New Saloon Presents Preview Performances of Minor Character
“Lightning-fast, kitten-fanged comedy that are an unalloyed joy: the zippiest, zingiest salvos I’ve seen come out of what we might call the Millennial Camp movement.”
—Time Out New York on New Saloon
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— One of New York City’s most exciting young theater companies, New Saloon, returns to Bard with their kaleidoscopic adaptation of Uncle Vanya. A work in progress developed through Live Arts Bard, the Fisher Center’s residency program, Minor Character collages a century’s worth of English translations of Chekhov’s masterpiece—from a flowery 1916 version to Google Translate’s nonsensical rendition—into one sprawling, intimate, quietly disastrous evening. The company’s week long residency concludes with two preview performances of Minor Character on Friday, November 30 and Saturday, December 1 at 7:30 p.m. in Bard Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater. Tickets are $25 and are available at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900.—Time Out New York on New Saloon
Founded by Bard alums Milo Cramer ’12, Morgan Green ’12, and Madeline Wise ’12, New Saloon’s handcrafted original performances have been called “a brilliant match of material and theater” by the New York Times. For Minor Character, the trio are working in concert with six translations of Uncle Vanya (by Marian Fell, Laurence Senelick, Paul Schmidt, Carol Rocamora, Cramer, and Google Translate) and nine performers (Cramer, Ron Domingo, Rona Figueroa, Fernando Gonzalez, David Greenspan, LaToya Lewis, Caitlin Morris, and Wise), with Green at the helm as director.
About New Saloon
New Saloon celebrates the unique and enduring aspects of live performance and the dramatic canon; putting ancient traditions in dialogue with contemporary aesthetics, politics, and new media. Their work has been commissioned, developed, and presented by The Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival, the Bushwick Starr, Ars Nova, The Invisible Dog Art Center, and more. New Saloon is Milo Cramer, Morgan Green, Madeline Wise, and Caroline Gart.
About Live Arts Bard
Live Arts Bard (LAB) is the interdisciplinary residency and commissioning program of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. LAB creates a community of professional artists and students who develop work side by side, inspiring one another to create and experiment. LAB provides commissioning and residency fees, studio and stage time, research resources and dramaturgy, and production support to a wide range of professional artists and ensembles.
About Bard Fisher Center
Bard College has distinguished itself as a leader in the field of liberal arts and sciences for more than 150 years by providing a first-rate undergraduate education for its students. The College is known for its pioneering ideas in education, its passionate commitment to the highest standards of artistic inquiry and practice, and for its vigorous advocacy of liberty, citizenship, individual dignity and tolerance of differences.
The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by architect Frank Gehry, is the most ambitious capital project in Bard’s history, and illustrates the commitment of the College to bringing performing artists of the highest rank to perform and work with its students, faculty, staff and the public. Bard Fisher Center creates moments that inspire curiosity, learning, and civic participation, believing that artists are uniquely able to lead discourse on the most urgent questions of our time, and that substantial, long-term investment in artistic innovation is vital to a well-balanced society. Bard Fisher’s programs in opera, dance, theater, music, jazz, and cabaret, along with its world-class facilities, provide an outstanding venue in which to create and learn.
Together these institutions provide an exceptional environment for artists to create and inspire students’ thinking and practice. As a central multi-venue arts platform in our region with a core program of a trailblazing global liberal arts college, Bard Fisher realizes Bard’s commitment to the arts as a cultural and educational right for all.
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