#Geoff Sobelle

[thebutcher-5]

The Rhythm Section

Benvenuti o bentornati sul nostro blog. Nello scorso articolo siamo tornati a parlare di animazione e siamo andati avanti con la Pixar, giungendo al loro ottavo film animato, un’opera che ho sempre apprezzato e che trovo molto profonda, Ratatouille. Rémy è un ratto che sogna di poter cucinare, un sogno che si scontra con il padre. Un giorno la sua colonia viene scoperta e sono costretti a…

[markagorman]

Edinburgh Festival Review: FOOD by Geoff Sobell, Day 16.

In 2018 we saw the extraordinary HOME by Geoff Sobell at the King’s Theatre in which he built a home on stage and then residents past present and future enacted a sort of glorious farce. It was five star then (here’s a wee clip to give you the idea). Last night we saw his latest more modestly scaled production, a one man show this time, called FOOD. We had booked early so had a seat at the…

[bxbakery]

In ‘Food,’ Geoff Sobelle Explores the Extremes of Eating

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: In ‘Food,’ Geoff Sobelle Explores the Extremes of Eating by Sarah Bahr

By Sarah Bahr “I don’t want to tell people what to think,” the performance artist said of his latest show. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity.” Published: November 6, 2023 at 11:00AM from NYT Arts https://ift.tt/Zw78JNX via IFTTT

[arizonaculture]

Geoff Sobelle’s “HOME” Delves into the Life Cycle of a Home

Geoff Sobelle’s “HOME” Delves into the Life Cycle of a Home

Like an object owned by different people, a home has many stories. It is shaped by the people who have lived in it, who have memories and traditions connected to the space.

Geoff Sobelle’s performance project “HOME” explores this concept of what makes a “home” through dance, live music, an innovative design process and audience participation.

Photo by Hillarie Jason

Phoenix-area…

[frontmezzjunkies]

  The Object Lesson: Not Much to Hold On To in the End

@NYTW

By Ross

There are boxes upon boxes, piled high to the ceiling.  Lamps and more lamps spread around the space that is slowly being filled with audience members. They are spread out, wandering around, unsure about what will happen in this ‘warehouse’ space that last month we were witness to the great Daniel Craig in Shakespeare’s Othello. But this afternoon, the space is not your typical theatre, and this is not your standard beginning of a play. No assigned seats, only boxes, crates, and couches for us to use in no exact arrangement.  We find a space to call our own in a corner by a lamp and a wall of drawers.  We are handed a box of objects, the contents carefully listed on the outside, for us to play with and examine.  We are here to experience the one-man show, The Object Lesson at the New York Theatre Workshop. I have no clue what will happen, so we wait.

Geoff Sobelle, All photo by Joan Marcus.

  This highly acclaimed show, directed by David Neumann, which won first prize at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 has been making the rounds, playing in theaters across the country and around the world.  Leading us through this pile of boxed memories and magical moments is the fantastically talented magician, clown, creator, and performer, Geoff Sobelle. Easily capturing our attention for the most part of a 100-minute performance piece, we experience the glee and inventiveness of this strange soul and the mountains of mementos that usher forth funny and inventive creations.  Tip toeing through the debris (excellent work by scenic installation design: Steven Dufala; lighting design: Christopher Kuhl; sound design: Nick Kourtides), he ushers us through a number of vignettes, some beautiful, some funny, some magical, and some that fail to be any of the above.  It’s a valiant attempt of creating something unique. Sometimes the reminiscing and ‘play’ seem drawn out and repetitive, and I must admit, at certain moments when the game has become obvious, the fun dissipates. A game of repetition can feel too long and tedious when repeated a second time. Audience participation adds another layer of entertainment, anxiety (I hope he doesn’t pull me into this…), and audaciousness.  At our performance, these participants, especially the one midway through, all brought life and humor into the procedure, adding some true spontaneity and spark into the adventure.  Not that it wasn’t there already; Sobelle imbues a humanity and sincerity that is lovely and engaging. But I could also see how one of the earlier moments could result in some deadness as well. It was poetic for about the first third, but then, as with most of the vignettes, the charm starts to wear off.

My only problem with the show is the structure itself.  There are moments of humor and wit along side other tidbits of emotional engagement, but spaces so dead and empty that its hard to stay connected. What is the point for these inventive moments of memories and magic? Are we supposed to feel a strong emotional thread, or is this just glimpses into our memories, in the way our mind jumps around when we shift through a box of our own mementos? The over arching theme exploring the idea of objects and memory is too weak to sustain the journey from beginning to end. There are moments when the energy just fades or stalls in the emptiness of the moment. The ending is extremely magical in its delivery but not in its length. What are we to carry out with us once we leave this environmental warehouse? There is little to hold on to. The memory of The Object Lesson will be filed in my own private storage room under ‘enjoyable’, but not much more than that.

The Object Lesson By Geoff Sobelle Directed by David Neumann Scenic Installation Design by Steven Dufala

The Object Lesson By Geoff Sobelle Directed by David Neumann Scenic Installation Design by Steven Dufala

The Object Lesson By Geoff Sobelle Directed by David Neumann Scenic Installation Design by Steven Dufala

  #frontmezzjunkies has posted a review: #TheObjectLesson @nytw79 #GeoffSobelle The Object Lesson: Not Much to Hold On To in the End @NYTW By Ross…

[gilberthbolanos]

Opera and theater's Prototype Festival pushed mostly online

Opera and theater’s Prototype Festival pushed mostly online

One of the world’s top festivals of contemporary opera and theater has shifted format because of the coronavirus pandemic. wo other world premieres will be presented through Jan. 16, including “Times3″ a digital audio collage by composer Pamela Z and theater artist Geoff Sobelle in New York’s Times Square, and “Ocean Body,” a multi-screen and music installation for in-person audiences of four a…

[ryanhamiltonwalsh]

My favorite creative things from 2017:

- Twin Peaks: The Return - Sticky Fingers (Jann Wenner bio by Joe Hagan) - Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm LP - Reply all podcast - Long Distance I + II episodes - Craig Finn - We All Want The Same Things LP - S-Town podcast - "Rain's Comin' In" - Chelsea Peretti's trope-ridden theatre experiment podcast http://bit.ly/2nGuFaq - Get Out movie - Gary Gulman on the Wonderful World of Depression podcast http://bit.ly/2BnSmKw - Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker: John Lurie profile http://bit.ly/2BuK1lu Defense of Negative Criticism http://bit.ly/2kqfoWG - David Lynch: The Art Life documentary - Guided by Voices - August by Cake LP - "The Mystery of L.A. Billboard Diva Angelyne's Real Identity Is Finally Solved" http://bit.ly/2Bp9GyK - The Women's March artwork http://bit.ly/2ChVjKp - Geoff Sobelle's HOME (theatre) - Liz Pelly on Spotify http://bit.ly/2nPUllv

[workingdraft]

Geoff Sobelle - “Home” 

[jimrmoore]

(Radio Vaudeville)  FLASHBACK!  Great interview with theater maker Geoff Sobelle. This was recorded in March 2017 when his show “The Object Lesson” was extended at New York Theatre Workshop. 

[theo-westenberger]

3 Wolf Moon

Contributed by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff for the Theo Westenberger Estate, June 12, 2017

The kind of t-shirt I never used to take seriously. Is this now the answer?

I am thinking about how rarely I can stomach art about the environment. I am trying to figure out if this says more about me or more about art.

I know Anohni’s album Hopelessness is beautiful, but I have no desire to listen to it. Last night in Times Square, I watched Lars Jan’s Holoscenes,  a dance piece that takes place in a giant elevated fishtank. As the dancers perform a duet, the water level rises and falls about them. The New York Times describes the piece as a meditation on “ the uncontrollable nature of climate change.”  Watching it though,  I wasn’t thinking about the environment. I was focused on the beauty of one dancer’s dress floating around her, on the little heartbreak I felt when the dancers dropped their weight entirely against the surface of the water and broke apart, on how impressive it was that both performers looked at each other with open eyes underwater, on how the culture that fuels the advertisements behind the tank is the same culture that fuels the anthropocene—and therefore how important it was that this show was free. So, okay, I was thinking about the environment, but only as it relates to staging concepts.

Geoff Sobelle and Annie Saunders performing in Lars Jan’s Holoscenes, 2017

*

I know that the environment around me is collapsing. I’m not in denial. This month, our president announced that the U.S. will pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. Oil is now flowing through the Keystone Pipeline, and the list goes on. But art about this news feels like pointing to a dead body. I don’t want to look. I’m trying to figure out if that is a fair response and if there are other ways of reckoning with an unfathomable loss.

* The philosopher Timothy Morton has a term for phenomena like climate change that are so large they become impossible to grasp: hyperobjects. “Things like: not just a Styrofoam cup or two, but all the Styrofoam on Earth, ever….hyperobjects outlast me, and they out-scale me in the here and now” (Timothy Morton, "Introducing the idea of Hyperobjects." High Country News 2015). I wonder if it is possible to feel anything about hyperobjects. Or if could politically-aware art address this impossibility of comprehension as a first step.

* 

I am thinking about Jewish funerals and how there are no open caskets. We tell stories about the person who has died. What they meant to us. All the funny and bizarre habits they had that made us love them, all the ways we carry them with us still. There is usually catering involved. And laughter. This storytelling and grieving and celebrating goes on for a full week.

Is what I’m craving some kind of shiva for the planet’s ecosystems? I am trying to picture it: everyone I know, sitting in a circle, telling stories about a tree, a wave, a cat. Remember when we could drink water from the stream—put your cup in it and bring it to your mouth? What a concept! Everyone who remembers this laughs and snaps their fingers. Maybe this is too defeatist because nature isn’t over yet. But there is so much we have lost already. And I have barely begun facing it.

Rachel Jendrzejewski’s play Early Morning Song has a passage that hits me hard. It’s simple. It’s a list of tree varieties.

Screenshots of Rachel Jendrzejewski’s Early Morning Song. The list goes on for 11 pages.

Early Morning Song is a play about the environment, and so it’s clear that the implication of this list is that all these trees will soon be gone. But experiencing the list, it overwhelms me in a different sense.  There are so many trees to admire. It is unbearably beautiful. It is elegiac—mournful and celebratory at once—and makes straightforward commentary feel flat in comparison.

In this light, BBC’s Planet Earth becomes an elegy, so does a landscape painting of the Hudson River, that t-shirt with the wolves printed on it, and any poem about the winter. It is interesting: in our present time, showing nature’s beauty—once the most straightforward form of art—may be the ultimate provocation. This is why so much overtly political art about the environment today feels like putting a hat on a hat.

Landscape near Rome during a Storm, Simon Denis

[briefnytw]

Amidst the cardboard mountains of The Object Lesson, audience members are encouraged to explore and open the boxes. You never know what you'll discover! Scenic Installation Designer Steven Dufala and Creator/Performer Geoff Sobelle reveal where they found some of the objects they stashed inside the boxes.

[bxbakery]

In ‘Food,’ Geoff Sobelle Explores the Extremes of Eating

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: ‘Food’ Review: It’s an Acquired Taste by Houman Barekat

By Houman Barekat At the Edinburgh Festival, Geoff Sobelle presents a dinner party as a theatrical spectacle, in which silliness is the end in itself. Published: August 10, 2023 at 07:34AM from NYT Theater https://ift.tt/Y8nqVZU via IFTTT

[mironivanov]

One Performer and 4,000 Boxes

Geoff Sobelle’s solo performance, "The Object Lesson," at New York Theater Workshop, invites the audience to explore the sprawling set before the show begins.

[riting]

Kestrel Leah in conversation with Nichole Canuso

In advance of the LAX Festival we asked twelve artists to profile the twelve pieces in the festival. Nichole’s performance, PANDAEMONIUM made in collaboration with Lars Jan and Xander Duell, runs from October 18th–21st at the Los Angeles Theater Center, in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival. Details can be found here.

KL: How did Pandaemonium come about?

NC: It began with Lars and I … with the idea of being alone and together at the same time—both being connected to people you don’t realize you’re connected to, as well as the great chasm that can exist between people who think they’re close, who think they understand each other. It began with the visual image of two people separated in space, two solos in two different cities that, through live feed, fit together like a locket. So the two people are actually having a duet in the virtual space. We brought Geoff Sobelle in pretty quickly, thinking that he would be the other performer, and the two of us would be in different cities.  But when we got together to rehearse and we put Geoff on one side of the room and me on the other, with the video in the middle—just to rehearse—we started to realize that it was pretty powerful to see both people side by side not knowing the other was there, and then to see the third space, the video space, at the same time. So we decided to go forward with this idea of a triptych, where the audience could scan all three spaces, and I decided to table the idea of the two different cities for an installation that would include the audience.

That installation is actually what I’m developing currently—I’ve finally returned to that aspect. It will be in two separate locations, but instead of two performers, it will be two audience members at a time that meet in that virtual space. It’s using the same video design and software as Pandæmonium but with a very different take. The participants will see themselves and their own surroundings, but they’ll also see someone else sitting at the table who’s not actually there … and those participants will be able to talk to each other.

You describe Pandaemonium as a "performance concert.” Can you explain your choice and expand on the role of music in the piece?

Xander Duell plays live and is on stage with us. We brought Xander into the process pretty early and started to realize it would be a non-verbal piece—that the music would be the sonic environment and that the story would be told through visuals and sound. The music he’s made sometimes takes over and we take a back seat to the music and sometimes we come forward and the music is more of a support. I really do think of the music, the video and the choreography sharing voice, sharing the story telling.

So they were created quite symbiotically?

Yeh .. Really the five of us, meaning Geoff, Lars, Xander, Pablo and I made the project together. We were on a residency actually … there was a book of photographs by Richard Misrach called Desert Cantos—and he actually uses the term Cantos to describe these photographic essays—and we gave this book to Xander while we were rehearsing. He would go off hiking and look at these books, and write music, and come back at the end of the day and show us what he’d played. He actually wasn’t in the room with us much of the time but we were both using the same source material. On the flip side, sometimes he was in the room, scoring live what we were doing, and some of it would inspire our improvisations. We found a way of communicating, a way of speaking together.

I find musicians, as performers, keep their performances open to a degree of spontaneous improvisation that can be in opposition to the way most theatre and dance performances are composed …

It’s pretty set. That wasn’t much of a conflict.

You clearly use the languages of both dance and physical theatre in this performance. Do you lean more on one than the other?

I always see my work and my approach to the world through a choreographic lens. So everything that I do, structurally and physically and formally, it all feels like choreography to me. That said, Lars and Geoff both come from theater so that influence is pretty heavy as well. I also have done a lot of physical theater—I’ve done some clown pieces—and that world feels useful at times. We do lean into different modes in different sections. There are sections when we lean into the characters and the humor and the relationship between two people and you see them as characters who are going through something. And there are times when we lean into the visual aesthetics of the space and the relationship between object and body. So I think what the piece does is take sharp turns. Someone said it felt like a cubist painting … that it’s taken apart and put back together.

What kind of voice did Lars have as you and Geoff were going on this journey?

The three of us often functioned like co-directors and we would lean on each other for our strengths. Much of the show was born out of improvisations. As the outside eye, Lars was an instigator, a reflecting board, but then the three of us would make decisions together about how to move forward—and often include Pablo and Xander in those conversations. We relied heavily on Lars for his eye on the whole, and he’s a wonderful provocateur igniting things. We trust and feel inspired by each other and that’s what drives the collaboration.

What is your relationship to technology as an artist who works in body-based disciplines?

Photography and film have always been a passion of mine. I work with Lars and Pablo because I feel like they share a desire to address this tension between the live body and the digital image, and so I feel like this is at the heart of the pieces that we make together—this collision, this tension, and using the technology to show chasms of all sorts, and sometimes to show the technology we are interacting with in the world. The video is never arbitrary. It’s always at the heart of the work, or at least that’s the goal.

Has the project changed since you created it?

This is the first time since 2016 that we’re doing it … we’re unpacking costumes and re-remembering the choreography! We were really in each other’s lives when we made the project and it’s a reunion of sorts. Feeling the way the world is now changes the embodiment of the piece. And there’s something different about performing something at the end of a process, where it’s sort of the bloom of the process, as opposed to re-approaching it with a fresh perspective.

Kestrel Leah is a British actor and director working internationally across stage and screen. She often collaborates across music, film, dance and visual art, and is co-founder of PHYSICAL PLASTIC theater project with Cypriot composer and sound artist Yiannis Christofides.

Nichole Canuso creates performance experiences that embrace the complexity and absurdity of humanity while sitting at the crossroads of movement, visual art, and theater.

photos by Nichole Canuso