23 days to go- Help Vernita and David meet their goal!
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About this project
We are two New York performance artists, going to Germany to do performances at a 16th Century castle. In this amazing location, we will explore the clash between the Old World and it’s traditions and rituals, and today’s 21st Century world and the contradictions which we all embrace everyday. The performers are David Rodgers and Vernita N’Cognita, longtime colleagues and collaborators. Our performances will be a compelling mix of theater, music and dance, in which both the artists and the audience will examine their own place in the march of history.
The invitation to perform comes from a summer art festival called the Sommerakademie of Kunst in Schloss Homburg, an annual art institute and creative gathering in the small town of Homburg-am-Main, in Bavaria. Rodgers has been participating and performing there since 2008, but this will be N’Cognita’s first visit. The performances will be interrelated and collaborative, but conducted as individual performances. They will take place on Saturday, August 25, 2012, at 8 PM.
We are two artists doing this on our own, not a production company or organization, and are posting this listing on Kickstarter to seek support from you in meeting the cost of this trip. We believe that the ultimate purpose of performing is to create an active dialogue among people by sharing the collective experience of live performance, and with this project, promote international cultural exchange. Through our performances, we encourage people to share different viewpoints and sensibilities, both among our audience members and the people with whom we work. We also want to share our work with our Kickstarter supporters, so we will stage these performances again in New York after returning from Germany.
About The Performances
Vernita N’Cognita’s work, The Trail of Sighs and Whispers, is a performance inspired by the ritual and tradition of marriage. In a twisted tale told through Butoh-inspired movement, costume and voice, N’Cognita, as The Bride, will take aim at this ritual of culture. She will seek to shed light on the concept of ‘The Wedding’, and the difficulty of wedding the complex paths of two lives in the 21st Century, using masks and movement to create a work with feminist overtones. In this work, N’Cognita will be using the streets and main plaza of Homburg as her stage, traveling by foot and bringing the audience to the entrance of the town’s Church of St. Burkardus, where she will be joined by Rodgers for the conclusion of her performance, and the beginning of his.
Rodgers’ performance, The Music of the Spheres, concerns the 17th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and his surreal encounter with the remarkable astronomical events of 2012, which he predicted mathematically in the 1600’s. Rodgers will explore how this man from the Scientific Renaissance confronts life 400 years in the future, and how Kepler learns to communicate his revolutionary discoveries to people of the computer age. In this theatrical spoken-word performance, staged in the courtyard of the castle, Rodgers will explore the nature of communication, scientific and otherwise. He will once again work with local musician David Hartmann, who makes and plays his own unconventional musical instruments, providing the live soundtrack to accompany Kepler’s journey through a new world.
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