ALIEN AND ORDINARY: A POETS THEATER SYMPOSIUM

Sept 18-20, 2024

St. Mark’s Church

131 E. 10th St

Curated by Ethan Philbrick

Building on decades of engagement between experimental literature and performance, The Poetry Project presents ALIEN AND ORDINARY: A POETS THEATER SYMPOSIUM. Our title recalls Bertolt Brecht’s understanding of how making everyday life productively strange, a technique Brecht referred to as alienation, opens up possibilities for ordinary people to transform the world around us in profound ways. Over five events and three days, this symposium engages the past and future of Poets Theater, exploring how community-oriented, anti-professional performance makes new sense of changing everything.

The symposium will feature performances and plays by Nile Harris, Bassem Saad, Sanja Grozdanić, Amelia Bande, and Charlene Incarnate, plus a poets theater variety show hosted by Morgan Bassichis featuring Jess Barbagallo, Nazareth Hassan, Stephen Ira, Kite, The Illustrious Pearl, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Tony Torn.

Tickets to each performance are $15 in advance, or $20 at the door. Attendees can also purchase a pass to all five events for $40.

Alien and Ordinary: A Poets Theater Symposium is generously supported and made possible by funding from the Axe-Houghton Foundation.

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WEDNESDAY 9/18:

Poets Theater Variety Show

hosted by Morgan Bassichis

featuring Jess Barbagallo, Nazareth Hassan, Stephen Ira, Kite, The Illustrious Pearl, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Tony Torn

8 pm

The Sanctuary

ALIEN AND ORDINARY opens with a Poets Theater Variety Show hosted by the performance artist Morgan Bassichis and featuring performances and readings from Jess Barbagallo, Nazareth Hassan, Stephen Ira, Kite, The Illustrious Pearl, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Tony Torn. While variety shows have been a central genre of theatrical performance since the vaudeville era, our Poets Theater Variety Show aims to bring forth the broader etymological resonance of variety: an absence of monotony, a change of fortunes, going astray, altering, transforming, bending, all things various and varying.

THURSDAY 9/19:

Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century)

Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić

performed by Omar Berrada and Kim Rosenfield

7 pm

The Parish Hall

Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century) is a script-based performance jointly authored by Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad that contends with the possibility and mutability of mourning through protracted catastrophe. While the performance begins with two discrete roles—that of traveling eulogists—the frame of who or what is being mourned appears to shift and unsettle as the work unfolds. The nameless duo recalls both the recent and distant past as if from a discontinuous identity. Their memories and musings are recurrently interrupted by the spectral presence of a third voice invoking what is called “the American Century” (1948-present). Did the Century end in Afghanistan, Syria, or Bosnia? Is it unending? Shifting tenors from the comic to the nostalgic, the melancholic to the absurd, a digressive back-and-forth between these “post-conflict” landscapes and psyches builds toward an uncertain eulogy.

Across numerous iterations since 2021, Permanent Trespass has developed a distinct formal language through a process of continuous re-writing. To quote the opening lines of the performance—everything must go. For this reading at The Poetry Project, Grozdanić and Saad present the first performance of Permanent Trespass with new readers—Kim Rosenfield and Omar Berrada.

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let me hold your hand when I say this [the words are just words]

Nile Harris

performed by Pamela Sneed, mayfield brooks, Jennifer Kidwell, Arewà Basit, Muna Mire, and Crackhead Barney

sound by Akeema-Zane

9 pm

The Sanctuary

let me hold your hand when I say this [the words are just words] is a new play by Nile Harris meditating on the ordinary poetics of desire and faith. The play is a text to be read simultaneously by six Black women. The readers become a discordant and out of sync choir as Harris performs a chance operation to determine whose voice is amplified at a given time.

FRIDAY 9/20:

REHEARSAL ABYSS / ENSAYO ABISMAL

Amelia Bande

performed with Mana Bugallo, Tess Dworman, and Ned Riseley

7 pm

The Parish Hall

REHEARSAL ABYSS / ENSAYO ABISMAL, is an incomplete play. Amelia has broken bones, pneumonia, depression - or so she says. Three strict and clumsy nurses move her around while they audition to be in her band, Disregard. The rehearsals are enmeshed with a choreography of care, made difficult by everyone’s personalities, and perceived bodily limitations. Spanish and English fail to translate into legibility. Pain, songs, gossip, resentment and flirtation are the ingredients of the group’s pretentious artistic desires and unreliable healing practices.

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Y’all Are Fucked Up

Charlene Incarnate

9 pm

The Sanctuary

Come over to Charlene’s for a joint and who knows what else as she takes you on a faded tour of her serotonin-but-not-dopamine-regulated brain; the one-sided conversations, the showtunes, the transsexual mischief, the ecstasies and sufferings of a woman on the edge fixed in spin cycle. Y’all Are Fucked Up is an honest but inebriated glimpse into the destructive habits and LSD belly laughs that our hostess, her family, and her community suffer daily from a non-recovery standpoint. Incarnate, a decade-spanning seminal Brooklyn Drag queen and burgeoning downtown impresario, concocts in perfect verse the stories that follow her virtuosic debut Cuntpany in May 2024, and mounts it at The Poetry Project for one night only.