thingNY @The Brick “You Against Nature” + “Mouthful”
Date: August 17, 2024
Time: 8:00 pm
AUG 15 @ 8pm
AUG 16 @ 8pm
AUG 17 @ 8pm
The Brick
579 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn NY
You Against Nature
[world premiere]
by Joseph White
Performed by:
Paul Pinto
Gelsey Bell
Dave Ruder
Andrew Livingston
Erin Rogers
Mouthful
[world premiere]
Written and performed by:
alejandro t. acierto
Isabel Castellvi
Dave Ruder
Paul Pinto
Andrew Livingston
Gelsey Bell
thingNY returns to the Brick with a double bill made up of Joseph White’s You Against Nature and their latest collectively written opus, Mouthful, as part of the eclectic Exponential Festival.
You Against Nature is a new opera from the genre-fluid librettist and composer Joseph White who the Times calls “magical… mulchy… ribald… outlandish…” You Against Nature is based on the French decadent classic Against Nature, and situates a self-isolating aesthetic explorer in the present day. Expect forty minutes of homilies on modern-day alone time, attempts at life-hacking, and nihilistic indulgence taken to extraordinary lengths, performed by five singing, storytelling instrumentalists.
Mouthful is the latest collaboratively composed experimental opera from thingNY. Situated in the orbit of a large communal table, the ensemble explores digestion and excretion: of food, of blood, of ancestry and linguistic transmission. Each performance is different. With switching roles, in-ear monitors and instruments, the performers act as transmitters of each other’s songs, languages and choreography: reckoning with various degrees of appropriateness and appropriation, comprehension and (mis)translation.