Maria Hassabi: STAGED? (2016)

About

STAGED? (2016), is the first part of a performative diptych, along with STAGING (2017).

“Titles are always appropriate and … usually very important. …They become a metaphor, part of the image of the piece,” claimed Robert Whitman, referring to his 1966 performance Prune Flat.

Maria Hassabi’s STAGING and STAGED? are a diptych. The basic definition of “staged” is planned, organized, or arranged in advance, and “staging”—among many definitions—refers to the act, process, or manner of presenting a play or performance. “Staging” is an active, non-finite verb form, and “staged” is a passive, finite form. […] The piece indeed appears staged, with precision. Every detail has been carefully considered. Yet the question mark of the title seems to express doubt or uncertainty about something. It becomes a haunting presence.

– Ana Janevski, from “It Is Never Staged: Ana Janevski on Maria Hassabi,” published by Walker Art Center, August 11 2017.

STAGED? furthers Hassabi’s conversation on the expectations of viewership, addressing the ways in which dance and the spectacle of performance are presented within the theater space. The work takes its time and asks the viewer to do the same, using slowness and stillness as techniques in a choreography that oscillates between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image. In STAGED?, the audience surrounds four performers entangled in a tense, colorful pile on a vividly pink carpeted expanse. Beneath a sculpture of burning spotlights, the performers pass over and through each other, forming an amorphous sculptural mass that changes through the accumulation of their sustained movements, creating a surreal theatrical intensity.

77 minutes.

*** STAGED? – undressed is an adaptation for public spaces, an iteration represented solely by its performers.

Credits

Performers: Jessie Gold, Hristoula Harakas, Maria Hassabi, Oisín Monaghan
Outfits: Victoria Bartlett
Composer: Marina Rosenfeld
Lighting design: Zack Tinkelman and Maria Hassabi
Dramaturgy: Scott Lyall
Management: Alexandra Rosenberg

STAGED? (2016) is a co-production of Dance4 (Nottingham, UK); FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival (New York, NY); High Line Art (New York, NY); The Keir Foundation with support from Dancehouse, Melbourne (Melbourne, AUS); The Kitchen (New York, NY); kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, BE); Onassis Cultural Center – Athens (Athens, GR); and Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston (MA); and supported through residencies at Live Arts Bard at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (Annandale on Hudson, NY); Camargo Foundation with funding from the Jerome Foundation (Cassis, FR); and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Captiva Island, FL). STAGED? was supported, in part, with contributions from Stephen Kahn, Randi & Jeff Levine, and Leo Koenig & Maggie Clinton.

Performance History

Selected Press

"In Maria Hassabi’s slow, meticulously articulated theater piece “STAGED?,” texture begets emotion and seemingly inadvertent placements — a touseled head near a shoulder here, a hand on a thigh there — can carry the weight of ages."
– Thea Singer, The Boston Globe [full article]

"We turn our attention inward, figuring out how to watch, how to listen, how to borrow their sense of time in order to absorb what’s in front of us."
– Lydia Mokdessi, Routine Magazine [full article]

More info

watch a trailer created by Robert Eally for Kunstenfestivaldesarts.

Please contact RosieManagement@gmail.com for the full-length video and technical information.

for booking inquiries, contact Alexandra Rosenberg at RosieManagement@gmail.com