Newyorkland (EXIT)
April 3rd, 2012Newyorkland (VIA)
April 3rd, 2012Residency at Columbia University
May 7th, 2011Temporary Distortion will be in residence at Columbia University in July 2011, developing our new project: Newyorkland.
The Summer Residency Program is a professional residency program, bringing leading American and international theatre, dance, music, and performance artists to the Columbia campus to develop new projects in a nurturing and collaborative environment. New York City affords few development opportunities to artists, and the Summer Residency Program provides much-needed time and space for the creation and exploration of new material. Residency artists also serve as adjunct or guest faculty in the Arts Collaboration Lab, teaching courses, leading workshops, giving lectures or presentations, or advising and critiquing students work.
The Arts Collaboration Lab is born from the belief that often the most interesting work is made at the borders where genres intersect and new forms are created. The Lab’s curriculum and structure therefore emphasize process, collaboration, and innovation over finished products. Under the mentorship of internationally acclaimed professional artists and faculty members from Columbia University School of the Arts, the Arts Collaboration Lab is a testing ground for artistic collaboration, where students expand and deepen their understanding of their own practice by working in partnership with artists from other genres and disciplines.
The Drama Review (TDR) Article
January 11th, 2011Temporary Distortion’s work is discussed in the current issue of TDR (The Drama Review)
Winter 2010, Vol. 54, No. 4 (T208), Pages 11-38
Next Up Downtown: A New Generation of Ensemble Performance by Paige McGinley
“Staging scenes in both English and Japanese, Collins and his team create a transnational ghost story for the 21st century, one that draws on medieval Japanese noh’s evocations of ghosts, the spare, still violence of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, urban legends of subway murders, and tropes from Japanese horror films.”
The Drama Review focuses on performances in their social, economic, and political contexts.
With an emphasis on experimental, avant-garde, intercultural, and interdisciplinary performance, TDR covers dance, theatre, performance art, visual art, popular entertainment, media, sports, rituals, and performance in politics and everyday life.
Long known as the basic resource for keeping up with performance studies in all aspects, TDR continues to be a lively forum of debate on important performances in every medium, setting, and culture.
Prague Quadrennial
August 9th, 2010Americana Kamikaze has been selected for inclusion in the 2011 Prague Quadrennial as part of FROM THE EDGE: The USITT-USA exhibit, representing the best in American scenic design. This exhibit is “specifically American, self-reflective and self-critical” and exemplifies American artists engaged in “rapturous invention.”
The Prague Quadrennial is considered the Olympics of Performance Design and is on par with the Venice Biennale. Learn more about PQ 2011.
New Website Launched
August 7th, 2010Welcome to the newly designed Temporary Distortion website. Feel free to have a look around at all the new pages and features. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Welcome to Nowhere (the film)
July 9th, 2010A new website has been launched for Welcome to Nowhere (the film).
Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road) is a feature length experimental film and accompanying immersive video-art installation based on Temporary Distortion’s hit show of the same name. The original live performance premiered in New York City in 2007 and has since been performed throughout Austria, Canada, and France. At this time Welcome to Nowhere (the performance) continues to tour internationally.
The film takes place during a non-specific late-20th century era in the American Midwest. The characters we meet are by-products of the archetypes found in the road movie film and literature genres. They are: the drifter, the outlaw, the truck stop waitress, the highway patrolman… among others. Through overlaps and failings of singularity the film calls into question traditional notions of character and storytelling in addition to the boundless American sensibilities of individuality and freedom.
High-level compositing techniques combine live action with hyperreal and dreamlike photographic settings of an America just out of arm’s reach. Fully animated environments and motion graphic elements amplify a pervading sense of reality in flux and further thematic explorations of such discontinuous ideas as: expanse and isolation, distance and intimacy, self and other.
An accompanying single-channel video-art installation is set in a claustrophobic boxlike structure built to appear inside as one of the ramshackle motel rooms featured in the film. Constructed expressly for the purpose of viewing the film in isolation, this room creates an immersive environment allowing the viewer to literally share in the world of the film.
Please visit this site to stay updated on the progress of Temporary Distortion’s feature film adaptation of Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road).