Emily Mast - Offending the Audience at the Velaslavasay Panorama

Offending The Audience
Friday, Saturday & Sunday, March 25-27
8 o’clock PM
Tickets $10
($8 VPES Members, Students, Seniors)
Advance tickets available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/158708

Presented by Emily Mast, Offending The Audience is an “anti-play” that was written in 1966 by the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke. This 45-minute lecture about theater must, by necessity, take place in a theater while attempting to be as un-theatrical as possible. In this particular adaptation, seven children between the ages of six and twelve remove the audience from the artificiality of a critical discourse of artifice by introducing real play into a play that, for all of its avant-garde seminality is, to a contemporary ear, far too self-conscious to be listened to. The childrens’ lack of pretense allows the audience to experience the piece empathetically. This fresh take on Handke by no means resembles a conventional children's play. Rather, it is a conceptual gesture that is staged in a conventional theater.

With : Zane Amundsen, Amber Barbell, Mathew Davis, Bailey Garcia, Kaitlin Morgan, Gerald Orzikh & Talyan Wright

Emily Mast is a visual artist who works primarily with people, movement and sound to advocate uncertainty as live sculptural material. In 2009, she presented a live looping play called "Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!)" at X-initiative in New York for Performa 09. She has had solo exhibitions at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, Samson Projects in Boston and the Paris Project Room in Paris, France. She was a resident artist at Yaddo in 2010 and at Skowhegan in 2006. This past May she was part of a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled "Audience Experiments: Contemporary Art in the Age of Spectacle." Please visit emilymast.com for more information.  

This play has been made possible in part by the generous support of Ratatat (ratatatmusic.com)

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- Now On View -

 

 

On view in our Ancillary Salon through April 3, The Velaslavasay Panorama hosts a special exhibition dedicated to The Grand Moving Mirror of California, a moving panorama presentation which was revived and performed on our stage for 5 weeks in 2010. Imparting an idea of the thrills and dangers undertaken on a seaboard trip around the South American continent to reach Gold Rush-era California, the painted scroll depicts the rough seas at Cape Horn, early versions of today's California cities and famous natural treasures, and the people, landscapes and ports-of-call the original '49ers encountered on their journey to find their fortunes in the Golden State.

In addition to getting a close look at the painting and its presentation mechanism, the exhibit includes an assortment of preparatory and inspiration materials used in the creation of the new artwork, as well as displays relating to the original panorama production that was toured through New England in 1855 by impresario L. Eaton Emerson.

That is not all. We are indeed pleased to present a new item to our expanded array of souvenirs - a limited edition T-shirt commemorating The Grand Moving Mirror of California, now available through our website gift shop. With a hand-drawn design by the artist Guan Rong, painter of the moving panorama scroll, the shirts are lovely memento of this great manifestation of panorama traditions.