"Appointment" Auditions at NYU

The Undergraduate Drama Department
Proudly Announces
Audition/Interviews for

APPOINTMENT
Directed by Aaron Landsman

AUDITION/INTERVIEWS:
Thursday, April 29th, 7-11pm & Sunday, May 2nd 12-3pm


PERFORMANCE DATES:
September 16-19th

The piece will begin rehearsing in late-August. You must be in town and available starting August 30th in order to audition.

Please prepare for the interview:
1-2 minute presentation that answers the following questions

1. How have you created original work in the past?
2. Why do you want to be a part of this project, given the description of it?
3. Who are your influences?
4. What are three things that distinguish you as an artist?
5. What is an area of your theatermaking you'd like to improve?

You are welcome to bring in text, audio, video (on a laptop) or still photos to support your presentation, but please note that you only have two minutes before Aaron starts asking you questions.

Adventurous theater-makers sought for Appointment, an ongoing theater project by theater artist Aaron Landsman. Selected students will work with Landsman on short, repeatable performance works staged in small offices for a single viewer at a time. This project is open to intrepid playwrights, directors and performers who create original work, and to both single artists and collaborative pairs. Participants will be chosen by interview. Please come prepared to discuss your approach to making live performance; if you’d like to read or show something, you are welcomed to.

We’ll start with a score – a series of formal elements that need to be in each piece – and a series of possible scenarios for creators to use as starting points. Over the course of two intensive weeks, each artist or team will develop 10- to 15-minute works that can be performed several times in a row. We’ll inhabit a suite of newly renovated offices on NYU’s campus, and create an event that combines elements of theater, installation and workaday task. Viewers may not only be performed for, they may be counseled, negotiated with, seduced, or interviewed. Together we’ll study and explore strategies for how to create work in a small space, how to involve the audience in a clear way, how to perform intimately, and how to deal with the technical and dramaturgical requirements of a piece that is performed again and again.

Appointment is an ongoing project Landsman is creating with groups of artists and students internationally. Previous iterations have taken place at CUNY’s Prelude Festival and in Oslo, Norway. Future versions are scheduled in Austin, Berlin, Minsk and Philadelphia. The project continues his series of works created for quotidian locations like offices, homes and barrooms, in which context becomes its own formal element.

The results of our work together will be available online at the Appointment Blog: http://makeanappointment.wordpress.com

About the Director
Aaron Landsman is a Brooklyn-based playwright and actor. Since 2002, he has created four site-specific plays including Open House (2008), commissioned by the Foundry Theatre in New York, and performed in 24 NYC apartments; Love Story (2007), an audio walk and gallery tour presented at Austin’s Fusebox Festival, What You’ve Done (2006), a theater installation in a Houston row house, commissioned by DiverseWorks; and Desk (2002), presented by Chashama in an abandoned Manhattan office and supported by an artist residency at HERE. He is currently an artist-in-residence at University Settlement, where he is developing two new stage plays, Running Away From The One With The Knife and Special Tonight. He is a member of the I-73 writer’s group at P-73 and a finalist for their playwriting commission, as well as a finalist for the Yale Drama Series. His monologues have been aired on public radio in New York and Minnesota.


Since 2004, Landsman has performed with Elevator Repair Service Theater, creating roles in two acclaimed productions – GATZ and The Sound And The Fury – and touring these works across the US, Europe and Australia. He has appeared with many directors and choreographers, including Richard Maxwell, Tory Vazquez and Andrea Kleine. Landsman has taught at Juilliard, where he was an artistic advisor to seniors in the dance program from 2004-2007, and at NYU’s Department of Undergraduate Drama. He is a founding member of Collective Arts Think Tank – an group of artists, curators and administrators seeking to address systemic issues in performing arts funding, presenting and creation. http://www.thinaar.com

*Sign up book available now*
(outside the production office on the 3rd floor of 721 Broadway)
Questions? Please e-mail Carrie Meconis at carrie.meconis@nyu.edu
or visit the production office - Room 311 of 721 Broadway

For information regarding performances, ticketing, or The Department of Drama, please go to: drama.tisch.nyu.edu