[Capdist-announce] Phantom Limb: 69ºS. | Fri. 09/23 + Sat. 09/24 | EMPAC, Troy, NY

[jason steven murphy]

http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/fall/quote/phantom
Phantom Limb: 69ºS. 
Friday + Saturday, September 23 + 24, 2011, 8 PM 
Theater 
EMPAC
Troy, NY
$18 general admission / $13 students + seniors

A stunning vision of Antarctica’s past, present, and future—uniting puppetry, junk-rock, dance, film, history, and photography with contemporary music



Inspired by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s harrowing expedition to Antarctica in 1914, Phantom Limb unites puppetry, dance, film, history, and photography with contemporary music to create a stunning vision of the great arctic continent—past, present, and future. Dim light plays across a lunar terrain dotted with icebergs. Shackleton’s crew, played by half-life-size puppets, struggles to survive in this vast landscape, putting into stark relief the power of endurance and camaraderie and the price of knowledge. With sound that combines the junkyard dog aesthetic of the band Skeleton Key playing live, a score recorded by the Kronos Quartet, and glacial field recordings, 69˚S. mines the inherently bittersweet and complex nature of the Shackleton experience and what the future may hold for this fragile environment.
 
Following a two-week residency at EMPAC with the entire cast and crew, these performances are the final workshop showings before the piece officially premieres at Dartmouth College.

The New York City-based Phantom Limb Company, founded by composer and marionette maker Erik Sanko and visual artist Jessica Grindstaff, is critically acclaimed for its reinvention of traditional theatrical forms, incorporating marionette puppetry, music, and large-scale installation in order to probe issues of contemporary life. Since the success of their first marionette play The Fortune Teller in 2006, Sanko and Grindstaff have collaborated on numerous original theatrical works with such diverse artists as Ping Chong & Company, Ulrike Quade, Geoff Sobelle of Pig Iron and rainpan 43, and Mark Z. Danielewski.
 
http://www.phantomlimbcompany.com
http://www.skeletonkey.org

Evelyn's Café will open at 7 PM with a full menu of meals, snacks, and beverages as well as a selection of wines. Service continues after the event. Parking is available in the Rensselaer parking lot on College Avenue.

Additional event information can be found on the EMPAC website: http://www.empac.rpi.edu/. Questions? Call the EMPAC Box Office: 518.276.3921.

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The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an international hub for art, performance, science, and technology — offering adventurous interdisciplinary public events, support for artists and scholars engaged in creative research, and the resources of a state-of-the art facility for digital media production, research, and performance situated on a college campus.

EMPAC 2011-2012 presentations, residencies, research, and commissions are supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts (with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Community Connections Fund of the MetLife Foundation, and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust), and the New York State Council for the Arts. Special thanks to the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts for support of artist commissions.

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The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) 
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 
110 8th Street 
Troy, NY  12180
http://www.empac.rpi.edu
Box Office: 518.276.3921
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