Violeta Luna, credit: Zach Gross

NOHspace Presents

Alien Body
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Sara Shelton Mann, Violeta Luna and Allison Wyper

January 19th & 20th, 2008
Saturday & Sunday at 8pm

Curated and featuring performance interventions by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Alien Body is built around three new short works by San Francisco-based performing artists, including Violeta Luna, Allison Wyper, and Sara Shelton Mann (whose piece, in collaboration with David Szlasa, is the developmental work for her full length premiere with ODC in April).

Representing three different generations, ethno-cultural backgrounds, and/or artistic disciplines, Alien Body looks at the body as territory in a foreign setting, a vulnerable entity in a hostile, unpredictable or inhospitable space: the aging body in a youth-centered space, the body as victim of a toxic environment, and the “ethnic body”.

Elke Luyten (R) & Kira Alker(L)
Credit: Scott Groller

NOHspace Presents

A Little of More
by Elke Luyten & Kira Alker

Elke Luyten (Belgium), co-creator, choreographer and performer
Kira Alker (USA), co-creator and director
Shamini Dias (Malaysia), dramaturg
Young Tseng Wong (Singapore), performer
Jocelyn Matsuo (USA), performer
Benjamin Acland (USA), performer

April 21st and 22nd, 2008
Monday and Tuesday at 8pm

Built on a strong foundation of codified movement, the performers interweave original Shaker writings and songs to create a richly detailed work of individual struggle and metaphysical transcendence. A Little of More was created in the traditions of Etienne Decroux, a theatre revolutionary of the 20th century who devised a system of movement allowing the actor to embody thought. By using this language of abstract movement and daily physical actions, the performers present a work that is spare, elemental and universal.

A Little of More was created in part during a residency at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center in New York in April of 2007. A 35-minute duet version of the piece premiered at the New Original Works Festival at the REDCAT in Los Angeles in July 2007. This performance at Nohspace is the premier of the full-length piece, including four actors from the USA, Belgium and Singapore. A Little of More will subsequently be shown in May 2008 at the Watermill Center in New York as a part of the group’s second residency at the center.

Elke Luyten, born in Hasselt, Belgium, currently lives and works in the Los Angeles area. Since 1998, she has worked as one of Thomas Leabhart’s research assistants, assistant teachers and principal performers of Corporeal Mime. In addition to teaching Corporeal Mime, Elke has presented her solo work throughout Japan, Belgium, France, Mexico and the United States.

Kira Alker, a resident of the Los Angeles area, graduated from Pomona College with a degree in Theatre Performance. She has studied Corporeal Mime with Thomas Leabhart since 2001 and currently works as one of his research and teaching assistants. Additionally, she has directed Luyten’s solos: On the Edge of Nothing, Happy Songs for Sad Days and Here is Someone.

Workshop in Corporeal Mime
led by Elke Luyten & Kira Alker

April 19th and 20th, 2008
Saturday and Sunday from 1 pm - 5 pm

Etienne Decroux (1898 – 1991) developed Corporeal Mime in France during the early twentieth century. Reacting strongly against realism and the dominance of words on stage, Decroux created a theatre form to empower the actor by giving him a specific technique to place drama within the body. Today, Corporeal Mime is one of the only codified theatre forms that exists in the western world. With a specific and unique vocabulary for the articulation of the body, the Corporeal Mime actor strives to embody thought. Singing the movements of the soul with the muscles of the body, the actor reveals a profound and universal inner conflict. Nonetheless, the drama expressed in Corporeal Mime is decidedly non-situational and nonlinear: there is no plot and no characters portrayed. Thoroughly modern, reactionary and revolutionary, the actor succeeds the playwright in this new form of theatre.

NOHspace Presents

paige starling sorvillo/blindsight productions

September 8th & 9th, 2008
Monday & Tuesday at 8pm

tickets $15/$10 Students/Seniors
reservations (415) 621-7978

Short Works by one of the Bay Area's most intriguing choreographer.

Empire of Night explores both our romance with solitude and our fear of isolation within a context of surveillance and violence.

imprint no. 2 for blind is an ensemble work on the visceral/vicous sense of family/intimacy and the evolution of a disconnected social identity. Inspired by Jose Saramago's Blindness, the story of Kasper Hauser as interpreted by Matthias Bossi of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and Richard Dawkin's The Ancestors Tale.

Neighborhood Eats & Drinks

Theatre of Yugen's 30th Anniversary Season is generously funded in part by our supportive individual donors, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Rockefeller MAP, and the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts.

Theatre of Yugen is a proud member of Theatre Bay Area, Project Artaud, Theatre Communications Group and the Network of Ensemble Theaters.