ARTISTS

GENERATOR Directors

Artist, performer and filmmaker JACK WATERS most recent video Eye,Virus was commissioned by Visual AIDS for Day Without Art. It premiered December 1, 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art with nationwide and international screenings and it is now streaming online at Artforum.com. He received accolades for his starring role as Jason Holliday in the critically acclaimed controversial 2015 film Jason And Shirley directed by Stephen Winter and co-starring writer Sarah Schulman. Juilliard trained, Jack also composed the music and choreography for Jason’s nightclub sequence in the film. Appropriate to GENERATOR’s run during Black History Month, Jack’s leading hand in the show shatters prevailing perceptions of the dearth of black proponents of the avant-garde, as did Ellen Stewart‘s radicalization of American theater in her founding of LaMaMa.

PETER CRAMER is known for his installation environments at MIX NYC and lighting designs for his own dance works as well as Kembra Pfahler and her band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. He is a co-founder of Allied Productions, Inc. whose primary venue is Le Petit Versailles, the world-renowned community arts garden on the Lower East Side. Through the ‘80s, Peter and his partner Jack Waters carried the banner of the radical community arts center ABC No Rio, a gritty standard raised by the notorious art collective CoLab, whose 1980 action The Times Square Show changed NYC art and culture by bringing radical politics into a foreground previously held by a market-driven and hetero male dominated neo expressionism. Waters and Cramer’s tenure at No Rio held the culture of resistance in the downtown 80’s East Village Art scene. Peter and Jack’s channeling of disruptive chaos overlaps with those of performers Penny Arcade and Karen Finley, associations spanning their mutual involvements with ABC No Rio, Allied Productions, Inc., and as denizens of New York City’s downtown underground community.

JOHN MICHAEL SWARTZ is a multidisciplinary, multimedia artist. A classically trained cellist and pianist, John is a self-trained vocalist with a background in experimental computer music composition and instrument building. John brings his skills in improvisation and performance from interdisciplinary collaborations in dance and theater to the composition and performance of the Pestilence score. His background in independent and alternative audio engineering, record production, and installation with an emphasis on digital and networked technologies create the bridge to the GENERATOR as a hybrid of theater and gallery art. As a technical consultant and sound recording engineer John scored the electronic segments of the opera “No Sound The Earth Owes” by composer Alexander Vassos. John collaborated with artist Jeanine Oleson for her experimental opera, “Hear, Here” (2014). He toured nationally from 2009-2012 with filmmaker Brent Green as a live sound cellist for the film “Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then”. John began collaborating on Pestilence in April 2013 at Harvest Works Digital Media Arts Center. His Sourdough Bread Yeast reaction was exhibited in May 2013 for the staging of John Cage’s HPSCHD with The Pestilence team at EyeBeam, NYC. In October 2013 John’s 12-channel, whisper-quiet digital granular synthesizer designed and built as a musical instrument and set-piece was exhibited for Pestilence In Process at Emily Harvey Gallery, NYC.

MIKE CACCIATORE did his undergraduate studies in English and Fine Arts at NYU where he connected with folks in the downtown experimental theater scene, which led to fruitful collaborations (most extensively as audio designer/sound FX elf for "A Good Year For Hunters" with Jess Barbagallo/Chris Giarmo). Mike spent several years touring and cutting an album with the band Griffin and The True Believers (as bassist/guitarist), as well as performing at the New Museum and Joe's Pub with members of the Half Straddle theater company. He’s a self-taught electronics tinkerer and builder of unconventional instruments. Mike is interested in the connecting thread between entirely digital and entirely acoustic instruments (plus their hybrid offspring) and how they inform one another in the sonic domain.

Cast

Davi Cohen: AUOA/ANANSI

Davi Cohen is a land steward, strength athlete and coach, creative collaborator, community co-facilitator, and life long dancer based in Brooklyn. In a former incarnation as a professional theater artist, Davi performed as the Bride Deity with Taylor Mac in The Lily's Revenge at American Repertory Theater, created an original performance for Hoyhentamo in Finland, danced the work of choreographers Deborah Hay and marikiscrycrycry, and premiered David Greenspan's Old Comedy After Aristophanes's The Frogs with Target Margin Theater at Classic Stage Company. Davi trained and workshopped with SITI Company for over a decade, is a former member of FoolsFURY Theater Company, helped shape and coordinate the E|MERGE Interdisciplinary Residency program at Earthdance, and studied and performed with the Isadora Duncan International Institute throughout the 80s and early 90s. Davi revisited and reimagined Duncan's work in partnership with Deborah Black for New Dance Alliance, collaborates regularly with Rebecca Lloyd-Jones and sings with Pete Sturman. You can find Davi on the dance floor with The Get Down crew and moving among the wetlands and woodlands of NYC. Davi met Jack and Peter in the late 90s or early 00s, probably at DUMBA. It's an honor to be working on Pestilence and this collaboration emerged organically through years of being together in queer community. A Clown Conservatory graduate with lots of Bay Area theater background Davi has performed as an acrobat with the San Francisco Opera.

Irene Sanchez-Casas: AMOEBA/HOMINID — Irene Sanchez-Casas: **AMOEBA/HOMINID**

Irene Sánchez-Casas Salvatierra from Pamplona, Spain is an actress interested in the performing of the arts such as dance, poetry, sound, acting…I think my goal on life is to be able to learn from all these beautiful arts and be able to perform them. I consider myself a hardworking person, I also think I’m a better artist when I’m working with others I always take in new ideas or plans.

Bryce Payne: TECHNOLOGY

Bryce Payne (Bryce Nice) is a hermit, a friend, a lover, and a fighter... When xe's not singing into faces or exploring the feeling of xyr weight on the floor, xe is often singing into microphones, or struggling to survive; in fact, xe often sings into microphones about struggling to survive. It can all get very meta... Xe likes to think xyr work bridges heart attack seriousness to a strong sense of irreverence, but ultimately xe would rather let you judge. Or really, xe would actually prefer you refrain from judging, but xe understands that no one is perfect.

Ivana Larrosa: AMOEBA/HOMINID

Ivana Larrosa is a visual artist from Spain based in New York. She works primarily with photography, video installation and performance. She has curated shows for Save Art Space and Plaxall Gallery in New York and collaborates with the performers collective The Commons Choir.

Maddie Schimmel: AOUA/GOURD

Maddie Schimmel is a dancer, choreographer, and designs and makes costumes and clothes. Maddie has performed for Kathleen Kelley, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Reiner, Jeremy Nelson and Luis Lara Malvacias, and Netta Yerushalmy. Her choreographic work has been presented at ROULETTE Intermedium, Triskelion Arts, Dixon Place, Alchemical Studios, Access Theatre Gallery, SMUSH Gallery, and Cathy Weis' Sundays on Broadway. If you want to get in touch with Maddie and see what she's working on, try her instagram: @masch17

Lauren Green: AMOEBA/HOMINID

Lauren Green was most recently seen as the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro and in the title role of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta with New York Opera Theatre. She originated the role of rebel-puritan Anne Hutchinson in the music-drama of the same name by John Taylor Thomas, with Tutti Bravi Productions.

JC Augustin: AMEOBA/HOMINID/STAG

JC is thrilled to be working at LaMama with Allied in this production . JC Augustin’s most recent performance includes Potter’s Wheel and No Brainer: or The Solution to Parasites at Theater for the New City. His play Whiskey River is part of the 2020 El Barrio Frenzy Festival. His Forty-Hour Poems was performed at the LUNGS Harvest Festival. He is a member of Shakespeare Forum and Gotham Rock Choir and trained at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

X: AMOEBA/HOMINID

X explores themes of identity, trauma, mental health, and lived experiences through evocations of double consciousness and the visceral. Our work manifests as time-based media, participatory installation, experimental dance, mixed media tchotchkes, and paintings.

Designers

Bizzy Barefoot (props and costumes)

Mike Cacciatore (sets, props, and moving image media)

Rodrigo Chazaro (costumes)

Peter Cramer (moving image, props, set)

Christopher Roberts (media and moving image)

Ethan Shoshan (scent score)

Austin Windels (sets and props)

Carolyn Wong (lighting)

Production Team

Lydia Barnes (Production Assistant)

Colin Casey (Stage Manager)

Consultants

Tim Cusack (dramaturgy and production)

Ron Lasko (publicist)

Susan Salinger (resource development)

Barbara Hoon (resource advisor)

Stefani Mar (costumes/production advisor)

Rowdy Tidwell (production support)

Orchestra

NYOBS is the musical heart of GENERATOR: Pestilence Part 1. NYOBS’ trance lyrics and primal screams pierce the restive soul with mind-blowing audiovisual inducements of synthesthesia that tap all six senses. NYOBS is the alternative experimental free association queer skinned “kitchen band” born at the Punk Island Festival Staten Island. Nurtured at the queer Hot Fruit party at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Lounge, their home base is Le Petit Versailles garden. Performance highlights include: The Whitney Museum, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (a tribute to David Wojnarowicz), Mercury Lounge, La MaMa, Microscope Gallery (a séance For Jonas Mekas), Performance Space New York (preview of Exposition Of The Prophet for GENERATOR: Pestilence Part 1), Apres Avant Garde Festival, Day de Dada, BWAC (with the legendary 3 Teens Kill 4), Incarnata Social Club at Berlin, and From The Ashes, Rise at WRRQ Collective.