Jeffrey Stein

Monday, June 27, 2011

V at Underbelly Festival

http://underbellyarts.com.au/2011/jeff-stein-and-justin-shoulder-v/

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Viva La Gong Festival

www.vivalagongfestival.org

see:
http://vimeo.com/16579341

Monday, September 20, 2010

THE ART OF PLAY @CAMPELTOWN ARTS CENTRE

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Raven Project in Brisbane for Under the Radar

If your in Brisbane:

http://www.brisbanefestival.com.au/Events/0,274,4747,027400906.aspx

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Performing at Sydney Biennale on 22nd May

It's FREE but you need to book at below site

http://www.superdeluxe-artspace.com.au/performers/jeff-stein/

Agesilaus Santander

A short performance by Jeff Stein | Music by Oren Ambarchi

This works starts with one of Walter Benjamin’s “Angels” and quickly finds its opposite in Milan Kundera’s Demon with its cackle of mocking laughter that deflates the pretensions of the angelic, punctuating its portentous world. What drives this demon to its sardonic fury is the extreme repleteness of human existence-its smug belief in its own solidity. In deflating a world, which calibrates value on a scrupulously nuanced scale, the demonic collapses these unique identities into eternal sameness of shit, and thus ironically ends up with pure identity.

Monday, April 12, 2010

The Raven Project

Merrigong Theatre Independent Producers Program presents

The Raven Project

Starting from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven and paralleling this with the work of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, in particular- The Birds, North by Northwest and Psycho, Jeff Stein looks at birds and planes as a sign of impending doom or simply as a messenger of something to come.

What message do they bring? What impending disaster do they speak to? What does Poe’s Raven mean by Nevermore? Why do crows and ravens have such a bad rep? If we watch all of the TV series Six Feet Under are we ok with death. Is death funny?

Jeff and Frank Mainoo will set up a parlor and will be taking guests and try to address these questions and many more. Part installation, part lecture, part video night.

An Alfred Hitchcock type character narrates a not altogether coherent story, in the way Hitchcock himself narrated the trailers for some of his films- irony combined with comedy into a narration of completely sinister stories.

Artists
Jeff Stein- direction, design and performer/devisor
Frank Mainoo- co-performer/devisor and production/lighting design

Dates and Times
Friday 16th and Saturday 17th April 2010
6pm/7pm/8pm

IPAC Theatre- 32 Burelli St Wollongong

Bookings and Info
02 42245999

Cost
$15/$10

Artistic Practice

He is working with Italian Company Raffaello Sanzio, most recently in Art of Play, with Chiara Guidi, facilitating the creation of a new Children’s Theatre work, at Campelltown Arts Centre.

Also performing in their show Inferno at the Avignon Festival, France 08.

Recent Work (2009-10)

Raven Project- IPAC, Wollongong and Brisbane Festival, Under the Radar.

Fire Water, Vivid Festival, Sydney

Agesilaus Santande, Searchlight Festival, Melbourne/ Sydney Biennale

Ariadne’s Thread, Pact Theatre, Sydney, devising and directing a new work in collaboration with 17 children (10-12yrs).

The Secret Name, Legs on the Wall's residency creating a new work with emerging artists.

State We Are In, Urban Theatre Projects with Paul Gazzola and Rosie Denis.

Impasse, worked with Denis Beabouis and William McClure, a development of a new Installation at Carriagewroks. http://www.vimeo.com/17514994

Overlay, collaboration with new media/ performance artist Paul Gazzola (Berlin), developed in residency at University of Wollongong in Aug 2008. http://over-lay.blogspot.com/

PAST WORK

He worked with Gravity Feed Performance Ensemble for twelve years as a core member of the ensemble in all their major productions. www.gravityfeed.org

He also worked with Post Arrivalists, Erth Theatre and Gekidan Kaitaisha, Tokyo.

He has done numerous solo works;

For 5yrs he has taught Performance craft and directed two shows at Pact Youth Theatre.

Creative Producer

As a Creative Producer he seeks to open audience minds to new types of work, trying to provide audiences access to engage with the unusual and opportunities for artists to broaden and expand their audiences.

Hoopla Festival, SHFA, 2011, Cordinator/Programmer;

Mullem Music Festival, Nov, 2009/10, Site/Stage Manager

Viva La Gong Festival, 08, 09, 10, Wollongong, Creative Producer

Riversdale Festival, Bandanon, Jan, 2010, Stage Manager

Australia Day Celebrations. 09, Wollongong, Programmer/Coordinator

15^th Birthday of the Bundanon Trust, 08, Production Manager

NYE Bondi Beach, 05/06/07, Programmer/Coordinator

Great Escape Festival, Sydney, 2006/07, Programmer/Coordinator

Cockatoo Island Festival, 2005, Programmer/Coordinator

LIVEBAIT Festival, Bondi Beach, 2004, Co-artistic director

Keating The Musical, for Company B Belvoir St Theatre, 07-08, Stage-manager

OZCO Inter-Arts Fellowship

For 2 years (07-08) I was engaged in an Australia Council, Inter Arts, Fellowship. Whilst the Fellowship allowed me to research and begin to develop three new works, underlying those projects was my artistic practice transitioning from working primarily with Gravity Feed Ensemble to developing my own practice as a solo artist and various collaborations with other artists.

I was a member of Gravity Feed Ensemble for 12 yrs. Gravity Feed evolved into a unique architectural performance-theatre, employing large sets to create potent, subversive and densely atmospheric events. The work involved movement, objects, sound, light, video and audience as equal partners; it traversed visual arts, architecture and theatre. The tension and synergies between the disciplines fuelled the collaborative process that created each work. The works were undertaken as large-scale site and set-based projects, which investigated new approaches to audience presence and mobility.
www.gravityfeed.org

As part of my Fellowship I researched and developed three new works, underpinning those works was three new collaborations with artists I regard highly and who have informed my practice a great deal:

1. A children's theatre work in collaboration with Chiara Guidi of Company Raffaello Sanzio (Italy). I have been researching the work of this company for a number of years. Last year I performed with the company in their latest show Inferno at the Avignon Festival, July 2008.
The work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is considered by many to be the most visionary experimental theatre of our time. Their commitment to interrogating theatre’s form and potential have led to extraordinary work, sometimes considered controversial, and usually on a vast scale, which uncompromisingly mines the human condition. The metaphoric and formal presentations of concepts and philosophies of contemporary cultural thinking, the deconstruction of stage composition and the innovations in audio-visual alienation, are the aspects of this theatre that I was originally interested in observing and studying.

2. Collaboration with dancer Dean Walsh on a dance/theatre piece, based of the life and work of Jean Genet, titled Loving Captive. It was shown in development at Carriageworks, Sydney in Jan 2008. See below.

3. Collaboration with new media/ performance artist Paul Gazzola (Berlin) towards the creation of a live art event. It was developed in residency at University of Wollongong in Aug 2008. See:-http://over-lay.blogspot.com/

The twitch

Article for Campbelltown Arts Centre Project-

What I Think About When I Think About Dancing

The twitch- Jeff Stein

I feel like I am impelled to start with a joke, say something funny or at least witty. None of that really interests me, I prefer something a bit more esoteric, I am prone to an ontological depth and seriousness with only the occasional fart to alleviate the tension. There you are, my one and only joke. Seriousness seems to grate at the postmodern sensibility of streetwise, skeptical, cool, lightness of being. I don’t want to apologise for being serious at the beginning and I don’t really want to add: “only joking” at the end. So I will begin and end without apologies or excuses, with no smell of farts and with sincere un-cool conviction.

Dance for me always starts with a twitch, inevitably it’s a nervous twitch, one that hides what I know but can’t really say. I want to say many things but the thing that the twitch says is the one thing I can’t really acknowledge, it’s too much for words, words always lie but the twitch never lies. It speaks in a language of disorder, muddled and confused and yet with a type of clarity that gives it a force of being.

Almost everyone has a twitch, its like the gambler’s “tell”, it tells the gambler when an opponent is lying, it reveals a truth. Is the gambler bluffing or doe s/he hold a good hand? A good gambler can read an opponents “tell”. One needs to be a good liar to be able to hide one’s tell from an opponents. These twitches reveal an intrinsic truth and in order to mask this truth one needs to temper a very deep seated desire and that desire is to confess.

We tend to hide a great many things, desires that are entombed within ourselves, that lie dormant, waiting for an opportunity to arise, to confess. They mostly emerge in a type of tourettes syndrome, blurted out, uncomfortably in profanity.

The ancient Greek word for actor was hypokritēs, which is our root word for hypocrite.

This, to me, is the hypocrisy and lies of the actor and theatre, it builds a new truth, an alternate truth, in which we may consider our own world. Most dance does the same, some dance attempts a type of authenticity that begins to unpack the many layer of lies and deceits that mask the world around us.

I am not a dancer, I’d like to say I like dancing but that’s not quite right, I am sometimes impelled to dance, driven to dance and perform, what force drives this desire? I cannot identify, its like trying to define happiness, as soon as you realise you are happy you are no longer happy.

When I think and speak of dance I impose its opposite on it. I erase dance with talk of dance. To me, the act of dancing itself is a type of erasure, erasure of the impulse. It is like scribbling. I call what I do dance because I like to constrain and contract my actions to a form I fundamentally appose.

The fundamental difference of my relation to beauty is brought out in two sentences:

The beautiful thing is true

And

The truthful thing is beautiful

For me the common perception of dance tends to bind itself to the former sentence and so distinction is drawn and in this distinction hierarchies of power and privilege are founded. In the later sentence I add the assumption that one can never know truth and therefore one can never know beauty and yet… the futile, comic attempt is made not in a privileged, distinct moment drawn apart but in every moment, which is held sacred and in which the sacred ceases to be.

I can only find beauty in the twitch, dance for me is an extended twitch, almost autistic in nature, an unkept overloading of the senses by a world in disarray. This is a common perception of ugliness but really its in tandem with both visions of beauty and ugliness, not just a juxtaposition for contrast but rather a Gnostic refusal to buy into either, a deferral, a putting off, a perhaps? It cannot be curtailed and in that uncertainty a type of truth can be found.

The twitch, the squirm is like the drop of blood on a child’s face, delicate and fragile and a reminder of uncertainty and impermanence. One needs this cut, this scar to be reminded of our own tenuous positions, otherwise we immediately begin to believe our own lies.

The body that expresses , can express many things, the range of human emotion and thought, however the overriding desire is the one for perpetuity and procreation. Procreation is our act that allows perpetuity, other expressions seem to remain beholden to that statement to this..

Most of my twitches are masterbatory in content, I cannot hide from this desire to desire and procreate. While my seed is often wasted on the futile gestures, this comic waste does facilitate something. It speaks to death directly, who feeds on wasted seed, and while death feeds and thereby grows stronger, s/he stops postponement and says very clearly “ENOUGH!”

Whenever I see dance I laugh at its ingeniousness, its façade, its’ absolute lie. The most authentic dance for me is stripping, which doesn’t hide dancing’s pornographic nature. When we privilege our aesthetics, make our vision of beauty truth, and attempt to dominate others through that act, this corruption to me is pornography, trading our desires for power. This to me is the basis of evil, which most dance seems to celebrate. Most art I see celebrates this ignorant perversion of one’s desire to dominate others through their vision of the world.

Dance entombs the body, through training the dances body lies, fabrications upon fabrications. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History the dancers body heaps violence onto the stage, screaming with an uncanny certainty “I am alive” and at the same time denies the audience room for this privilege. The dancer lives for the audience to die.

Standing centre stage, the decay of history’s violence is piled at the feet of the dancer. The face of the dancer shows cool indifference, they show nothing but showing itself and in that showing we inhabit an unkind universe of denial- denial of humanity. The angel that stands before us is the angel of death.

Jeffrey Stein

Monday, June 27, 2011

V at Underbelly Festival

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Viva La Gong Festival

Monday, September 20, 2010

THE ART OF PLAY @CAMPELTOWN ARTS CENTRE

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Raven Project in Brisbane for Under the Radar

Thursday, June 17, 2010

FireWater @ the Rocks

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Performing at Sydney Biennale on 22nd May

Monday, April 12, 2010

The Raven Project

The Raven Project

IMPASSE

Artistic Practice

Photos: Heidrun Lohr

Creative Producer

Links

OZCO Inter-Arts Fellowship

Blog Archive

A Loving Captive

The twitch