Category — Live Performance

The Bridge provides an alternative venue for every mode and model of public performance and happening; the aim is to offer a dynamic venue for exploration and public expression in the realm of performance. The Bridge PAI is not a traditional music venue; nor do we have a stage; instead our gallery space offers an intimate setting that provides an opportunity for performers to share their work with a receptive audience in a comfortable space. We have hosted live bands, off-stage theater performances, stand-up comedy, poetry and fiction readings, and more.

If you are interested in organizing a performance at The Bridge, read our submissions page or email one of our program coordinators. If you are musician interested in scheduling a concert at The Bridge, please contact ourmusic coordinator. If you are interested in scheduling a comedy act or play, contact our comedy and theatre coordinator. Interested in scheduling a literary reading? Contact our literary events coordinator.

Friday, September 9, 2011 | 8:30pm | $10 suggested | Mature Content Likely

An alternative rock improv performance. A mix of the familiarity of “Whose Line is it Anyway?”, the best of the New York underground stand-up scene and the sketch comedy stylings of Second City. Music, Comedy, Art, Magic, Dance, and Life merge for a night of truly spectacular improv. Classic Bent Theatre games and performers merge with the new in this fantastic comedy experience. This is not your usual Bent Theatre show….this (much like hipsters) is unique.

Thursday, May 12, 2011 | 8:15pm | $5

Double Image Theatre Lab, created by Spica Wobbe and Margot Fitzsimmons, uses the art of storytelling by using light, shadow and music. They have collaborated with alt-country and folk band Driftwood Fire and hope to collaborate with Flamenco group in Málaga, Spain in order to create the second half of their Chance Shadow piece.  The first half is about a Chinese Poet named Xu Zhimo (1897~1931) who was one of the first Chinese writers to successfully naturalize Western romantic forms into modern Chinese poetry. Tonight you will see Margot perform a taste of the second half of the piece inspired by the great writer Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) a spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director.

Margot Fitzsimmons is an independent puppetry artist in New York City. Her love of puppetry began when she did an apprenticeship in Málaga, Spain with Acuario Teatro. She studied Mask Making and Puppetry with Ralph Lee at New York University and performed with him in Procession of the Ghouls at St. John of the Divine for the past three years. Margot has performed with Shadow Box Children’s Theatre Company in a variety of shows using shadow puppets and hand puppets. She performed at La Mamma in Thirst Memory of Water using Bunraku style puppetry directed by Catherine Shaw. She works with Spica Wobbe using table top puppetry, pop-up arts and shadow theatre. Spica and Margot performed in the International Poppentheater Festival in Dordrecht, Holland where they also took a Shadow Puppetry Master Class called The Language of Shadow. They will be taking their piece A Chance Shadow to Israel in August of 2011.

She works as a teaching artist for The New Victory Theatre, American Place Theatre, Wing Span Arts, The Leadership Program and Acting Manitou Theatre Camp where she served as a puppet choreographer and builder for their summer shows. Her passion is bringing social awareness and social change through theatre. By using the elements of shadow theater, the show brings the audience into the poetic and romantic world.

Monday, June 27, 2011 | 6:30pm – 9:30pm | $20

Using the master of truth and nonviolence, Mohandas K. Gandhi, learn to find the essence of Truth in improv, comedy, characters and in oneself. Learn to understand nonviolence in improv and the secrets of Satyagraha (Gandhi’s truth force).

Instructor – Alex Modic

Cost is $20 a class. Cash or check to be paid to the instructor of the day

Monday, May 23, 2011 | 6:30pm – 9:30pm | $20

Comedy doesn’t come from phallic humor and fart jokes. Real comedy comes from real people and how they react with other people. Learn how to create real comedy from real relationships and finally understand why people say “my family is so funny…but you have to know them to get it.”

Instructor – Andy Davis

Cost is $20 a class. Cash or check to be paid to the instructor of the day

Wednesday, April 20, 2011 | 8pm

Both recently chosen for the VQR Poetry Series, John Casteen (For the Mountain Laurel) and Dave Lucas (Weather) read from their new work.

John Casteen (John T. Casteen IV) grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has also lived in Connecticut, Maine, and Iowa. He lives in Earlysville, Virginia, with his wife, Laurie Casteen, and their children. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Casteen has contributed opinion and analysis pieces on gun policy, environmental policy, and professional ethics to Slate.com, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines and newspapers. His poems and criticism have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Paris Review, and other literary journals.

For ten years, Casteen was self-employed as a designer and builder of custom furniture. He is now Visiting Assistant Professor at Sweet Briar College, where he founded and directs the Sweet Briar Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference. He has also taught at The University of Virginia, and since 2005 has served on the editorial staff of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Dave Lucas is a recipient of the 2005 “Discovery”/The Nation Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. He contributes book reviews to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, and The Threepenny Review. He is a doctoral student in English at the University of Michigan.

Friday, May 20, 2011 | 8pm – 10pm | Doors at 7:30 | $10 |
Not Recommended for Young Children

Bent Theatre’s Alternative Comedy Experience

An alternative rock improv performance. A mix of the familiarity of “Whose Line is it Anyway?”, the best of the New York underground stand-up scene and the sketch comedy stylings of Second City. Music, Comedy, Art, Dance, and Life merge for a night of truly spectacular improv. Classic Bent Theatre games and performers merge with the new in this fantastic comedy experience. This is not your usual Bent Theatre show….this is unique.

Sunday, April 10, 2011 | 8pm

A free, cozy screening of Devon Sproule’s DVD “Live in London” for friends, family & fans. This DVD features the guitar playing and singing of Paul Curreri and the screening will be followed by short live sets of new material from both Paul and Devon.

This film was made by Anti|Type Films, a group of talented young filmmakers from Coventry, UK. From the Anti|Type website:

“Devon Sproule’s new offering, Live In London, is released today.

The 2-disc set includes a live-DVD-cum-tour-documentary, produced by Anti/Type. The images it captures are so striking that they could very well enter the general iconography, and the editing is Academy Award worthy, if we do say so ourselves. It also features a man eating peanuts from his bellybutton. Oh, and the album ain’t half bad either. But don’t take our word for it, check the blurb:

‘Live in London, the 28-year-old’s first live record, includes a 10-song CD and 8-song DVD: 18 performances that showcase Sproule’s equally powerful and nuanced style. “Sproule’s songs ooze the atmosphere of balmy Virginia days,” wrote The Observer. “She grew up in a commune in the state – and her sunny outlook is infectious.” Scattered between songs on the DVD are video clips of Devon and the band in their tour van, backstage dancing, drinking, ribbing, & lamenting petrol put in a diesel tank.’

Silliness aside, we are very proud and excited to be a part of this project, and very much hope that you enjoy listening to and watching Live In London as much as we’ve all enjoyed putting it together.”

Saturday, April 23, 2011 | Workshop 10:30am | Performance 8pm | $5

The Bridge is incredibly excited to present a workshop and performance by Alison Knowles. Knowles, a founding member of Fluxus, will lead workshop participants in the performance of her text scores. The evening performance will feature Knowles, workshop participants, and performance artist Meghan Della Crosse. The evening will conclude with a screening of Shorelines, a video documenting a beach performance in San Diego featuring cellist Charles Curtis.

The workshop will take place at the Bridge at 10:30 am on the 23rd. To sign up for the workshop email jonathan (dot) zorn at gmail (dot) com. The workshop is limited to 10 participants.

http://www.aknowles.com/

Alison Knowles Bio

Alison Knowles was born in New York City in 1933. She is a visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, publications and association with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded in 1962.
Formal and Informal Education: After briefly attending Middlebury College, Knowles studied with Joseph Albers and Richard Lindner and graduated from Pratt University in 1954. With John Cage and Dick Higgins, she joined the New York Mycological Society, frequently hunting for wild mushrooms around New York City from the late 1950s-60s. During this time a close and fertile exchange of affection, food and ideas developed between Knowles and Cage. Also significant, if informal, in 1968 Knowles designed and screen printed the last known edition with Marcel Duchamp, a reprint of his Couers Volants for the Something Else Press.
Book Objects: As a founding member of Fluxus, Knowles produced what may be the earliest book object, a can of texts and beans called the Bean Rolls, in 1963. In 1967, Knowles produced The House of Dust poem, possibly the first computerized poem, which she produced with composer James Tenney following his informal seminar on computers in the arts held at her home with husband Dick Higgins in 1967. In addition to many performances based on the House of Dust, one quatrain of Knowless House of Dust poem was built as the House of Dust public sculpture; “a House of Dust ion open ground lit by natural light , inhabited by friends and enemies.” This quatrain-sculpture and would move from a ILGWU housing project in New York City, where it was arsoned in 1968, to the new Cal Arts Campus in Burbank California in 1970, where she taught briefly. A sound installation for the House of Dust sculpture was produced by Max Neuhaus.
In 1967, she expanded the scale of her book projects with the Big Book, an eight foot tall book of environments organized around a spine. This book opened at the Frankfurter Buchmesse and continued touring through Europe. After the first Big Book was destroyed, Knowles produced a second large-scale book, The Book of Bean in 1982 with the help of Franklin Furnace. Some pages of this book can be found at Museo Bostell in Estramadura, Spain. This was followed by a smaller book of tactile languages called A Finger Book of Ancient Language in 1985 that has seven eleven inch high pages all in braille and was shown at the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York. Three examples of this books were made and exists in private collections. Knowles has also produced aand written several books of experimental text and poetry.
Loose Page Sculptures: Beginning with the Bean Rolls, the Big Book and the House of Dust, Knowles has engaged in thirty years of experimentation on the sculptural potential of the book. One part of the book, the page, has engaged her since 1982. Loose Pages (1983), originally produced in collaboration with master paper maker Coco Gordon, consisted of pages made for each part of the body, the human spine taking the place of the standard books. In other page sculptures, the visitor stands in the page, physically entering it with one or another body part. Mahogany Arm Rest (1989), and We Have no Bread (No Hai Pan) (1992), invite the viewer to engage directly with their four and five meter page formats respectively. Since 2000, Knowles has been producing sounding objects, most recently Bean Turners, using beans and paper which are both pages and instruments.
Events and Performances: Events are a minimal form of performance score invented by George Brecht in John Cages historic class in Experimental Composition at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1958. Many Fluxus performances take this reduced means of performance, which is often a deceptively simple instruction. For example, Knowles much discussed The Identical Lunch (1969) is a score based on her habit of eating the same food at the same time each day “a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast, with lettuce and butter, no mayo and a cup of soup or a glass of buttermilk.” This meditation on the everyday was also explored in a book by her friend, composer Philip Corner, who originally suggested to her that this habit might be scored as an event. Other often performed Events by Knowles include Make a Salad (1962) most recently performed at the Baltimore Museum of Art “Work Ethic” exhibition and The Wexner Center (2004) and Shoes of Your Choice (1963) which invites the audience to talk about their shoes and to tell the stories they evoke. Knowles has produced more complex performances that often involve the use of ubiquitous objects such as beans, which evoke a world culture of sustanace, and shoes, a nearly universal clothing item. These performances utilize the Cagean compositional devises of indeterminate performance and chance operations and include The Bean Garden (1976), The Shoemakers Assistant (1977), Paper Weather (1986), and Loose Pages (1986-present).
Sound: Distinct from her Events and live performances, Knowles has been active in sound since the late 1960s. In 1968 Knowles designed and co-edited John Cage’s Notations a book of visual music scores for the Something Else Press. The book and exhibition with performances will occur at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany (2005). Her Bean Garden (1971), consisted of a large amplified platform covered with beans that were sounded underfoot by visitors to Charlotte Moormans Annual New York Festival of the Avant-Garde. In addition to many other radio broadcast performances, Knowless interest in the effects of resonant sounds produced by beans and hard surfaces was explored extensively in a series of four radio programs hosted by the progressive German station West Deutscher Rundfunk, whose director, Klaus Schning was a friend and supporter of Cage’s work and the work of artists associated with him. In 1982, Knowles was awarded the prestigious Karl Sczuka Award for best radio work from WDR for her sound work Bohnen Sequenzen [Bean Sequences]. The last of these radio plays was based on a series of prints by Knowles. This last radio play was produced in collaboration with Joshua Selman and titled Bread and Water (1994).
Prints: In 1960, Knowles began producing silk screen paintings shown at the Judson Gallery. She changed direction as her interest in performance and objects developed. He joined the Fluxus group. From 1963 until the middle 1970s, print functioned for Knowles as an expression of other process-based concerns. In 1963, she collaborated with Cage students Robert Watts and George Brecht in the Scissor Brothers Warehouse show, normally called BLINK for the bold word that appears in the center. This eighteen inch square printed painting consisted of three images chosen at random, one by each artists. The image appeared on everything from canvas to bathing suits and hair brushes. These were sold for random prices at a special sale at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles. These works were not presented as art but rather as a flea market. She would collaborate again with Brecht on a book in 1983 on a publication called The Red, the Green, the Yellow the Black and the White (Brussels: Editions Lebeer, 1983). In 1973, Knowles produced the Identical Lunch Graphic, which showcased many of her friends and Fluxus colleagues consuming the Identical Lunch. The prints includes a Starkist logo, indicating corporate sponsorship, which was withdrawn when it was determined that she might be a spy from the competitor, Bumblebee! Beginning in 1978 Knowles published limited print runs of found and manipulated graphic materials with Italian publishers Francesco Conz and Editions Pari & Dispari, Rosanna Chiesi.
Recent experiments with light sensitive chemicals have produced photographic prints on paper and cloth, which are then manipulated by hand. The most sustained of these was the Bread and Water cycle of palladium prints and cyanotypes, which in turn generated a sound work and book. In these later works Bread has replaced beans as a universal form of sustenance and myth. In 2000, Knowles began casting flax paper to make musical instruments. The Bean Turner, Rattles, Wings and Drums use beans for sound with the aid of text, toys and silence.
Prizes: In additon to numerous teaching engagement and minor awards, Knowles has been acknowledged for her profound contributions to contemporary artistic practice in the form of a Guggenhaim Grant (1967), NEA Grants (1981 and 1985), a collaborative New York State Council on the Arts Grant (1989), a Dokumenta Professorship at the Kunstakademie Kassel, Germany (1998), the College Art Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), and Annonymous was a Woman Grant (2003). 


Sunday, April 3, 2011 | 7pm | $5-$10

Check out the third installment of the Charlottesville Experimental Music Showcase featuring some of the noisiest, most out-there sounds in town. Among the bands you’ll hear:
Gull
Miami Nights
Great Dads
Islero
Cathy Monnes
Jason Robinson
Catastrophysics
Golden Glasses