Next Loco7 World Premiere
Room To Panic
October 3 through October 19, 2008
The Annex at La MaMa ETC, New York
Room to Panic
Room to Panic is created by Colombian born Federico Restrepo with music composed by prominent composer Elizabeth Swados.
Room to Panic is a new work and the final episode in a triptych theatrical work depicting the experience of immigration to America through movement and visual theater.
The goal of this project is to promote tolerance and broaden the human perspective through depicting immigration as the cornerstone of American culture. This work aims to give that cornerstone a voice and meaningful recognition.
The triptych began in 2002 with a work created by Federico Restrepo from his perspective as a Colombian immigrant. The first episode is entitled 9 Windows in which nine episodic vignettes reveal a series of multi-media, live art paintings showing the experience of a displaced immigrant. Open Door, the second episode, premiered in 2006. It addressed the impact of the many new immigrants who now make up the New York City landscape from such diverse cultural backgrounds as North and South America, Africa, Middle East, Europe and Asia. They are friends and strangers, living in the same city/apartment/room/building, meeting and exchanging stories that reveal their histories and disparate states of mind.
Room to Panic is the journey of joy, fear, alienation and struggle revealing the allure, pressures, disillusionments and rites of passage one goes through to achieve the American Dream, creating new American culture.
Award-wining composer, Elizabeth Swados, will create an original score with lyrics based on dialogues and discussions with first, second and third generation immigrant New Yorkers. The work will bring together magical puppets and 3-dimensional scenery, from toy-to-life-sized-to-larger-than-life, and incorporating the language of video, utilizing its narrative structure and imagery.
A comic strip language will be used in the narrative structure as well as in the imagery, employing various scaled puppets and stop-motion like movement. Marionettes, toy-puppets, body-puppets, music, light design, and video are integral parts of this drama, all becoming actors within the action. By embracing the use of different media forms, LOCO7 attempts to create a new language of movement and unique approaches to characterization.
Room To Panic is conceptualized by Federico Restrepo and Denise Greber together with Elizabeth Swados.
Room to Panic
October 3 through October 19, 2008
The Annex at La MaMa ETC, New York
66 East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
www.LaMaMa.org
