Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Welcome, Pig Iron!


 PROCESS IN PERFORMANCE welcomes

Dito van Reigersberg, Sarah Sanford and Geoff Sobelle,

on their work with the
Pig Iron Theatre Company

 

 
MONDAY, April 8th, 7:30 PM
83 E. 4th St | 3rd floor
FREE!

RSVP to PinP@nytw.org

DITO VAN REIGERSBERG is a co-founder and co-artistic director of Pig Iron Theatre Company. He has performed in almost all of Pig Iron’s productions since 1995, including the OBIE-winning original pieces Hell Meets Henry Halfway, a black comedy about tennis and melancholia, and Chekhov Lizardbrain, a mashup of Three Sisters and neuroscience theory. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. Favorite roles for Pig Iron include Current Okada in Zero Cost House, seen most recently at the Under the Radar Festival; Orsino in Twelfth Night; Federico in Poet in New York; Charlotte in Cafeteria; and John White in Welcome to Yuba City. He has also created and performed with Headlong Dance Theatre, Azuka, Mauckingbird, and Nichole Canuso Dance Company. He is a Barrymore Award recipient for Best Ensemble for Mission to Mercury (Pig Iron) and a nominee for Best Actor in a Musical for Hedwig (Azuka), as well as a Helen Hayes Nominee for Best Leading Actor in a Non-Resident Play for Hell Meets Henry Halfway. With his co-artistic director Dan Rothenberg and Quinn Bauridel, he has been named a Pew Fellow (2002) and a Knight USA Fellow (2010). His alter-ego Martha Graham-Cracker is famously “the tallest drag queen in the world”—her monthly cabaret series at L'Etage in Philadelphia has been running for over 7 years.
 
SARAH SANFORD has been a Pig Iron company member since 2002. Sarah has been co-creator/performer in Shut Eye, The Lucia Joyce Cabaret, Hell Meets Henry Halfway,Love Unpunished, 365 Plays/365 Days, Welcome to Yuba City,and Twelfth Night. She is also on the core faculty at the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training where she specializes in Movement Analysis. When not working with Pig Iron, Sarah acts, directs, and teaches around Philly and elsewhere; recent credits include BANG, a 3-woman clown show about female sexuality that played to sold-out houses at the 2012 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Theresa Rebeck’s one-hander Bad Datesat Montgomery Theatre, and choreography for The Acting Company’s As You Like It, directed by Dan Rothenberg. She has performed internationally with The Riot Group, Jo Stromgren Kompani, Volcano, and Pig Iron, and has directed both scripted and original work in Philadelphia and Toronto. Winner of the 2010 F. Otto Haas Award for Best Emerging Philadelphia Theatre Artist; graduate of École Jacques Lecoq.
 
GEOFF SOBELLE is a theatre artist dedicatedto the “sublime ridiculous.” He is the co-artistic director of rainpan 43, a renegade absurdist outfit devoted to creating original actor-driven performance works. Using illusion, film and out-dated mechanics, R43 creates surreal,poetic pieces that look for humanitywhere you least expect it and find grace where no one is looking. R43s shows include: all wear bowlers (Innovative Theatre Award,Drama Desk nomination), Amnesia Curiosa, machines machines machines machines machines machines machines (OBIE award – design), andElephant Room (commissioned by Center Theatre Group). His independent work includes Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl and the upcoming Object Lesson (commissioned by Lincoln Center 3). He has been a company member of Philadelphias Pig Iron Theatre Company since 2001. Pig Iron works include: Gentlemen Volunteers, Mission to Mercury, Shut Eye, James Joyce is Dead and so is Paris, Hell Meets Henry Halfway, Chekhov Lizardbrain and Welcometo Yuba City. All ofhis work to date has premiered at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival beforetouring nationally and internationally. As a teacher, Geoff has led workshops all over theworld in devised theatre creation, physical approach to character, clown and “jeu.” He is a core teacher at the new Pig Iron school in Philadelphia (APT). His work has been supported by theIndependence Foundation, the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative, the WyncoteFoundation, US Arts International, the Princeton Atelierand the New England Foundation for the Arts. He is a 2006 Pew Fellow and is a 2009 Creative Capital grantee. He is a graduate of Stanford University, and trained in physical theatre at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France.

PIG IRON THEATRE COMPANY, founded in 1995 as an interdisciplinary ensemble, is dedicated to the creation of new and exuberant performance works that defy easy categorization. In the past 18 years the company has created 27 original works and has toured to festivals and theatres in England, Scotland, Poland, Lithuania, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Romania and Germany. The body of Pig Iron's work is eclectic and daring. Individual works have been inspired by history and biography (Poet In New York, 1997 and Anodyne, 2001), rock music (Mission to Mercury, 2000 and James Joyce is Dead and so is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret, 2003), American kitsch culture (Cafeteria, 1997), serendipity (Dig or Fly, 1996 and The Snow Queen, 1999), and fallen heroes (The Odyssey, 1995 and The Tragedy of Joan of Arc, 1998). In 2001, Pig Iron collaborated with legendary theatre director Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003) to create an exploration of sleep, dreams and consciousness (Shut Eye). In 2005, Pig Iron won an OBIE Award for Hell Meets Henry Halfway, an adaptation of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz's novel Possessed; in 2008, Pig Iron won a second OBIE for James Sugg's performance in Chekhov Lizardbrain. In 2006, Pig Iron was named Theatre Company of the Year in the Philadelphia Weekly. Pig Iron calls itself a“dance-clown-theatre ensemble” - our focus moves from character to space to contact with the audience. Individual pieces have been called “soundscape and spectacle,” “cabaret-ballet,” and “avant-garde shadow puppet dessert-theatre.”We have a hard time sitting still. Currently, Pig Iron is composed of 3 artistic directors and 4 company members, in addition to an administrative staff and board of directors. The company made Philadelphia its permanent home in 1997; though individual pieces are often developed in residency at other theatres or at universities, we premiere all our work in our hometown of Philadelphia.