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Thu, Sep 24, 2009
Show Is Keynote Event of OSU Symposium on Narrative, Science, Performance
Longtime Wexner Center theater favorites the SITI Company returns to Columbus September 30—October 4 with another ensemble work co-commissioned by the Wexner Center, Who Do You Think You Are. This production by the New York City- based company explores the principles of brain science and will be the keynote for an Ohio State symposium on science, narrative, and performance.
EVENT INFORMATION: The regional premiere of SITI Company’s Who Do You Think You Are (90 mins., no intermission) will be presented Wednesday through Saturday, September 30–October 3 at 8 pm and Saturday–Sunday, October 3-4 at 2 pm in the Wexner Center's Performance Space, 1871 N. High St. Tickets are $24 for the general public, $20 for members, and $10 for students. For tickets, call (614) 292-3535, or visit wexarts.org or ticketmaster.com (1-800-745-3000). Note: Tickets are going fast to some of these shows.
With its text developed solely by the company members (for the first time since The Medium, the first SITI production presented at the Wexner Center in 1996), Who Do You Think You Are is a smartly conceived theatrical exploration of the principles of brain science. Audiences need not worry: Ph.D.s aren’t a prerequisite for grasping the dramatic situations that SITI puts into play onstage.
Notes SITI director Anne Bogart: “How does the vast labyrinth, the systems and the layers of chemical, muscular, and neuronal activity, inform our tiniest interaction? When we begin to examine the chemistry of emotion, thought, and action, does our own scrutiny alter the emotion, the thought, or the action? When studying the mind, does the mind study you?.…Our task is to construct a play that simultaneously suggests the complexity of human experience and celebrates its elegance and simplicity.”
Notes Charles Helm, the Wexner Center’s director of performing arts, “We are pleased to continue our long relationship with SITI Company with this co-commissioned piece—one that will fit perfectly into this special symposium focusing on the relationships between the sciences and the arts and support OSU’s “one university” aspirations to foster cross-disciplinary learning.”
The symposium, called Narrative, Science and Performance—taking place at Ohio State October 1-3 and cosponsored by Project Narrative (an initiative of Ohio State’s Department of English) and the Wexner Center—brings scientists and humanists together to explore new possibilities for dialogue across long-standing disciplinary divide, focusing on how science can often serve as a catalyst for the arts. SITI’s Anne Bogart will serve as a panelist for a session on Friday, October 1 from 9 to 11 am in the center’s Film/Video Theater, and the symposium registration fee includes a ticket to the October 1 performance of Who Do You Think You Are. More information on the symposium can be found on the Wexner Center’s event site at http://www.wexarts.org/learn/?eventid=4103 or Project Narrative at http://projectnarrative.osu.edu/events/default.cfm.
THE SITI COMPANY AND THE WEXNER CENTER The Wexner Center has a rich history of supporting Anne Bogart and SITI Company, and this show marks SITI’s ninth appearance at the center. Starting in 1996 with the presentation of The Medium (inspired by the writings of Marshall McLuhan) to the 2007 production of Radio Macbeth (a Wexner Center Residency Award project), with stops in between for the Obie Award-winning BOB (about theater director Robert Wilson); an inventive take on Alice in Wonderland called Alice’s Adventures; the one-woman show Room (based on the writings of Virginia Woolf); Score, inspired by the composer and educator Leonard Bernstein; and the Wexner Center co-commission Death and the Ploughman. SITI has also participated in both student and teaching residencies in Ohio State’s theater department over the years, and the company’s design and technical team will be talking with technical theater students at Ohio State this year. For more on SITI Company, click to: www.siti.org.
EVENT SUPPORT
Who Do You Think You Are was commissioned by the Wexner Center, Arizona State University (ASU) Gammage, and by SITI Company with support from the Leading National Ensemble Theatres Program, a joint initiative of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and additional support by the National Endowment for the Arts, the USA Rockefeller Fellow Award, and Public Funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Major support for the Wexner Center’s 2009–10 performing arts season is generously provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Accommodations provided by The Blackwell Inn.
All performing arts programs and events also receive support from the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members, as well as from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Columbus Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.
OTHER UPCOMING THEATER: Druid Ireland’s The Walworth Farce October 16–17 at 8 pm in Thurber Theatre This international theater hit from Galway, Ireland—disguised as an old-fashioned high farce, complete with rapid costume changes, cross-dressing, and mistaken identity—delivers insights into what happens when we become stuck in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Tim Crouch’s England November 17–18 at 8 pm, and November 19–20 at 9 pm, Wexner Center galleries Winner of a Fringe First Award at Edinburgh, England features two actors playing the same character: the somewhat naïve, disarmingly cheerful narrator who serves as a tour guide for a tale about art and family, whose deft turns contain dark surprises.
