DRAMATURGY becomes a function, rather than a role, when practiced by more than one person at the same time within a given space and time. This process, which can invoke labor as diverse as vocal practice, archival research, and urbanism, serves as a lens into microspaces within an unfolding work, as well as a portal for work to see outside itself. The transformative experience that Jen Rosenblit’s I’m Gonna Need Another One brings is that of constant meaning making, often through a curious and complex excavation/extraction process: We dig out, we find, we extract from what we found until it withers away into dust, and we do it again.

Jen is deeply interested in how people find (or fail to find) community and struggle to make home in the churn of unwritten rules. And while we are always and everywhere swaddled by complex weavings of different rules, it is perhaps in our cities that these rules become most concrete, in every sense of the word. The great, paradigm – shifting ideas in urban planning, from Vitruvius’s proportions to Le Corbusier’s slabs, may be understood less as transformative ruptures and more as the reconfiguration of a few key, recurring rules — a sort of generative grammar of cities. These reconfigurations, however, can be jarring, outpacing city dwellers’ experiences of these elements and subverting their natural sense of navigation and wayfinding. At their worst, these transformations displace and dispossess. Jen’s green blocks are not building blocks of a city, per se. But their decay and disintegration evokes a crumbling consensus, a breakdown that makes home elusive.

A similar dynamic of maneuvering-within-rules prevails in tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs), in which participants embody characters based on carefully crafted characterizations and describe their actions through speech, with those actions succeeding or failing according to formal systems of rules and guidelines. Within these frameworks, players are free to improvise; indeed, it is this improvisation which both propels the game forward and makes it engaging. However, if a player disregards the rules or manipulates them in bad faith, the encounter ceases to be a game. I’m Gonna Need Another One contains a multitude of offstage authors and onstage characters — a wheat farmer, a sous chef, the centaur Chiron, among others. And yet Jen does not try to act or embody these characters, but takes the role of an RPG dungeon master; that is, something akin to a referee, outlining the frameworks within which these characters willingly manifest themselves and thus tilting theater and choreography towards performance.

JEN ROSENBLIT makes performances in New York City and Berlin surrounding architectures, bodies and ideas concerned with problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny and maintenance of care, locating ways of being together amidst impossible spaces. Her next production is a collaboration with sound artist Li Tavor and will premiere at Tanzhaus Zürich Spring 2020. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez A.K.Burns and Philipp Gehmacher.
jenrosenblit.net

ANNA LIENERT radical feminist, queer, vegan, professional theatre lighting person.

GÉRALD KURDIAN studied visual arts and contemporary dance with Mathilde Monnier and Xavier Le Roy. His oblique concerts, crossing electronic music, performance art and documentary practices, are regularly presented in visual arts, indie music and performing arts contexts. Since 2016 he develops hot bodies of the future!, an artistic research project on sexual revolutions.

ADAM KUCHARSKI is an urbanist and artist who lectures on public policy and arts activism, deploying choreography and performance as tools for equitable urban planning. Adam is the founder of Kuchar&Co, an artistic platform that mobilizes collaboration with artists, scholars, and urbanists to inform and advise urban and social policy. Adam has degrees from the University of Chicago and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. ADHAM HAFEZ works in choreography, sound, and theory, and is the founder of Egypt’s movement and performance research platform HaRaKa (2006). He studied political science at SciencePo-Paris, choreography at Amsterdam Theatre School, and is a PhD candidate at New York University theorizing Arab contemporary performance history. His practice focuses on colonialism and climate change, performance and science history, and gender-in-exile.

LULU OBERMAYER After studying acting in New York and performance in Scotland, Lulu Obermayer graduated from the MA Solo Dance Authorship program at HZT in Berlin in 2017. In her performances, she isolates female characters from operas with the aim of exploring their ontology anew. Her performances have been presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Münchner Kammerspiele, Beursschouwburg Brussels, Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles and the Trente Trente Festival in Bordeaux.

[Source: play bill]

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