About this project

Appointment is a series of repeatable 12-15 minute performance works staged in small offices for one or two performers and two viewers at a time. I am developing the project over the next two to three years through collaborations with theater and dance companies, individual artists, and students at performance training programs.

The first Appointments will take place in New York and Oslo, with additional Appointments in the works for Austin, Philadelphia and Minsk, among other locations. I am hoping you intrepid donors will support artists' fees for my collaborators on the project. All donations will be used to pay the artists creating NYC and Oslo Appointments, and the production costs necessary to make them happen.

Appointment is interactive, intimate and immersive. The work makes the mundane unruly, the claustrophobic expansive. It takes the rituals and environment of the workplace - a situation that can seem beneath examination - and turns it into a cause for pleasure and surprise. Audience members are not only performed for, they are counseled, negotiated and played with, and asked to choose whether and how to participate.

Examples include: an intake session that becomes a therapist’s confession; a meeting with a lawyer that turns into a legalese burlesque; a session with a marriage counselor in which the viewer is interrogated by a disbelieving spouse; a tape recorder on a desk in an empty room, on which sits an index card scrawled with lipstick reads, ‘play at your own peril’.

The culmination of this whole endeavor will be simultaneous, worldwide Appointments. In its final form this project will be coordinated through a website from which anyone can download instructions for contributing their own works.

The first iteration of Appointment will take place in New York at the PRELUDE FESTIVAL on October 2, 2009. For FREE.

The first international installment will take place at the TITAN theater school in Oslo Norway, March 2010.

My hope is that the culminating performance will lead to “Appointment-tours,” where participants from one location can exchange with those from another. What the inhabitants of two places (say, Minsk and Austin) do with a common setting and parameters will, I think, embody the way each feels about their respective locales. Issues of containment, intimacy and authority will be conjured in ways that can be easily felt. My goal is that Appointment can simultaneously be a formally innovative experimental art work, a “community theater” piece that takes place around the world on the same day, and an ongoing event that honors a situation many of us go into without even thinking.