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New York Cool: December 2007
The New York Sun: Review of "Made in Secret"
New York Magazine: November 2007
The New York Sun: November 5, 2007
Grand Street News: November, 2007
Indiewire.com: November 2, 2007
BC Magazine: November 2, 2007
LoHo Guide: November 2007
NuYorker: October 30, 2007
New York Times: October 26, 2007
Downtown Express: October 26, 2007
Brooklyn Vegan: October 26, 2007
Manhattan Movie Magazine: October 26, 2007
The Villager: October 26, 2007
Chicago Tribune: Big Events for October
Travel + Leisure October 2007: Trip Tips
Manhattan Movie Magazine: Press Event Coverage
New York Cool: The Fall Collection
Written By Cynthia Hartzell
“ Las Rubias Del Norte,” or “The Blondes of the North,” is a versatile group of musicians from the U.S., France, and Columbia, who blend the music of Cuba, Venezuela, and Austria (Mozart!). The two beautiful brunette singers, Emily Hurst and Allyssa Lamb, overwhelmed me with their talent. Check out their website to find out where you can see them for yourselves: www.lasrubiasdelnorte.com
“The Nice Ones,” featured a shy Genevieve Blouin. She explained that due to the hurricane, her back-up band was unable to travel and she would be performing accompanied by recorded back-up tracks, plus live guitar music played by Richard Schreiber. Okay, a little weird, but the music had been so good that night, I decided to stay and check it out. The music started and images and drawings were projected onto the stage. Then Gen began to sing. I was instantly converted into a fan. Do not let her shy-girl look fool you. That girl has talent and she is going places. Gen’s voice and lyrics remind me of Edie Brickell’s first album, “Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars”. Her band has a sophisticated folk-pop sound. I was able to grab a CD and have been playing it non-stop since that night. My neighbors even asked to borrow it. Don’t miss out on this hot new band. Go to www.theniceones.com to hear the music and to find out where to see them next.
Bottom line: The Fall Collection has their finger on the pulse of what’s hot in New York City. In one evening, you can be exposed to lot of new talent from multiple mediums, all for one great price. You can drink, dance, and party with New York City’s hottest new artists. Check out www.thefallcollection.org for tickets to the Fall Collection Festival, which will take place November 1st-21st at LaTeaTheater at the CSV Center (Lower East Side.) Be sure to come on down for twenty-one nights of cutting-edge film, music and theater.
Indiewire: Fifteen Shorts on Tap for NYC's Inaugural "Fall Collection"
by Brian Brooks
On November 1st, New York City will welcome its latest film/cultural event, "The Fall Collection." The 21-night festival combines film, music and theater into each night of programming in order to spotlight "underexposed new and emerging artists." The Fall Collection, which is non-competitive, offers a rotation of one-act plays and short films in a theater, followed by music at a nearby venue where the evening will culminate in a party featuring live music from DJs, bands and solo artists. The fest promises that "no two nights will be the same," and organizers have named fifteen American independent and international shorts from notable and emerging filmmakers for its inaugural event.
Among the film offerings slated to screen during The Fall Collection is Steve Collins' "Homebody," about a boy who stalks and eats a can of moldy soup that reminds him of his beloved mother. Bill Morrison's "Light is Calling" depicts a deteriorating scene from James Young's "The Bells" (1926) which is optically reprinted and edited to Michael Gordon's seven-minute composition. The piece is described further as "a meditation on the random and fleeting nature of life and love, as seen through the roiling emulsion of an ancient film." Cam Archer's "bobbycrush," currently on rotation on Sundance Channel, is about 13 year-old Bobby who has a crush on his best friend Dylan, who then ignores his friend after finding a girlfriend, thus crushing Bobby.
2004 Sundance-winning short "Gowanus, Brooklyn" by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden join the lineup with a film about a 12 year-old girl who has discovered a dark secret about her teacher, while Chase Palmer's "Shock and Awe" takes place at a family meal in Baghdad, which is interrupted by bombing, but a teenage boy, determined to eat, does not follow his family for shelter. Cesar Kuriyama's "Awkward" centers on three bored companions who experience an 'awkward' moment when they introduce beer to the situation, while John Chuldenko's "Fake Stacey" is the story of an accidental pop culture icon. The film has screened at Sundance, Tribeca, Hamptons, SXSW and the Atlanta film festivals. "Gravel," meanwhile, is the story of a "single mom [who] drags her skateboarding teenage daughter on a short road trip for lunch with an ex-convict mother has her eye on. Directed by Steven Bognar, the film along with his other shorts and docs have screened at global fests including Sundance, Rotterdam and Locarno.
"Like the films being chosen to headline The Fall Collection's debut season, these first fifteen were carefully chosen by our board of curators not only to showcase the talents of their creators, but also to expose them to an unsuspecting audience in a totally new and entertaining way," commented Erica Livingston, The Fall Collection's executive director in a statement. "While some of the films are comedic and otherwise readily engaging, others are more visually and morally challenging. When placed in rotation against each other in a single evening that also offers one-act plays and live music for 21 nights in a row, The Fall Collection offers our audience a totally new performance and multi-media arts experience." The event will take place at the LaTeaTheater at the CSV Center in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and will continue through November 21st.
By Simi Horwitz
"Ajax" in The Fall Collection
reviewed by jessica slote
The current production of Sophocles' Ajax -- at Teatro La Tea on the Lower East Side -- is a laudable endeavor. This play was chosen for presentation in the Fall Collection -- a juried festival of new theater productions and films -- and one can imagine why. It is important when young American theater artists decide to wrestle with classical Greek drama and try to make it their own. This group does a reasonable job.
The play opens with a high-heeled and sultry version of Athena (Christine Price) gloating over her own cleverness. To wit, after the death of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, there was a struggle between Odysseus and Ajax over who should get Achilles' armor. The goddess Athena favors Odysseus, so -- before the play opens, she sends Ajax on a hallucinatory rampage in which he murders scores of sheep, believing them to be his Greek detractors. Now, she looks forward to the moment when Ajax will awaken from his vengeful stupor. Knowing what honor means to him, Athena is sure he will take the hero's way out: suicide.
Ajax, ably played by Bennette Pologe, awakens and, indeed, would rather die than suffer ridicule as a sheep-slayer. The chorus, here portrayed as his young soldiers, counsel him to live. Interestingly, the chorus is an all-young-women cast. They take time out to speak texts from modern-day soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. These texts, spoken collectively, convey a mixed message of pride, confusion, doubt, homesickness, weariness, and a sense of futility. The chorus speaks with gentleness as it considers the paradoxes of warfare.
Ajax' wife (Carin Murphy) makes a convincing plea for living, but it falls on deaf ears. Other military types in modern-day fatigues -- Teucer (David Paul), Menelaus (Daniel Manley) Agamemnon (Gavin Star Kendall), and Odysseus (Chad Goodridge) make appearances and argue both sides of the short-lived nature of loyalty under the burden of military exigencies.
All the while, Athena looks on with amusement from the sidelines, watching the action on a television monitor that is sometimes a closed-circuit video of the performance itself; at other times, current news footage of war reportage.
A laudable effort, all around.
New Festival Takes New York by Storm
"Off-off-Broadway." You have to love the phrase, reminding you that only in a world theater capital as diverse as New York City could storefront, 30-seat stagehouses survive within blocks of legendary institutions that sell ABBA and Andrew Lloyd Webber to tourists from around the world. It's one gritty color, one rich tone in the city's beloved cosmopolitan harmony.
For actor Kelly Markus, however, off-off-Broadway is more than a metaphor. It's a livelihood--a passion that helps pay her bills. And of late, she worries that it's losing the edge that provides its raw resonance.
"Theater has become marginalized," says Markus, 32. "It's sort of like the bastard child of art. Nobody says, 'I'm going to a cool, rockin' night at the theater.'"
Such is the rationale behind the Fall Collection, a new three-week festival of theater, film and music beginning Nov. 1 that Markus co-founded with fellow New York stage professionals Devin Burnam, 31, and Erika Livingston, 26. Each night features an alternating three-hour set of one-act plays and short films, concluding with a live music performance at one of six venues on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
In all, the event will feature nine plays, 18 films and 27 musical acts, including a Sundance Film Festival award winner (Ryan Fleck’s and Anna Boden’s “Gowanus, Brooklyn”), a Student Academy Award nominee (Cam Archer’s “bobbycrush”), and the work of nine theater directors whose credits range from the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company to a Brooklyn-based opera company. The musical acts feature four DJ's and popular New York bands like the Break-Up and Looker.
The organizers conceived the Fall Collection as a sort of youthful arts revival, one strong-willed attempt to present off-off-Broadway theater alongside other disciplines that have a greater contemporary appeal among New Yorkers under 40.
"We felt that the weight of live performance could enhance the experience of watching a movie," Burnam says. "You have a more interactive audience when you go to live theater than you do when you go to see a film. Likewise with the music."
The event's roots trace back to last February, a time at which Markus, Burnham and Livingston grew increasingly discouraged about the state of the off-off-Broadway scene. All three were working regularly in theater, but often found themselves associating with theater groups whose non-existent organizational structures and woeful budget management often crippled their productions. In turn, they perceived audiences' expectations--and ultimately their numbers--diminishing.
By early March, the group had entered what Markus refers to as its "incubator phase." It settled on the name "the Fall Collection," as well as the inter-disciplinary scheduling format. Next, the three worked to refine the style by which separate theater, film and music committees would "curate" each evening's event--a process Markus likens to a museum curator determining the most aesthetically appropriate and effective way to display a collection of paintings.
The curatorial approach is not a new one for arts festivals, but Markus describes the Fall Collection's process as especially grueling the first time around. The curating committees included months of discussions and meetings among numerous industry professionals: Literary agents and theater veterans evaluated 225 plays, while former record label scouts attended prospective bands' shows instead of relying on the hundreds of demos submitted for consideration.
An equally rigorous process greeted directing applicants, some of whom received as many as fifteen one-act scripts to review and pare down according to their interests. Rodney Hakim, whom the directors' committee selected to helm the comedy, "Entertaining Lesbians," says his experience with the Fall Collection is a departure from the disorganization that plagued some of his past off-off-Broadway productions.
"It's been a very positive experience for me," says Hakim, 29. "I really felt I was able to focus on the creative element of directing because everything else is being taken care of. I can direct without worrying if someone is going to pull together costumes."
The Fall Collection upheld a similar standard in selecting its actors. Even Markus submitted herself to the actors' audition process despite her role as the festival's executive producer and partial benefactor.
"The three of us all felt like it's not worth it if it’s given," Markus says. "I need to do everything I can to be sure that even though I'm going to act in this, I'm also going to be there as the producer, and that I can really do both of these jobs."
While the creative details fell in line, the organizers assembled a team of almost two dozen staff members to help arrange the event's technical elements. Another small group led by Markus pursued sponsorship angles, and each month, the Fall Collection distributed a report detailing its progress to potential supporters in New York's arts and business community. When the group's overall fund-raising goals fell short, the organizers charged much of the difference to their credit cards.
Recalling the sponsorship drive, Livingston and Burnam say that many prospective sponsors were nervous about investing in a small arts group's maiden voyage.
"We talked to a lot of people who said, 'That's great. I love that idea. Call me in December," Livingston says.
"Also, because it's a new way of packaging old stuff, people have a tough time getting their head around it," Burnam says. "The reluctant sponsors say to call up next year."
"And we will be calling them," Livingston says.
"On the 23rd," Burnham adds. "Right after it's over."
The early buzz suggests they'll have plenty to call about. Moreover, Markus insists that everyone involved will enjoy what's considered these days to what’s becoming the rarest of off-off-Broadway rewards: a paycheck, either in the form of a small stipend or deferred payment.
And the reward for the Fall Collection, the would-be saviors of off-off-Broadway?
"This isn't about industry," Markus says. "This is about an audience coming in and experiencing all of these art forms in one night. Theater is what makes New York unique."
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