Trifecta: a festival of new work

Trifecta: a festival of new work premiers three works-in-progress by NYC theatre companies, Performance Lab 115, Drama of Works, and Sponsored by Nobody. These companies are the winners of the 2007 chashama/NEA Performance Development Award, a regrant program providing theater companies with rehearsal and performance space and a stipend, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In Performance Lab 115’s Dead Letter Office, millions of messages lie in limbo. From letters to Santa to the signals of the Voyager Space Probe, messages wait to be reunited with their rightful recipients. Part theatre, part dance, part sound laboratory, Performance Lab 115 presents an intimate discourse on the capacity for hope and the human need for contact.

Puppet company Drama of Works presents Puppet Kafka, a speculation on the work, life and peculiar perspective of Franz Kafka as imagined for performance by puppets. Using the complete text of The Metamorphosis as the main framework, in the closed black-box space of Gregor Samsa’s bedroom, three puppet versions of Kafka are manipulated by forces from the outside.

Sponsored by Nobody’s W.M.D. (just the low points) launches a large-scale deconstruction of our culture’s preoccupations. Structured around a single day, January 8, 2004, W.M.D. (just the low points) uses found texts to investigate America’s relationship with media during wartime.