BLACKBOX is a poem-play live performance weaving 5 different perspectives, 5 different writing styles, and 5 different characters set at the site of a fictional plane crash in the Canadian wilderness in an attempt to explore ‘what is’ the nature of physical reality and the limits of perception.
Followed by an evening of NY’s finest punk rock!
Brooklyn-based Aztec Economy presents a staged reading of a new experimental play, BLACK BOX — devised in parts by NYC playwrights: Bekah Brunstetter, Clay McLeod-Chapman, Matthew Hancock, Eric Sanders, Adam Laten Willson, & Casey Wimpee. Featuring Adam Belvo, Anna Abhau Elliott, Emma Reaves, Timothy McDonough, Nick Capodice, & Cole Wimpee and TBA
Southeast Texas theatergoers will experience a different kind of live performance as theatre groups Ad Hoc Beaumont and New York’s Aztec Economy present My Aim is True on Saturday Feb. 9, Friday Feb. 15, and Saturday Feb. 16, at 7:30 p.m., on the grounds of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum at Lamar University.When a mysterious stranger wanders from the night into a small western town, he runs into a slew of crooks, creeps and faces from his past. What drew him there? And will anyone survive to see him disappear back into the night?With a mix of dark humor and operatic mayhem, My Aim is True is a theatrical homage to the cinematic works of Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and the Italian- style Western.First produced as part of the 2010 Crown Point Festival in Lower Manhattan, and, subsequently, at the 2011 New Orleans Fringe Festival to widespread critical acclaim as well as “Top Picks of the Festival” mentions, this production employs a collaboration of some of the original cast with actors from New York and Beaumont to embark on a traveling narrative through the buildings of Gladys City. Through staging, movement, costumes and music, My Aim is True recreates the gritty world of 1970s Spaghetti Westerns with humor and pathos.
Featuring Michael Mason, Gator Armitage, Jody Reho, Adam Belvo, Kristen Read, Donny Avery, Cole Wimpee, Jeff Wisor, Adam Laten Willson, & The Big Thicket Outlaws.
Just 5 months before an assassine murdered President Abraham Lincoln, a benefit performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was presented in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Three brothers, Edwin, Junius Brutus, Jr., and John Wilkes Booth – stock the most prestigious acting family of their day, performed onstage together for the first and only time as, Brutus, Cassius, & Marc Antony, respectively. With the Civil War raging, and played-at plots against over-throwing Caesar ever-present, THE BRUTES is a new play adventuring to the pivotal acts of violence in American & Roman history as explored through the practices of theatrical history and sibling rivalry.
A Free Staged Reading with Wine available. One night only.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 20th – 8PM
@ THE NEW OHIO THEATER
154 Christopher St. (btwn Greenwich & Washington)
West Village, NYC
Text by Casey Wimpee / Direction by Leah Bonvissuto / Featuring Christopher Baker, Adam Belvo, Nick Capodice, Ian Hill, Lucy Kaminsky, Timothy McDonough*, Adam Laten Willson, & Cole Wimpee.
Image design by Kalli Newman
*actor appearing courtesy of Actor’s Equity Association
BUTCHER HOLLER HERE WE COME is the story of four workers trapped in a mine in the coal fields of West Virginia. A pusher, a driller, an engineer, a deputy pit boss, and the crew’s foreman are trapped when an unexpected explosion rockets through the mine. With their foreman unconscious, the remaining miners are forced to deal with the life-and-death choices of survival- as well as the turbulent history of small-town secrets which connect them to each other. Blending Aesop’s fables, Loretta Lynn fandom, chain gang field hollers, the dissociative effects of ketamine use, and the complicated world of slope coal mining (with its dialects, hierarchies, unionization struggles, and history of disasters), BUTCHER HOLLER HERE WE COME is a journey into the darkness of the human psyche and its ruthless social order.
A short version will premiere in New Orleans in mid-November with UNROUTE at Michalopoulos & a Shaolin-Do Attic Space
KILL DEVIL HILLSis a live, immersive performance which creates a psychic space to re-imagine the dawn of flying machines. Wilbur is the doubt-ridden, emotionally stunted, one-mechanical-armed, maniacally hard-driven visionary with suicidal tendencies & a nightmare quest (a la Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’) to capture Icarus’ wings and whose success will ultimately be subverted by an Ahab-like legal war against his enemies for creative ownership of their flying machines. Orville is his hard-drinking, fast-scheming, reckless younger brother whose absolute commitment to war against the earth takes him to the brink of paralysis and death. With their pantomime, suit-covered sidekick mute engineer / crash-test-dummy, Cannonball and their stern, proper school-teacher sister, Kate, the brother’s rum vessel becomes a place where war is waged, and ambition and dreams are weighed, and imagination meets death in a hallucinatory mindscape of human achievement and destruction.
Featuring: Chris Baker, Adam Belvo, Isaac Byrne, Lucy Kaminsky, Michael Mason, Zoe Metcalfe-Klaw, Will Neuman, Adam Laten Willson.
COLOR TVS EN TIJUANA (approx. 45 min) is a live performance using 7 PERFORMERS. 7 TVs. 7 SCENES to explore Christ’s 7 Stations of the Cross in the context of modern day Tijuana, Mexico. In Room 7 of Tres Marias Motel on the volatile border between the United States and Mexico, one evening’s encounters of the souls of a dancer, an undercover narcotics agent, a coyote, an on-call travelling dentist, the ghost of a legendary cartel member, and the dead body of a pinata artist carry along a narrative of Mexican Catholic ritualism, Ancient Aztec Mythology, and the lessons of how to ‘cross the border’ between states of the land and states of the spirit.
Featuring: Nanda Abella, Malcolm Madera, Adam Belvo, Matthew Hancock, Michael Mason, Karen Sours, Adam Laten Willson
MORE SONGS FROM THE NEOFASCISTS (2008; 2012) is an ongoing sideshow act depicting Goose, Bruno, Gaucho, Rudolf, Assaryan & Others as they travel the circuit from Berlinto Bucharest from Santiago to the Sunny Slopes of Spain to Brooklyn Locations such as Bushwick Starr to Roberta’s Pizza to House of Yes; to Moscow to Manhattan locations such as The Tank (formerly in Tribeca) & Dixon Place, to Syrian Birthday parties and Occupy Bed Stuy Events.
Entertaining and edifying and educating the children with the virtues of 20th Century Totalitarianism and Regime / Cults through song, games, interpretive dances, and sado-masochistic rituals.
▲YouTube – More videos from MORE SONGS FROM THE NEOFASCISTS
PSYCHOJELLY (aztec economy) is a half-hour performance with live music and video detailing a narrative involving radioactive jelly, turtle eggs, floppy discs, James Bond, and cold war escapism set in Bulgaria in the 1980s. Aztec Economy has presented shows at the Obie-Award Winning Ice Factory at the Ohio Theater and 3LD in Lower Manhattan, as well as at P.S.122, The Tank (formerly in Tribeca), The Steamship Lilac off the Hudson River,
The Brick Theater, Brooklyn Fire Proof, New Orleans Fringe Festival, The Fridge in Washington D.C., and bars, backyards, rooftops, and churches all over Brooklyn.
DEN SVARTA FANAN is composed of Joe Merolla on Cello, Weasel Walter on Drums, and Nonoko Yashida on Alton Sax.
PHOTONS BE FREE (panoply performance lab) was originally cheap propaganda for the Hologram Liberation Front written by The Doctor (Joe). PPL’s 2012 piece attempts to provide a crucial platform for the voices of photon, electrons, and other enslaved particles (dear ones), as they shuffle together for warmth, scream their despair into ears too large and crude to understand, and riot across the spectrum in a haze of elementary self-organization.
with Esther Neff, Brian McCorkle, Arla Berman, Bonnie Kane
SIGHTINGS is a psychedelic rock band in Brooklyn. DISCOGRAPHY 4 song 7″ (Freedom From, 2001) “Live” cass. (Spite, 2001) “Sightings” cd/lp (Load, 2002) “Live at Free 103.9 FM” cd-r (Free 103.9 FM, 2002) “Michigan Haters” cd (Psych-O-Path, 2002) “Absolutes” cd/lp (Load/Riot Season, 2003) “Unreleased Vols. 1 & 2” cd-r (no label, 2003) “Gardens of War” w/ Tom Smith cd (Smackshire, 2004) “Arrived In Gold” cd/lp (Load, 2004) “Castle Moat/Invisible Coats” 7″ (Fusetron, 2005) “Back to Back/Une Drole De Journee” 7″ split with Hrvatski (Ache, 2005) “End Times” cd/lp (Fusetron/ En/Of, 2006) vinyl edition has 3 tracks from CD version + one different song and is paired with an offset print from artist Daniel Richter. ltd to 100 copies “Through The Panama” cd/lp (Load-CD/Ecstatic Peace-LP, 2007) Mike Morgan (Guitar), Richard Hoffman (Bass), John Lockie (Drums).
PSYCHOJELLY
|| Aztec Economy + Den Svarta Fanan Joe Merolla (Cello) / Weasel Walter (Drums) / Nonoko Yashida (Alto Sax)
Casey Wimpee (text) / Sean Berman (video design) / Adam Belvo (Pizo)
THE BATTLE PLAYS TRILOGY was a three-year / three-piece performance installation that examined the isolation of the American-psyche-in-crisis through genre, medium, and history.
BRING ME THE HEAD OF JOHN FORD (2008, The Brick Theater – Brooklyn) mixed elements of Noh and Greek mystery plays with 4 projector screens and 2 televisions against one speed-addicted video store clerk in a synchronized-riff edit of a classic Spaghetti Western, into which he projects all of his innermost desires and memories in an obsessive ritual set in a trailer park in West, Texas.
ANTIGONE WITH THE WIND (2009, Monkey Town – Brooklyn) combined a surround-sound audio book recording of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel with densely-layered environmental compositions, 70’s femme-disco pop, and a chorus of barking dogs, all as a backdrop for an intricately rehearsed cope-mechanism work-out exercise performed by a little girl locked in a basement by an unknown abductor in suburban Atlanta.
MY KIND OF BLOOD (2010, Brooklyn Fire Proof in association with Bushwick Open Studios) took a seminal 50’s Miles Davis Jazz album and re-constructed it with police scanner radio, german burlesque, street crime photos, and hard-boiled pulp to reveal a private eye’s pattern-guide work fetish as he unravels a violent noir-crime mystery in a gritty Brooklyn brownstone apartment.
Conceived and developed by Darcie Champagne, Ryan Dorin, Anne Dyas, Michael Mason, Adam Laten Willson, Karl Newman, Casey Wimpee, and Cole Wimpee
Contributions from Isaac Byrne, Ishaq Clayton, Jared Culverhouse, Amanda Hamilton, and Amy Lynn Stewart.
PONTIAC FIREBIRD VARIATIONS premiered at the Obie-Award Winning Ice Factory at 3LD in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. 3 years in development and combining 80s pop culture, parallel dimensions, muscle cars, linguistic variation, mythology and dreams, PFV took one scene from Shakespeare’s RICHARD III (ACT I, SC 4), and explored it in the context of ‘the musical art of variations’ – with 6 murderers pitted against each other in a revving car crash of tragicomic proportions. With live violin and grand piano, PFV wove a narrative of an intricate New York crime family embroiled in an internal battle over whether or not to murder one of their own.
Conceived and developed by Christopher Baker, Adam Belvo, Sean Berman, Isaac Byrne, Darcie Champagne, Jared Culverhouse, Ryan Dorin, Matthew Hancock, Julian James, Michelle Kelleher, Zoe Metcalfe-Klaw, Michael Mason, Will Neuman, Karl Newman, Jake Platt, Adam Laten Willson, Casey Wimpee, Cole Wimpee, and Charles Yang.
NATIONAL DIET OF JAPAN was presented at Performance Space 122 (P.S.122) in the East Village of New York City. Borrowing from Native American mythology, Nintendo Games, Zen Garden Rituals, Japanese tea ceremonies, and Parliamentary Processes, NDOJ took the audience through a 45 minute spectrum of political and biological hierarchy and the skinning of a dead rabbit on stage as metaphor for the Human Digestive System- all to a soundtrack of dueling banjos, drum circles, and wind chimes.
Conceived and developed by Adam Belvo, Ryan Hart, Michael Mason, Will Neuman, Karl Newman, Adam Laten Willson, Casey Wimpee, & Cole Wimpee.
ADVENTURES IN THE OK SKIN TRADE premiered at the Fridge Theater in the Capitol Hill District of Washington D.C. The Baron, The Matron, The Rustler, and The Auctioneer have their final cattle call for the soul of an ex-NFL quarterback who has become badly burned in a barn fire. Encompassing 100 years in the American West, AITOST is a dark, fast-paced parable depicting what lengths lost souls will go to re-attain their true loves. AITOST was the first multi-city touring show presented by Aztec Economy.
Conceived and developed by Adam Belvo, Ryan Dorin, Michael Mason, Julie Morgentaler, Adam Laten Willson, Casey Wimpee, and Cole Wimpee.
