Trifecta: a festival of new work at Chashama at 217

Trifecta: a festival of new work premiers three works-in-progress by NYC theatre companies, Performance Lab 115, Drama of Works, and Sponsored by Nobody, at chashama's black box theater at 217, from 7 - 10 Jun 2007.

These companies are the winners of the 2007 chashama/NEA Performance Development Award, a regrant program providing theater companies with rehearsal and performance space and a stipend, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. This award was established by chashama in 2005 as part of its mission to provide emerging theater artists with the resources they need to produce new and original works. Winners are decided by a curatorial panel of chashama staff, past awardees and professionals from the NYC theater community.

In Performance Lab 115's Dead Letter Office, millions of messages lie in limbo. From letters to Santa to the signals of the Voyager Space Probe, messages wait to be reunited with their rightful recipients. Part theatre, part dance, part sound laboratory, Performance Lab 115 presents an intimate discourse on the capacity for hope and the human need for contact.

Puppet company Drama of Works presents Puppet Kafka. The piece will be a speculation on the work, life and peculiar perspective of Franz Kafka as imagined for performance by puppets. Using the complete text of The Metamorphosis as the main framework, in the closed black-box space of Gregor Samsa's bedroom, three puppet versions of Kafka are manipulated by forces from the outside.

Sponsored by Nobody's W.M.D. (just the low points) launches a large-scale deconstruction of our culture's preoccupations. Structured around a single day, January 8, 2004, W.M.D. (just the low points) uses found texts to investigate America's relationship with media during wartime.

chashama is an NYC arts organization whose mission is to support artists of all genres. chashama adopts vacant properties that are donated by their owners and converts them into theatres, galleries, studios, and window performances sites; chashama then regrants this space for free or at heavily subsidized rates. Since 1995, chashama has transformed more than 20 vacant properties and has given more than 5,000 artists access to space.