put them all on the internet, where we let anybody who wanted to vote to assign each director a play. Thursday, we open with Sophocles’ Philoctetes, directed in ASL and voice by Garrett Zuercher. Garrett, deaf himself, and probably best known as Huck in the Broadway touring company of Deaf West’s acclaimed Big River, is working very hard to make theater equally accessible to deaf and hearing audiences. Philoctetes features a chorus made up of hearing, hard of hearing, and deaf actors, with various fluency in ASL, and Garrett has cast hearing and deaf actors in the principle roles. As producer, my big concern once the votes were cast was whether the language of a Greek tragedy would translate stylistically in to ASL. So when Garrett sat down and told me his concept for the show, and how incredibly it capitalized on the themes of the show, I forgot all about the language. Philoctetes is certainly not just some Greek play: it deals with isolation, deceit, exploitation, and assumption. Re-positioning it as a piece of deaf theater (which I hesitate to call it, as it really is just theater that is accessible to more than one kind of audience), Garrett refocused this play in a big way for me, which is far beyond my expectations for how this series might work out.

After Philoctetes, we run Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus in October, directed by Andrew Scoville, who will be just coming off of Assistant Directing Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and who has a mild obsession with order and chaos. All I’m comfortable telling you about his Faust is that it’s set on Wall Street, and it uses interactive video performance software triggered by live digital sound design. And also that I believe it will be awesome.

With that, I leave you. I’m going to watch Andrew Neisler workshop Ivanough for November.

(via True Chip Till Death)

Thanks to Tiny Cartridge for helping us with our contest and Bytejacker for bringing the bright green cupcakes from Butter Lane!!