Dan
Sat, 09 Apr 2011 15:27:59 +0000
Projects, exhibition, interactive, mobile, zone-a, zone-b, zone-c, zone-d, zone-e

Please Remain Seated is a set of performances for 15 buses. Experience the mystery, intimacy and terror of missing your stop from the other side of the yellow line.

Please Remain Seated is a set of performances tailored for 15 festival buses and their drivers, along the routes and for the duration of Northern Spark: a Nuit Blanche. Giving riders a glimpse into the inner life of driving and being driven as they navigate the city, Please Remain Seated explores the forgotten spaces of a system of public transit and the dynamics within a system of public service.

Constructed from interviews with city bus drivers and commuters, each performance will be created for the particular characteristics of the bus, utilizing the talents of the drivers as well as the equipment on the bus itself. Please Remain Seated will be performed along the routes of the Northern Spark bus routes. Each bus’s performance will vary in context, style, length and theme, allowing riders to experience a range of expression from short poetic works to longer sound monologues enlivening and animating the night.

Created by the three Skewed Visions principles, Please Remain Seated will range from short enigmatic pronouncements to longer monologues, from choreographed equipment to passenger dance lines, from hummed tunes to full orchestrations, from the haiku of paying the fare to the historical epic of the cross-town journey. These performances provide rider-audiences with insight into the world of bus drivers, the routes of the buses, and an opportunity to experience the mystery, intimacy and the terror of missing your stop from the other side of the steering wheel.

→ Please see also see Getting Around for more information.

Skewed Visions

Skewed Visions is an award winning interdisciplinary artist collective specializing in site-specific artistic practices and dialogues. Recognized nationally and locally for their inventive original performance and media works exploring notions of landscape, environment and place the company were City Pages 2004 Artists of the Year, and Best Performance of the Year for The City Itself series. Their work has been seen in Russia and the UK and honored at the CUNY International Symposium on Site Specific Performance along with artists Meridith Monk and Steven Koplowitz. Taking inspiration from Shuji Terayama, Skewed Visions believes that any space can be a theatrical place.

Sean Kelley-Pegg is a multimedia artist creating works that explore intimacy in the urban environment by mining the relationships between media, performance and site. He is currently working on a virtual public art event for smartphones. Read more at http://blog.midthought.net.

His latest work is Decoy, a video for Internet viewing which can be seen in the recent Skewed Visions Cubicle series. Different versions of the video are delivered depending on how the viewer arrives at the site. He created Strange Love (device), which began as an altered photo booth leading into a secret surveillance chamber that visitors navigated on their way to watch the performance.

Gülgün Kayim is an award winning interdisciplinary theater artist and a founder of Skewed Visions recognized for her work through several grants and awards including a Bush Foundation fellowship, Creative Capital grant and Jerome Foundation Travel grant. Her work combines ideas from public art, theater, architecture and human geography to investigate the cultural resonances of violence, conflict and trauma within the landscape, as they relate to memory and identity. These interests are explored in her current works Self Portrait…for now made for the Cyprus demilitarized zone and Terror Town about the US terror training industry. Kayim was a 2006 Walker Arts Center resident artist and is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Theater Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota.

Charles Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist and a founder of Skewed Visions for which he is co-Artistic/Managing Director. He has created well over a dozen original video and performance works since 1999 and has been appeared in the work of award-winning choreographer Megan Mayer. His normative education includes a BA from Sarah Lawrence and an MA and PhD in Theater from the University of Minnesota. Further he takes inspiration from the theories and practices of artist-innovator Tadeusz Kantor whom he has been studying since 1993.