The Nonsense Company presents "Great Hymn of Thanksgiving / Conversation Storm",
an award-winning pair of urgently intricate pieces blurring the boundary between experimental theater and
avant-garde music, both written by internationally-known composer and company member Rick Burkhardt.
"Great Hymn of Thanksgiving" takes place at a dinner table, where the sounds of conversation have been replaced with fragmented news reports, scraps from the Army prayer manual, faux-Middle-Eastern folk tales, and disembodied cries of emergency. The sculpted sounds of the table itself — scooting chairs, singing wineglasses, squeaking forks — force this “conversation” into a confrontation with material reality.
In "Conversation Storm", three friends from three sides of the political spectrum unwillingly argue their way through a ticking time bomb scenario, revising, dissecting, and even brutalizing their own positions in the process — but time has either stopped or entered an ugly loop, and as the friends assign and reassign roles, the scenario begins to dissolve the boundaries
between real and hypothetical, past and future, day and night.
Best New Play — San Francisco Fringe Festival, 2007
Audience Choice and Best-of-the-Fest awards — Frigid Festival NYC, 2008
“Strange and compelling pieces… introspective, recursive, highly charged.… Stunningly choreographed into visual theater as well as an aural melange….”
Dave Romm, KFAI Minneapolis
“Thrilling performances... spiked with intense shots of satire. Through precise delivery and the sheer force of their concept and subject material, [the Nonsense Company] captivate their audience even as they disorient it.”
Ronni Reich, Backstage New York
“Artists to be reckoned with…. hilariously funny and awesomely tragic at the same time.”
Martin Denton, nytheatre.com
“Moving, funny, and provocative… theater at its best.”
Joey Seiler, Austin 360
For more information: http://nonsensecompany.com
Note: This performance contains extremely graphic adult language and is not appropriate for children.
Also On This Day:
literature LANGUAGE HARM
9:00PM - - - Price: $5 for all three events
Language Harm is recurring experimental poetry show curated by the APG. Expect sound poetry, polyphons (multi-voices in a single poem), projections and who knows what else at any given event.
music Skeletons
10:00PM - - - Price: $5 for all three events
In conjunction this evening's Language Harm/Nonsense Theater event, right afterward will be the SKELETONS!!!!
shiny bizarre rock and roll pop at it's most quirky and transfixing!! now on Tomlab Records, the nice folks who brought us the Books, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and the Oh Sees (and many more, of course)
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