Undercurrents & Exchange: Performance #2

posted by Third Rail Projects



Above is an excerpt from Performance #2 of Undercurrents and Exchange, presented by arts>World Financial Center, Tuesday, February 3 at 1pm in the World Financial Center Winter Garden. Day #2 is created and performed by Zach Morris and Donna Ahmadi, with live music by Bessie Award-winning composer Kris Bauman and Luca Benedetti of the Dang-It Bobbys.

Read more about the project in previous blog entries or visit thirdrailprojects.com

Undercurrents & Exchange: Performance #1

posted by Third Rail Projects



Above is an excerpt from Performance #1 of Undercurrents and Exchange, presented by arts>World Financial Center, Monday, Feb 2 at 1pm in the World Financial Center Winter Garden. Day #1 is created and performed by Zach Morris and Marissa Nielsen-Pincus. Visit our related blog entry, featuring video footage of the rehearsal for Day #1 and Day #4.

Read more about the project in previous blog entries or visit thirdrailprojects.com

Undercurrents & Exchange Schedule for Week

posted by Third Rail Projects

Below is the schedule of performances for Week #1 (Feb 2-6) of Undercurrents & Exchange at the WFC:


Mon, Feb 2 at 1pm

Business man and Mermaid (created and performed by Zach Morris & Marissa Nielsen-Pincus)

A short duet that explores the impossible relationship between a business man and a mermaid that finds her way up from the Hudson River into the Winter Garden.

Tues, Feb 3 at 1pm

Coffee Break Duet (created and performed by Zach Morris & Donna Ahmadi)

An excerpt from the Bessie-Award winning Vanishing Point, which is reconfigured for the WFC Winter Garden. A look at the relationship between two people sharing a break, a cup of coffee, and a dance. Live music by Bessie Award-winning composer Kris Bauman and Luca Benedetti of the Dang-It Bobbys.


Wed, Feb 4 at 1pm

Banjo Love (Tara O'Con & Kris Bauman)

A subsequent excerpt from the Bessie-Award winning Vanishing Point, which explores the developing personal relationship between two people as they begin their courtship amid a busy and very public thoroughfare. Live music by Bessie Award-winning composer Kris Bauman and Luca Benedetti of the Dang-It Bobbys.

Thurs, Feb 5 at 1pm

Bookfair (Created by Tom Pearson and performed by Zach Morris, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, Tara O'Con, and Mayuna Shimizu)

A group experience relating to another event in the space, Thursday's book fair. The performers withdraw into their own private, individual experiences of reading while seated on the benches in the palm garden, and then echo the undercurrent of the grid pattern of traffic through the palms.

Fri, Feb 6 at 12:30pm

Duet with Baby Jane Dexter and her Trio (Created by Zach Morris, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, and Tom Pearson)

A second coordinated effort with another event happening in the WFC . A couple arrives via escalator to dance a surprise duet during Baby Jane Dexter's set at the WFC. Live Music!

Exclusive: Undercurrents & Exchange Brings Free Dance to Downtown NYC

Click Through for an Exclusive Interview with Tom Pearson & Zach Morris at FLAVORWIRE
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posted on 11:05 am
Monday Feb 2, 2009
by Caroline Stanley

Posted using ShareThis

Undercurrents & Exchange: Getting Started

posted by Tom Pearson

One of the objectives for Undercurrents and Exchange, our new work presented by arts>World Financial Center and supported by an Art in Public Spaces Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, is to mix performance and process. It's one of the unnerving but also energizing aspects of our engagement with the daily inhabitants of the Winter Garden. We know what we are doing, but not everything... Part of the project involves experimentation with what we think we know about site-work, building into that some flexibility to adapt or change directions with what we offer daily as we learn about the denizens of the site: the employees, shop owners, guards, visitors, etc.

In our previous site-specific works, we often found that the lasting impressions and more deeply engaging relationships developed between ourselves and the people who have some "ownership" of the site, those whose acceptance we earned throughout the rehearsal process. Though wonderful to share the final product with audiences who came to see the work, the shopkeepers, employees, visitors, etc who make the site their daily homes gave us the larger education about what worked, what didn't, and what was most engaging and intuitive in a public space. For the WFC, we decided to make that process the product, with evolving performances that served as daily offerings to the denizens of the site as well as tiny experiments for us that accumulate meaning as they respond to the responses. Zach has a lot to say about this aspect as well, so I'll leave some of that for him to cover later.

As far as the Winter Garden is concerned, it is both a transitional space and a destination, probably even more of a destination in winter than summer, when businesses and employees often spill outdoors into the parks and river front walkways. An attractive aspect for me is that the lunch time crowd has the possibility of including a recurring group of people, who follow the same itinerary each day and will hopefully be the ones that manage to put it all together, making the connections between what we do in our daily performances, the displays Zach has created for the vitrines, and the overarching themes.

The project has been conceived by Zach and myself, but the choreography is not only ours. Marissa Nielsen-Pincus and Tara O'Con are taking the lead on certain days, and contributing their visions to the total work, and performing with us are Mayuna Shimizu, Elizabeth Carena (via film... and she's also the lovely redhead in all the marketing materials all over the WFC) and composer Kris Bauman with Luca Benedetti (The Dang-It Bobbys).

Month-long Site-specific Engagement at WFC

posted by Tom Pearson


Zach and I, along with Marissa Nielsen-Pincus and Tara O'Con are preparing to embark upon a grand experiment in site-specific encounters with a month-long engagement at the World Financial Center Winter Garden. We are preparing daily "offerings" to the denizens of the site (but we welcome other audiences to come down and have fun with us too), to see what a sustained engagement with a population in their daily transitional space will produce.

I am posting info on the show below, and we will soon be posting entries on our process and performances. We will share some of our initial thoughts, observations, and expectations in a few subsequent entries, and then really begin sharing the day-to-day happenings in February. So, stay tuned. Subscribe to our blog, and share in this experience with us.

Sugar From Sugar Street

Posted by Tom Pearson

[Originally published on greatdance.com]

From all of our research for the work we did in Hong Kong, the one thing we did not know before arriving was that "Tong Chong" literally translates as "sugar cube." So, our piece was "Strangers on Sugar Cube Street." It was a nice affirmation of our choices for a sugary color palette, and a gesture vocabulary and comedic references to sugar--and audiences in Hong Kong responded strongly to this, recognizing our connection to the site's history as part of the TaiKoo sugar industry.

Below are three video clips, representing the whole of the work, from Gofella.com(please be patient while content loads):

This completes or series of blog entries for this project. We will begin another series soon. Meanwhile, keep up-to-date on our activities at our official website:www.thirdrailprojects.com, and thanks for reading and sharing this experience with us.