WHERE: Wexner Center for the Arts in the Mershon Auditorium.

WHEN: April 23 through 26, 2015

 

the theater is a blank page

 

This world premiere production is the first full collaboration between visual artist, Ann Hamilton and theater innovators SITI Company, was created through a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award and is a signature moment of the Wexner Center’s 25th Anniversary Season.

 

     The work’s title metaphorically refers to the meta-experience of reading; being aware of both the solitary act of reading and of the author’s narrative journey. As an extension of this idea, Hamilton and SITI’s co-artistic directors on this project, Anne Bogart, Leon Ingulsrud and Ellen Lauren, will focus on the apparatus of theater: its architecture, mechanics and tools as well as on the audience’s immersion in the performance’s ever evolving layers of images.

     Text from Virginia Woolf’s novel, “To the Lighthouse” (1927), known for its shifting temporal and psychological perspectives set alongside poignant ruminations on loss, subjectivity and perception, will be another point of departure for the work.

     Director of Performing Arts Charles Helm says, “That artists of the caliber of Ann Hamilton and SITI Company can, over the years, develop a kinship through the Wexner Center and grow into collaborators to make adventurous work here realizes our aim to be a special platform for creative enterprise. We have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with both Ann Hamilton and SITI through many projects and look forward to seeing how their joint effort the theater is a blank page will unfold on our stage.”

About

Internationally renowned installation-art pioneer Ann Hamilton, who lives and works in Columbus and is a Distinguished University Professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Art, has engaged the Wexner Center since New Works for New Spaces (1990–91), one of its inaugural exhibitions, and was the subject of the center’s 1996 survey of her multimedia work, the body and the object. She developed her interest in video through the support of the center’s Film/Video Studio Program and launched her first collaborations with performing artists such as choreographer Meg Stuart and multidisciplinary visionary Meredith Monk in projects spearheaded and commissioned by the center’s performing arts department. In addition to representing the US at the 1999 Venice Biennale, Hamilton has exhibited installations at such major institutions as the Park Avenue Armory, Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award, among countless others.

 

Through Wexner Center creative residencies SITI Company has created and premiered multiple works at the center, including Bob (1998), Alice’s Adventures (1998), Room (2000), and Score (2002), and presented several other productions on the center’s stages. Among other notable accolades, SITI Company has received the Rene Castillo Otto Award for Political Theater and the American Theatre Wing Award.

MORE DETAILS: http://wexarts.org/performing-arts/ann-hamilton-and-siti-company-theater-blank-page