SITI Company is an ensemble-based theater company led by Anne Bogart. It is known nationally and internationally as a top-level artistic collective that generates groundbreaking theater while training artists from around the world.
The Viewpoints and the Suzuki Method are two methods of actor training used in building and staging SITI productions. Through the dialogue between these two distinct, yet complimentary approaches to the art of acting, the philosophy and technique of SITI Company is continually explored, revitalized and articulated.
The troupe is a seven-time Obie winner with a score of productions in its repertoire, including such iconic pieces as Bob (1998), Seven Deadly Sins (1996), The Medium (1994) and No Plays, No Poetry (1988). Originally envisioned as a summer institute in Saratoga Springs, New York, SITI has expanded to encompass a year-round program based in New York City with a summer season in Saratoga.
Ms. Bogart is a recipient of two Obie Awards, a Bessie
Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Professor at Columbia
University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program.
2008-2009 Available Projects
Under Construction (9 actors)
SITI Company will add another chapter to its American Museum Cycle of plays with Under Construction by Charles L. Mee. The play combines the iconic Americana of Norman Rockwell with the rascally chaos of Jason Rhoades to illuminate, in Anne Bogart's words, "the dichotomy between Rockwell's vision and what actually came out." The play presents scenes, songs and dances inspired by the work of both artists. Its stage picture will look like a Rockwell family inhabiting a construction site that is constantly changing, interrupted constantly by the chaotic nation that appeared after him. Mee juxtaposes the two as a way to compare the red and blue states, the fifties and the present, where we grew up and where we live now. America, he says, is "permanently under construction." The play is set to premiere in March, 2009 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, KY and will then tour to Tempe, Arizona and the Krannert Center in Illinois.
Who Do You Think You Are (6 actors)
SITI Company's magnum opus this year will be a devised work by the company, Who Do You Think You Are, which is based on the neurophysiological basis of our beliefs. Now that brain science addresses problems of personal consciousness, neurological research has increasingly addressed the social processes of thinking, i.e. how we live and die by our commitments to particular views of life. So this is a play about The Brain that actually asks, "if we know more about what's happening in our brains, inside our bodies, can we stop violence in the world from actually happening?" The issues of the play are animated via a fictional quiz show, one that is devoted to the question: if you could re-live a scene of your life, using your knowledge of neurology, might it turn out better? Into that framework are thrown the structure and aesthetics of the Fassbinder film "Katzelmacher," a film about the circumscribed lives of young working class people, whose societal disillusionment is combined with a healthy dose of violently expressed xenophobia. The play premiered March, 2008 at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.
Radio Macbeth (7 actors)
SITI embarks on a next adventure with Shakespeare, this
time by means of MacBeth. Following the formula of Radio
Play, SITI's staging of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater
on the Air's War of the Worlds, the company is approaching
Radio MacBeth, through a very special lens. Radio MacBeth takes place late at night in the guts of an abandoned theater.
Actors circle restlessly around the common shared warmth
of a rehearsal table, moving through the bullet of Shakepeare's
briefest and perhaps most magnetic play. Around them, in
the perimeter of the space, the ghosts of all previous productions
hover and encroach. The spirits of ambition, violence, fortune,
fate, free will, hubris, vengeance, pride, indecision, paradox,
the eternal male-female conflict and madness flicker and
glow. The actors cling to the sanity of words while the
chaos of history grows to be undeniably present with them
in the room.
Death and the Ploughman (3 actors)
How do we manage to live full and vibrant lives while death breathes down our neck? Death and the Ploughman, a hauntingly beautiful play written in Germany in 1401, awakens the complex mystery encased in this deeply disturbing question. A man loses his beloved wife in her prime and demands some answers for his ensuing pain. He asks Death to respond. The result is an extraordinarily contemporary exploration of what it means to be alive in the world.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (8 actors)
This remarkable production represents SITI Company's first
adventure with Shakespeare and a bold reinvention of the
classic. Its hallmarks are the actors' intense physicality
and the theatrical magic created using minimal effects.
War of the Worlds - The Radio Play (7 actors)
On the foggy fall evening of October 30, 1938, America went to war with Mars!! War of the Worlds was presented as a Halloween thriller which terrified a nation. Now, 68 years after the original broadcast, this radio classic comes to life as performed by the SITI Company in a special staged version of the H.G. Wells/Howard Koch/Orson Welles/Mercury Theater on the Air, War of the Worlds - the Radio Play.
The American Museum Cycle
bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, and Under Construction
Following their blissful collaboration on bobrauschenbergamerica, Anne Bogart, SITI Company and the playwright Charles Mee, have made pieces inspired by the lives and work of great American artists: Hotel Cassiopeia, inspired by the life and work of Joseph Cornell and Under Construction, scenes, songs and dances inspired by Norman Rockwell of the fifties juxtaposed by the installation artist of today, Jason Rhoads.
bobrauschenbergamerica (10 actors)
This production won critical acclaim at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2003 Next Wave Festival, the 2004 Bonn Biennale, Bobigny in Paris and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. Written by Charles L. Mee, the play takes us on a rowdy road trip through the American landscape - as Robert Rauschenberg might have conceived it had he been a playwright instead of one of America's greatest visual artists.
Hotel Cassiopeia (7 actors)
Charles L. Mee's play, written especially for SITI Company,
is a sustained peek into the irrational, miniature, and
magical world of Joseph Cornell. Inspired by Cornell's vision,
Mee and SITI create a theatrical kaleidoscope using the
im- ages and obsessions that filled Cornell's trademark
boxes: pocket watches, coiled springs, a forest of thimbles,
parrots, seashells, broken glass, children's alphabet blocks,
brightly colored balls, soap bubbles, whales' teeth, star
maps and movie stars. Relationships and longings within
Cornell's work come brilliantly to life in this quintessential
SITI production.
Under Construction (9 actors)
A collage of America today--scenes and songs and dances inspired by Norman Rockwell of the fifties, and scenes and songs and dances inspired by the installation artist of the present day, Jason Rhoades: Rockwell and Rhoades juxtaposed side by side--then and now, the fifties and the present, the red states and the blue states, where we grew up and where we live today, a piece that is, like America, permanently under construction.
The Triptych
Bob, Room, Score (3 solo pieces) Recently, the SITI Company completed a trilogy about the artistic process: Bob, based on the life and work of iconoclast director Robert Wilson, Room inspired by the life and writing of Virginia Woolf and Score, centered around the great conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein and his passion for music. What joins these three works is the infectious enthusiasm of these individuals for their art. The three productions are available as a trio or individually.
|
