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THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY THEATER PRESENTS Mallory Catlett / Restless NYC DECODER: Nova Express
In Collaboration With G Lucas Crane, Jim Findlay & Keith Skretch
Remember the future? Nova Express is the final edition of DECODER, a sound and image cutup machine, that has been turning out concerts, digital transmissions, video art, and sound recordings for the last 8 years. This Machine is for everyone – according to William Burroughs whose instructions were followed closely to create it. With two tape recorders and a microphone, performers Jim Findlay and cassette tape artist G Lucas Crane take you on an interstellar adventure into the prophetic imagination of The Nova Trilogy, Burroughs’ 1960’s space odyssey whose central character is the virus. Acting as both fictional characters and real-time systems operators, our time travelers cut internet debris into kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, prophetic pronouncements, and surreal routines of colonial fantasies and alien eroticism that expose their complicity in the systems that control them. Created pre, mid and “post” pandemic, Nova Express is a fever dream turned time machine that confronts the physical sensation of living today by traveling back to a time when the political problems we now face, became unavoidable.
Nova Express is the final edition of DECODER, a sound and image cutup machine, that has been turning out concerts, digital transmissions, video art, and sound recordings based on William Burroughs’ 1960’s Nova Trilogy - The Soft Machine, Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express.
Text by William Burroughs Director: Mallory Catlett Performer and Set: Jim Findlay Performer, Sound and Video Manipulation: G Lucas Crane Video: Keith Skretch Associate Video: Attilio Rigotti Interaction: Ryan Holsopple Dramaturg: Alex Wermer-Colan Lighting: Yuki Nakase Link Costume: Enver Chakartash Associate Sound: Ryan Gamblin Assistant Set Design: Stephanie Grey Glass Stage Manager: Grace Gilmore Associate Set and TD: Žilvinas Jonušas Set Construction: Joe Silovsky Studios
DECODER is a Creative Capital project and has received commissioning support from Gibney Dance and Theatre Conspiracy; a research grant from Stony Brook University; and development support from a CultureHub MicroResidency, Playwrights Theatre Center, the Collapsable Hole, Mabou Mines, Pioneer Works, and a Watershed Labresidency at Mount Tremper Arts, with lead support by the National Endowment for the Arts. DECODER was also created and supported (in part) at The Watermill Center—a laboratory for the arts and humanities (2019) and with a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and a Collective Fund grant. DECODER has recieved an Independent Artist Comission from NYSCA for deisgner Jim Findlay and sound artist G Lucas Crane and is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The full series (Soft Machine, Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express) is commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater. DECODER is co-produced by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Restless NYC and the Collapsable Giraffe.
THE SOFT MACHINE, THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED, NOVA EXPRESS, and THE JOB by William S. Burroughs. Copyright © [for SOFT: 1961, renewed 1966; for NOVA: 1964, renewed 1992, 2013; for TICKET: 1962, renewed 1964, 1967; for JOB, 1969, renewed 1970, 1974], used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council DECODER is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
SPECIAL THANKS: Bill Kennedy, Amy Huggans, Aaron Landsman, Kim Guzowski, Janet Clancy, Mike Taylor, Kamani Walters, Miguel Valdarama, Melanie Joseph, Tracey Kennedy, Henry Plesser, Angela Mattox, Jubilith Moore, Alan Nakagawa, Mabou Mines, Andy Sowers, Billy Clark, Jesse Ricke, mattie barber-bockelman, Jill Mueller, Maggie Hoffman, Craig Petersen, Oliver Harris, Ira Silverberg, Meredith Boggia, TIm Carlson, Collapsable Hole, Christina Campanella, Becca Blackwell, Rick Burkhardt, James Graueholz, Ela Troyano, Miwa Matreyek, Simon Harding, Meredith Boggia, Denise Shu Mei.
Restless NYC is an OBIE and Bessie Award-winning production company that excavates the theatrical and literary record to engage the past in a dialogue about its life in the present. The dismantling and repurposing of stories that have already been told is a practice in transformation, an attempt to create openings, to find away, out, and forward. Founded by creator/director Mallory Catlett in 2004, the company’s past work includes site-specific reconstructions of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (2004) and Richard the Second (2010) and a remix of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, called This Was The End (2014) and Archive (2018), an installation based on that performance. DECODER is part of a larger project called M/F FUTURE, a diptych of pieces inspired by the novels of Burroughs and Doris Lessing (Dead Time of Plenty) about the perils gender and the prophetic imagination. Restless is also working on a new opera, based on a Janet Frame novel called Rainbird, co-produced with Experiments in Opera for 2024. Catlett has written about her work with Restless in PAJ and Performance Research. restlessproductionsnyc.org
BIOS:
Mallory Catlett is creator/director of performance across disciplines; from opera and music theater to plays and installation art. She has worked with visual artists Dread Scott and Nene Humphrey, and sound artists Lea Bertucci and G Lucas Crane. She has directed new operas and music theater works by composers Eve Beglarian , Mika Karlsson, Stefan Weissman, Aaron Seigel, Tarik O’Regan, Christina Campanella, Dave Malloy and James Beckwith Maxwell and written 2 librettos Rainbird (Experiments in Opera 2024) and Barcelona, Map of Shadows (Mabou Mines 2025). Her works have premiered in New York at EMPAC, 3LD, HERE, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, PS122, Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, The Collapsable Hole and the Ohio Theatre, and have been featured at the Ice Factory, CultureMart, COIL, Prelude and BAM’s Next Wave Festival; and toured internationally to Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, Australia, and France. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Grant and a 2015 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She is an Associate Artist at CultureHub, a member of the Collapsable Hole, an artist-run development and performance venue, and Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines.
Alex Wermer-Colan is a writer, editor, translator, and dramaturg. His dramaturgical work for DECODER has been informed by his archival research and scholarship on the writings of William S. Burroughs, published in the book collections The Travel Agency is on Fire (2015) and Cutting Up the Century (2019). Alex cowrote the essay "Decoding the Reality Studio" with Mallory Catlett and Lucas G Crane for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art in 2020. His essays on Burroughs and American culture have also appeared in the American Book Review, Twentieth Century Literature, and Ill Will. Alex recently published a translation of Jean Cocteau's 1949 Letter to the Americans with New Directions, and his writings have also appeared in such venues as the L.A. Review of Books, New Criterion, and Harper's Magazine.
Enver Chakartash is a British-born Turkish Cypriot costume designer. Broadway: A Doll's House, Is This A Room. Off-Broadway: Public Obscenities (Soho Rep.), The Trees (Playwright's Horizons), Wolf Play (MCC/Soho Rep.), Catch as Catch Can (Playwright's Horizons), English (Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout Theatre Company), Bodies They Ritual (Clubbed Thumb). Other recent works: Tina Satter/Half Straddle’s Ghost Rings; The Wooster Group’s A Pink Chair, The B-side, The Town Hall Affair, Early Shaker Spirituals; Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group’s POWER. Film: Reality (HBO).
Ryan Gamblin is a sound designer, composer, and performance-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work centers around original composition, found media, system manipulation, and a fixation on collective effervescence through post-drama. Recent designs include: Weathering (Faye Driscoll / NYLA), Liveness: A Performance Made from the WNYC Archives (The Civilians / WNYC), You are Here (Third Rail Rep). Recent Associate Sound Design: The Trees (Playwrights Horizons / Page 73), Public Obscenities (SoHo Rep / NAATCO), FOOD (Geoff Sobelle / Philadelphia Fringe). Proud Member, TSDCA. RyanGamblin.com
Žilvinas Jonušas started his theater career as an actor/dancer after finishing his B.F.A. studies in Theater and Philology from Vilnius University in Lithuania. He has worn many hats since then. Born in Lithuania Žilvinas has acted, danced, directed, wrote, designed and built sets in his native country and abroad. He has worked as an Art and Technical Director, designed lightsfor theater and film and was part of crews which made things run. When he is not creating live entertainment, he is most likely painting, writing or building something with his hands. Žilvinas holds M.A. in Media Arts and M.F.A. in New Media Art and Performance from LIU Brooklyn. His thesis Epistemologies of Death, Desire, and Disgust in the Films, The Psychological and Social Usefulness was published by VDM Verlag in 2008. His short play The Cleaning was included in The Best American Short Plays of 2006-2007. Žilvinas most recent work was seen at La MaMa, New Ohio Theatre, Performance Space New York, NYU Skirball, and HERE Arts Center.
G Lucas Crane is a sound artist, designer, performer, and musician whose work focuses on information anxiety, media/memory confusion, sonic mind control and time skullduggery. His cassette-tape based archival sound practice explores the wild liminal spaces of hybrid analog aesthetics and new performance techniques for allegedly obsolete technology. His haunting analog composition style has been lent to a wide range of bands and projects over the last 25 years. In New York City, he has variously performed at the Museum of Art and Design, Pioneer Works, Roulette Intermedium, Issue Project Room and the Brooklyn Museum, and has toured nationally and internationally as a tape-manipulation extraordinaire. He has been recognized for his sound design and compositions with a Henry Hewes award and a Bessie nomination, and was the co-founder of Silent Barn, one of the largest collectivist art space projects in recent history.
Yuki Nakase Link: Lighting Designer. Previously designed with Mallory Catlett: Decoder 2017 (Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center), Nene Humphrey’s Circling the Center (3LD) and Anne Washburn’s Apparition (Stony Brook University). Recent and Upcoming: Fidelio (Canadian Opera Company); Orfeo (Santa Fe Opera); Madame Butterfly (Cincinnati Opera); Torera (Alley Theatre); Proving Up (Juilliard Opera); Orpehus and Eurydice (San Francisco Opera); In a Grove (Pittsburgh Opera); Four Saints in Three Acts (Target Margin Theater); Anna in the Tropics (Miami New Drama); The Orchard (Baryshnikov Arts Center); Red Velvet (Shakespeare Theatre Company); Our Town (Dallas Theater Center); Seven Deadly Sins (New York City, Miami Beach). She was born in Tokyo, grew up in Kyoto, Japan and currently lives north of NYC in the woods of Hudson Valley. M.F.A.: NYU. Website: yukinlink.com
Jim Findlay works as a performance maker, director, designer and technician. Recent original performances: “Electric Lucifer” (2018), “Vine of the Dead” (2015-2023) and “Dream of the Red Chamber” (2014). Recent direction projects: “Oper&” by John Supko and Bill Seaman and David Lang‘s “Whisper Opera.” Recent designs: “Mary Motorhead / Trade” by Emma O’Halloran. His video installation collaboration with Ralph Lemon “Meditation” is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center. He is a Creative Capital Artist (2016) and MacDowell Fellow (2012 and 2016). Recognition includes two Obies, two Bessies, Lortel and Hewes Awards. Residencies: Baryshnikov Arts Center, UCross and Mount Tremper Arts. He is a founder of Collapsable Giraffe and a founder and partner artist at the Collapsable Hole. He is the Director of Production and Operations at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
Grace Gilmore is a theatre maker and designer based in New York City. With a fierce respect for comedy, Grace has studied and performed improv at UCB (NYC). In 2018 she wrote, performed, and designed Not in Good Standing, a one woman show following a small town HOA in Michigan. Grace has been an acting company member at The Mercury Store (NYC) which serves as a directing incubator for new works. Grace was the lighting designer and stage manager for the world premiere of “Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed” by Advanced Beginner Group at Abrons Arts Center (NYC) for which the company won an OBIE in 2020. She has designed lights at The Chocolate Factory (NYC), UNC Chapel Hill, MASSMoCA, Ensemble Studio Theatre(NYC), MANCC, and The Prague Fringe Festival. She has stage managed at National Sawdust (NYC), The Chocolate Factory (NYC), MassMoca, Mabou Mines (NYC), The Tank (NYC) and assistant Stage-Managed Paul Winter’s Annual Winter Solstice concert at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC. She holds her MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College.
Keith Skretch is a media artist and designer whose work spans theater, installation, experimental animation, and mixed-reality experiences. He received Henry Hewes and Bessie awards for his work on Mallory Catlett’s Obie-winning This Was The End (Chocolate Factory Theater), which he and Catlett subsequently adapted into the immersive installation ARCHIVE: This Was The End (EMPAC, CultureHub NYC). Other installations have been presented in Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, and Warsaw. He is a creative director at NightLight Labs, an interactive media company based in Los Angeles.
Source: THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY THEATER
© 2010, ŽILVINAS JONUŠAS