Desire Caught by the TailScott Keightley and Tom O’Neill
| Nov ’09 |
| 15 |
| 7:00 pm |
Scott Keightley and Tom O’Neill are collaborating on this production of Desire Caught By The Tail, a darkly comic play written by Pablo Picasso during the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1941, about a motley group of characters who fight wartime deprivation with sensual acts of indulgence in food, sex, and poetry. A fertile ground for new art production, sculptures and costumes built for this performance will live on as artifacts following a performance by a generous and talented crew of actors and artists.
Scott Keightley was born in Boston in 1987. He grew up in America’s first industrial city, Waltham, Massachusetts, also known as the “Watch City.” His formative years were spent exploring the dense, often historically layered spaces surrounding him, eventually leading to the formation of an aesthetic and art practice revolving around themes of exploration, physical and material diversity, loss, and adversely, excavation, regeneration and growth. Through experimentation and the relentless pursuit of inspiration, his work taps into and unlocks the physical potential stemming from human desire and imagination that waits invisibly within real spaces. His work seeks to make the will of the heart tangible and real. Keightley studied art formally both in high school and at Parsons, the New School for Design, in New York City, before dropping out in 2008 to focus on a project wherein a storefront rendered vacant by the dying economy would be activated again by the presence of visual artists. This idea came to fruition in the spring of 2009, when a building owner in Tribeca lent his storefront at 401 Broadway (and Walker) to Keightley for a month, free of charge. This space was subsequently filled with artworks and artists, who often haunted the space at night and during rainstorms. This amorphous project was titled three times: firstly as Tears in the Fence, after a somewhat obscure literary magazine published in the UK, chosen for it’s inclusion of the poem Inauguration Day: January 1953, by Robert Lowell. (Characterized by bleak imagery of a New York Winter and descriptions of the rapid, exponential growth of technology, this poem seems to be about a nation of people filling a massive spiritual bankruptcy with the promises delivered by a new president, and was read by Keightley at 401 Broadway after a performance by the noise band Annual Reports.) Mayflowers, as a moniker for the opening of the space to the general public and an umbrella over the initial collection of works shown, flowers being a metaphor for artworks and a symbol of regeneration after decay, and lastly, The Quiet. Scott Keightley is currently working on a series of open ended, changing sculptures, and a book of drawings for his project, “Magnetic North.”
Tom O’Neill is a recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he recieved his BFA at Stella Adler Studio, The Experimental Theatre Wing, and International Theatre Workshop: Amsterdam, Holland. He also studyed in London, at the British American Drama Academy. While at Tisch, Tom worked mostly in physical and experimental works from Michael Checkov, to Grotowski to Brecht, which then developed into an interest with Commedia del Arte, Mask Work and overall, Clowning both in the Standard American sense (Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin) as well as physically stylized works. O’Neill recently finished his Senior Thesis Riding the Belly to the Coconut Grove (advised by Sam Shepard and Annie-B Parson) at the Experimental Theatre Wing, where he wrote, produced, directed and starred in an experimental moment/movement piece about the infamous fire in Boston in the 1940’s at the Coconut Grove Nightclub. The fire claimed more than 500 lives, including O’Neill’s uncle. And was also responsible for fueling federal law to require occupency regulations, fire-retarded decor and visible emergency exits for all businesses. O’Neill is now co-heading The Electrical Hum Society–Keeping Tongue Movements Alive! with his friend and classmate, Matthew Carr. The theatre company stands to challenge current events both political and social, as well as regurgitate classics in a funky fashion.
Keightley and O’Neill have been great friends since childhood. Desire Caught by the Tail is their first collaborative effort and they are excited and honored to work not only with each other, but with Performa and X-Initiative.
Presented by X Initiative.
FREE
