SCREENING ROOM: actor + composer for a piece by Andrea Kleine

ANDREA KLEINE
Screening Room, or, The Return of Andrea Kleine (as revealed through a re-enactment of a 1977 television program about a ‘long and baffling’ film by Yvonne Rainer.)
December 2014. The Chocolate Factory Theater. New York.

Andrea Kleine, an ‘enigmatic and eccentric’ (the New York Times), ‘brainy, allusive Downtown artist’ (Village Voice), whose work is ‘something like genius’ (ArtVoice), has been absent from the stage for a decade. She resurfaces as the choreographer/filmmaker Yvonne Rainer and Rainer’s lion-tamer-turned-dancer character ‘Kristina,’ transforming a verbatim talk show interview into an imaginary film recounting Kleine’s journey of disappearance.

Screening Room... is a re-imagination of an episode of "Screening Room," a 1970s talk show about film. This particular episode featured choreographer/filmmaker Yvonne Rainer and her film "Kristina Talking Pictures.” The piece transforms as Andrea Kleine, the performance artist suffering from stage anxiety and agoraphobia, integrates herself into the 1970s interview and becomes a new character in Rainer's film, thus changing the story of the film and the direction of the interview. The piece becomes an exploration of the conflicted relationship of performer to performance through a hybrid of dance, theater, television, documentary, and group experience illuminating the intersections of fiction and autobiography.

Screening Room... is the third project in a series of pieces exploring re-enactment and source material from past work. Memoir (2010) was a performance based on a 1999 piece by Kleine with the original dancers/actors performing remotely from their homes over video-chat. Rationality (2011) was a re-enactment of a 1992 live call-in cable-access philosophy TV show re-staged in her apartment. The new project, Screening Room, marks Kleine’s return to the traditional performance stage venue after more than a decade.

Performed by Andrea Kleine, Anya Liftig, Bobby Previte, Michael Kammers, Paul Langland, Vicky Shick. Original score by Bobby Previte. Lighting Design by David Overcamp.