Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed

Video

The cast of Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed in rehearsal at the Fisher Center.
(Credit: Todd Norwood)

Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed

Artistic Team

Dan Hurlin (Translator, Designer, and Director)

Dan Hurlin received a 1990 Village Voice Obie award for his solo adaptation of Nathanael West's A Cool Million, and in 1998, he was nominated for an American Theater Wing Design award for his music theater piece The Shoulder. His suite of puppet pieces Everyday Uses for Sight: Nos. 3 & 7 (2000) earned him a 2001 New York Dance and Performance award and Hiroshima Maiden, (2006) was given an Obie award for music by Robert Een, as well as a UNIMA-USA Citation for Excellence. Other performance works include The Jazz Section (1989), Constance and Ferdinand (1991), Quintland (1992), No(thing so powerful as) Truth (1995), Disfarmer (2009), and his toy theater piece The Day The Ketchup Turned Blue (1997). Formerly the Artistic Director of Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, NH, Hurlin is currently the director of the Graduate Program in Theater at Sarah Lawrence College, teaching performance art, dance, and puppetry. In addition to grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and Creative Capital, Hurlin is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in choreography, a USA Artist Fellowship, the Alpert Award for theater, and the 2013 Jesse Howard Jr. Rome Prize for visual art.

Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed

Director's Note

I've spent much of my career believing that narrative structures in theater are no longer valid for the contemporary world. The notion of having a "plot," it seems to me, appeals to a centuries-old desire to make order out of chaos. Art has long since given up on that and, in an effort to reflect our times more accurately, has embraced the chaotic, unknowable, immediate, and multifaceted way our lives actually unfold. Yet like a monkey on my back, both my training and love of history keep dragging me back to Aristotelian narrative, representation, and the impulse to tell a story.

Like me, the Italian futurists were dedicated to abstraction in theater without knowing exactly how to achieve it. In Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed the signifiers of narrative are there—characters, settings, and sequentially developing events—but the narrative logic is outdone by chaos, nonsense, and style. These plays, having been created by a painter/designer (Fortunato Depero), use visual languages, as opposed to the spoken word. Visual impact is employed to eschew reason and correctness, and to embrace non sequitur and impossibility. They are wonderful expressions of a liminal moment during the transition from representation to abstraction in art, which mirrors my own development as an artist. The plays provide a rich opportunity to uncover for myself a new way of making theater that honors my story-telling impulse, while allowing for a more abstract evocation of the madness, violence, and playfulness of the world in which we live today.

In addition to thanking Maria Consagra, Cristina Puglisi, Lake Simons, and Kim Bowes, without whose contribution and help, these performances would be impossible; I would like to gratefully acknowledge the following institutions and individuals:

The American Academy in Rome: Lindsay Harris, Barbara Drudi, Peter Benson Miller, Denise Gavio; MART: Mariarosa Mariech; Center for Italian Modern Art: Heather Ewing; MAPP International Productions: Cathy Zimmerman, Sandra Garner, Julia GutiérrezRivera, Michelle Coe, and Brian Tate; American Dance Institute: Adrienne Willis, Ruth Moe, Cathy Teixeira, and the ADI staff; Bard College and the Fisher Center: Gideon Lester, Caleb Hammons, Vin Rocca, and Rick Reiser; the Jim Henson Carriage House: Heather Henson, Cheryl Henson, and Lindsey Z Briggs; Heather Streckfus, Green Cesare Santus, Jessica Palmieri, Cyrus Cassells, Catie Newell, Cathy Weis, Vivien Greene, Christine Farrell, and my husband, Kazu Nakamura.

Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed

Program

Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed

Futurist puppet plays by Fortunato Depero
Translated, designed, and directed by Dan Hurlin
Original music by Dan Moses Schreier
Created by the ensemble
Produced by MAPP International Productions
World Premiere