NEW YORK (March 2010) – Trickster Theater, a New York-based theater company, announces the launch of Digitheater, a project dedicated to presenting and producing theatrical works exclusively for the web. Digitheater uses YouTube as a medium to produce original theater for the international Internet community. TricksterTheater on YouTube has produced over one hundred short dramatic segments, or cantos, each running between one and five minutes long. New cantos are added weekly and can be accessed through the TricksterTheater channel on YouTube.

In this online format, the camera focuses tightly on the actors’ face — their essential expressive tool — to give the actor immediacy as they interpret, often bilingually, the director’s narratives. Rather than using the web as a site solely for documentation, these online theater performances investigate the nature of the computer frame as a theatrical proscenium. This new approach rewrites formal conventions and, because of the accessibility of the Internet, creates a new cross-cultural platform for actors. Trickster Theater on Youtube provides a great service for the actor and acts as a permanent archive.

Since its inception, one of the most important aspects of the Trickster Theater is its role as a multilingual and multinational theater, creating a theater as global as its audience. The Trickster Theater has a history of bilingual productions, tackling the issue of translation in dramatic arts and reflecting the multi-lingual community of the Americas. The Trickster Theater’s website, http://trickstertheater.org, contains a repository of select past performance works. Since 2002, the Trickster Theater has been innovating online productions such as M Play, a bilingual web series telling the story of three women reflecting on life in the modern metropolis.

Digitheater uses a diverse cast of actors from around the world, each one bringing a unique cultural perspective and collectively representing the many voices of the modern city. The multi-lingual texts of the Trickster Theater incorporate Urdu, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, Swedish, Greek and Japanese, among other languages. The actors explore the words as sounds and reference an internal Trickster notation system, which cues gesture and intonation. The inflection of the actor’s speech, the musicality of foreign accents, and the immersion into the sounds of other languages explore the rich possibilities of what can be heard when many different cultural bodies are brought together. These videos feature a diverse range of actors and languages spanning different cultures and continents.

Digitheater videos utilize intimate compositions and a striking minimal aesthetic. All texts will ultimately become part of live performance works, recombined each night in a different order, creating different meanings and contexts for ever-changing plays.

Digitheater currently encompasses four different projects – Venus Erotica, The Adventures of ZigZag, Change of Skin, and I Want To Be A Painting – and will continue to grow. Venus Erotica juxtaposes the erotic relationship between words and gestures. The Adventures of ZigZag introduces the viewer to the characters and actors of ZigZag and exists as an independent companion piece to an eventual theatrical production. Videos establish the universe of ZigZag, creating a distinct mythology around the show prior to its live production. Change of Skin and I Want To Be A Painting explore the differences of race, gender, and language.

Digitheater is an ongoing project. New series will be added over time, creating a diverse theater experience viewable on the internet – a theater for one. This virtual theater exists solely online.

“Every room is the center of the world.” – Papo Colo

http://www.youtube.com/trickstertheater
http://www.trickstertheater.org
http://vimeo.com/user3108340

CURRENT DIGITHEATER PERFORMERS
Carmel Amit, Rena Anakwe, Zoe Anastassiou, Mia Anderson, Amanda Broomel, Oni Brown, Jenn Dees, Pascal Escriout, Aizzah Fatima, Ellie Foumbi, Manuel Fihman, Andrea Goldman, Rebecca Hirota, Barbara Klaaysen, Arooj Majid, Ashley Martinsen, Ampora McLean, Miriam Mintz, Soleil Nikki, Saoko Okano, Belen Oyola-Rebez, Martina Potratz, Jorge Rubio, Eugene Santiago, David Speer, Ashley Spivak, Laryn Stout, Malin Tybahl

HISTORY
Trickster Theater was founded in 1998 by Papo Colo. An artist who has always worked in multiple mediums, Colo has been involved in theater since 1991 when he founded the First World Theater which presented
Zygmunt and Stolen Kisses at The Cultural Space in 1992. In 1995 Colo produced Imaginary Beings, combining a theatrical and visual art exhibition about invented characters from Jorge Luis Borges’ text of the same name. In 1996 he produced Resonances, a play of simultaneous texts and overlapping narratives that took place on two stages concurrently. Since moving to its current location in Hell’s Kitchen, the Trickster Theater has produced a diverse range of shows such as Praying Project, Water Project, Wild Nights, Tropical Area, Cannon Dialogues, Confessions of the Face, Somehow, and Still Life available as DVDs on the Exit Art and Trickster Theater websites.

Since 1984, Colo has been the Co-founder and Artistic Director of Exit Art, a multi-disciplinary cultural space located in Hell’s Kitchen. At Exit Art he integrated performance and theater with the visual arts in projects such as Terra Bomba (1997) and Let the Artist Live (1995). The theater, performance and visual arts awards he has received are: Franklin Furnace Fund Award for Performance Art (1987); Guggenheim Award in Painting (1991), Bessie Award (1995) for his innovative conception of the Exit Art project Let the Artist Live; an Individual Artist Grant in Theater from the New York State Council on the Arts (2001); awards from the National Endowment for the Arts in the Visual Arts (1981, 1983); and a New York Foundation for the Arts award in Painting (1991), among others.

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TRICKSTER THEATER / EXIT ART 501 West 36th St. New York, NY 10018
212.966.7745 x 33 l info@trickstertheater.org l www.trickstertheater.org