(HUDSON, N.Y.) – The CATCH performance series brings ten cutting-edge acts in a variety of genres to Basilica Hudson for the second summer in a row on Sunday, July 10, at 6pm. Most of the performers are based in New York City and the Hudson Valley, and include innovative creators in theater, dance, music, and other fields.

This year’s performers include Banana Bag & Bodice, celebrated downtown theater company now based in Beacon; Chelsea and Magda, Philly-based performance duo with roots in the Hudson Valley; the NYC-based music/story duo James and Jerome; Beacon-based interactive installation artist Steve Lambert; interdisciplinary West Coast Hudson Valley transplant David Szlasa; dance-maker and music artist Saúl Ulerio; Dan Safer’s NYC and Catskill based trans-disciplinary performance collective, Witness Relocation ; Obie-award winning composer Heather Christian; choreographer Faye Driscoll; and Adrienne Truscott, choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer, and as of late, comedian, among others.

CATCH is a Brooklyn­based, nomadic and multidisciplinary performance series which creates a celebratory, communal space for both artists and audience members to experience bold new performance works in a rough and ready way. A serious performance framed by a serious party that whirls through Brooklyn every month or so (and now traveling up the Hudson), each CATCH event features an array of artists working across and between disciplines, creating a space for community discovery and exchange. CATCH is curated with reckless delicacy by Jeff Larson, Andrew Dinwiddie, and Caleb Hammons.

Founded by Jenny Seastone Stern in Brooklyn, NY in 2003 as a home for the emerging NYC avant-garde, CATCH is an integral part of the cultural life of the city with a strong track record of supporting the experimentations of hundreds of emerging and mid-career artists through the curation and production of over 70 outstanding group performance events that the New York Times calls “consistently entertaining, stimulating, thought-provoking and irreverent.”
Tickets are $15 at the door.
Information on some of this Sunday’s performers follows:

Faye Driscoll is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director whose work is rooted in an obsession with the problem of being ‘somebody’ in a world of other ‘somebodies’ and all of the conflicts and comedy born in our interactions with others.

Driscoll says, “I make dances that are mistaken for plays and load-in like installations. Sets are designed to break apart, musical scores are made from performers’ stomps and voices, props are worn, used and reused for fantasy, excess, and loss. Performers sing, fight, frolic and make love in bursts, like rapid fire flip-books of human emotion. Awkward virtuosic bodies teeter on the edge of high art and slapstick. A viewer feels a rollercoaster of joy, outrage, arousal and discomfort while performers hold a frank gaze that says, “You are me and I am you.” Embarrassment and exhilaration live side by side. I aim for an immersive world of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation. Through performers’ powerful exposure, heightened proximity, and at times physical connection with the audience, viewers feel their own culpability as co-creators of the performance. My work is a rigorously crafted group experience that comes off as improvised, chaotic and spontaneous.”

 

 

Banana Bag & Bodice is a Brooklyn-based ensemble theatre company that creates original plays with a strong emphasis on text, music and design. They have performed at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, PS 122, The Brick Theater, Abrons Arts Center, American Repertory Theater, Joe’s Pub, and festivals in San Francisco, New York City, Montreal, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Adelaide. Founded in 1999 in San Francisco by co-artistic directors Jason Craig and Jessica Jelliffe, Banana Bag & Bodice have created ten original productions.

Their rock musical Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage, commissioned by the Shotgun Players, won the 2008 Will Glickman Award and a 2011 Edinburgh Festival Herald Angel, and continues to tour internationally.
Banana Bag & Bodice says of itself, “Our design is inspired by the objects and materials thrown into the theatrical dumpsters of midtown Manhattan…. Our elastic approach to creating live theater has one common goal – to entertain and confound through thoughtful provocation.”

 

Chelsea & Magda began collaborating in 2012 while studying at the Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia. Their first piece together, “Rooster&Snowball,” went on to be presented through Jumpstart LiveArts and DanceNOW at Joe’s Pub. Their second collaborative duet, “Singer/Songwriter,” was recently presented by ThirdBird at the Christ Church Neighborhood House. While continuing to tour excerpts of these pieces, they are also working on an evening-length version to be unveiled sometime this year.

 

For more than 15 years, Adrienne Truscott — choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer, and as of late, comedian — has been making genre-straddling work in New York City and abroad. She was one of 20 artists selected nationally as recipients for the inaugural 2014 Doris Duke Impact Artist Award. Her evening-length solo comedic work and group choreographic works have been presented variously at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Just For Laughs, Darwin Festival, PS122, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, Dublin Fringe, Danspace, and Dance Theater Workshop among others.

Truscott has taught at Wesleyan University Dance Department as a visiting artist, and guest taught at Sarah Lawrence College’s Theater and Dance Departments and Yale Universtiy.

 

Self-described music/story duo James and Jerome makes original, high-speed live music literary spectacles, like novels on stage. Their full-length shows have often been directed by Rachel Chavkin (who directs The TEAM and directed Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812) and Annie Tippe (who directed Ghost Quartet, and Debutante). Their sprawling music-storytelling saga AARON/MARIE ran in January 2015 as part of Under The Radar Festival’s INCOMING! portion.

 

Witness Relocation formed in 2000 and is led by director/choreographer Dan Safer. The company is ensemble based and makes shows ranging from fully scripted plays to original, devised dance/theater pieces to many things in between. Based in New York City, they are recognized as one of the “ensembles who now lead the city’s progressive theater scene” (Village Voice), and are the recipients of three New York Innovative Theater Awards. Witness Relocation performs frequently in dance and theater venues internationally.

Witness Relocation combines dance and theater with the energy of a rock show, exploding contemporary culture into intensely physical outrageous, poetic, and sometimes brutal performances about the fact that, when it comes down to it, you just don’t have to be an asshole.