PRESENT
CONDOLENCE (working title)
Written & directed by Ain Gordon
Work In Progress. Contact: gordon@pupcs.org
Condolence (working title) asks who contemporary death and dying practices actually
comfort - and how we can lovingly/responsibly release a body into the ecosystem?
RELICS AND THEIR HUMANS
Ain Gordon and Josh Quillen
Directed by Ain Gordon
Contact: gordon@pupcs.org
Ain and Josh performatively reimagine the 3-year odyssey following Josh’s dad Jerry’s 2006 ALS diagnosis.
WE (ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURES)
Conceived and choreographed by Emily Coates – directed by Ain Gordon
Contact: gordon@pupcs.org
A juxtaposition of works by Emmanuèle Phuon and Emily Coates, We is a multi-artist, hybrid performance/lecture utilizing text, video, installation and the body. The work is ultimately about human and artistic struggles to represent and connect with our natural world.
THESE DON’T EASILY SCATTER
Written & directed by Ain Gordon
Contact: gordon@pupcs.org
Part of Remembrance, a multi-year, multi-disciplinary memorial to Philadelphians lost
during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis sponsored by Philadelphia’s William Way
LGBT Community Center and its John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in partnership with artists, activists, community leaders, and archivists with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
217 BOXES OF DR. HENRY ANONYMOUS
Written & directed by Ain Gordon
Contact: gordon@pupcs.org
1972: Dr. John E. Fryer dons an oversize tuxedo and rubber joke shop mask to
become Dr. Henry Anonymous and confront the American Psychiatric Association
with these words: “I am a homosexual, I am a psychiatrist.”
Dr. Anonymous compelled psychiatry to declassify homosexuality as a mental
disease – but who was Dr. Fryer?
RADICALS IN MINIATURE
Written & directed by Ain Gordon
in partnership with Josh Quillen
Contact: gordon@pupcs.org
RADICALS IN MINIATURE is a series of performance-odes to a cabal of personal icons who impacted latter 20th century “alternative” culture only to loose their toehold on immortality.
PAST
THEN A CUNNING VOICE AND A NIGHT WE SPEND GAZING AT STARS
Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance with Ain Gordon (director)
Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is a multi-year project dedicated to building an all-night, out- door performance gathering.
The work includes in equal measure: making quilts, performance, storytelling, song, and a night outdoors under the sky. It relies upon people coming together to voice intentions, witness, work, experience time, rest, and imagine.
A GUN SHOW
Sō Percussion with collaborators Ain Gordon (director) and Emily Johnson
It seems that almost every hot-button issue in our society - race, economic inequality, constitutional rights - intersects with how we view these small machines. They represent a practical tool to some, but a public health menace to others. What is it about the American psyche that fastens so tightly to guns? A Gun Show is an exploration of these issues through music, text, and movement.
AN ARTIST EMBEDDED • 2015-16
When we look back, we cannot know ALL that happened. The historical record is rarely, if ever, complete. When we present history, we fill in the gaps, create the voices that spoke, the characters that lived. Are we creating fiction? Have we made history un-true? Or have we created a truth greater than mere fact?
SHORE • 2014
Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance with Ain Gordon (director)
SHORE expands beyond the theater into the world. Over the course of a week, SHORE includes four equal parts: COMMUNITY ACTION (volunteerism) in partnership with community organizations; STORY (a curated reading); PERFORMANCE that begins outdoors moves into a theater; and a festive, culminating potluck FEAST to which participants bring the stories and recipes of the dishes they bring to share.
NOT WHAT HAPPENED • 2013
A duet for two people who never meet: the historical re-enactor and the flesh and blood woman she portrays. For both figures it’s baking day. The re-enactor unspools her official history plus her twenty-year devotion to this woman she pretends to be but isn’t. Her doppelganger, talking to herself, toils though her actual day two centuries earlier. History lived vies with history told; can we ever know what really happened?
IF SHE STOOD • 2013
Meet Philadelphia’s first multiracial collective of female reformers at the moment they chose to move. If She Stood is an immersive theatrical experience in which the Painted Bride Art Center’s performance space is transformed into a 19th century Quaker meeting — the time and place that gave birth to the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Audiences step into the minds of Sarah Mapps Douglass, Sarah Grimke, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Sarah Pugh, who collectively stood to abolish slavery, literally invent the women’s rights movement and right a host of societal wrongs.
WHERE (WE) LIVE • 2012-14
Sō Percussion with collaborators Grey McMurray (songwriter/guitarist), Martin Schmidt (video artist), Emily Johnson (choreographer), and Ain Gordon (dramaturg/director)
For eight years, Sō Percussion has made our home in Brooklyn amid 2,500,000 others. In our city, each of the group’s four members has constructed a personal ecosystem we call home.When we leave those homes, our four members unite to create another artistic home, with its own unspoken rules and expectations; its own rhythm of interaction, its own banalities and mystery. Where (we) Live questions all these homes by purposefully inviting the unknown to “come on over.”
THE HISTORY OF ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION • 2012
The History of Asking the Wrong Question theatrically explores any relationship Native Americans have to a history the dominant culture has too often written for them. Wrong Question... is a live fictitious documentary, including actual filmed interviews with more than a dozen Native People from multiple Nations, fusing them with imagined interviews with some of the long-dead men and women who moved to historicize Native Culture in the 19th century.
A DISASTER BEGINS • 2009
A lone woman’s unbreakable bond with the hurricane that devastated the Texas island of Galveston in 1900, taking 6,000 lives in a single night. With only a pitcher of water and drinking glass she unravels the shocking truth behind this disaster, weaving in tales of presidential corruption, pubescent despair, patriotic fervor, pre-marital passion and paralyzing writer’s block.
IN THIS PLACE... • 2008-12
1830: Samuel and Daphney Oldham are the first free African-Americans to build their own home in Lexington, KY. Five years later, they disappear.
Now, award winning artist Ain Gordon imagines the full story behind these bare facts as told from Daphney's perspective in a new one-woman play featuring Brooklyn’s own Michelle Hurst.
