In our continuing journey to present new work in new ways for new audiences, The Satori Group is pleased to host the arts collective whizARTbang.

whizARTbang! Vol.3

Sat. Sept. 11th, 2010
6:30PM Dinner @ Cafe Paloma (93 Yesler Way)
8:15PM Show/Gallery @ the Satori Loft (619 Western Ave.)
$5 Suggested Donation**
RSVP info@satori-group.com to attend.

September’s gathering features a sampling of work from: Dance, Sketch Comedy, Experimental Theatre, and Visual Art.

Featured Artists include:
Gabrielle Schutz
Dana Raike
Killer Donut
Ubiquitous They
Boom!
Nikolai Lesnikov
Mark Brill

*The dinner portion is not free, but we work out deals with our culinary artists so that it’s always affordable.
**As part of whizARTbang!’s mission, all proceeds from the event go directly to supporting this months artists. We ask you to donate what you think the event was worth. Help us foster a community of well fed (physically and metaphysically) artists of all sorts.

About whizARTbang!

Where ideas and visions collide…
Dinner.
Gallery.
Show.
Party.

Each month, whizARTbang hosts an intimate gathering featuring culinary art, visual art, live performance, and libations. They are intent on connecting, collaborating, and supporting each other in any way they can.

Video

From July 3rd, 2010. Video by Elliot Trotter. From the show portion of the first event.

Documentary on artist Jocelyn Skillman for whizARTbang! Vol. 2 held on Sat. Aug. 7th, 2010.

Artist’s Statement:

I am fascinated by the encounter of consciousness embodied–that is to say, the existential platform of self encountering otherness. I am also enchanted by the exploration of “reality” as an embodied relationship between finitude and the transcendental.

My visual art depicts monsters and suffering as a metaphor for the state of despair and suffering that Self encounters as Separated Consciousness (e.g. arising into a body/Separation from Source). Thus, my art also seeks to explore the embodied point of contact between that state of despair/separation and the state of reconciliation: Enlightenment, the Kingdom of God, Relationship to Unconditional Love.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jocelynskillman/

I feel called to producing visual images because they seem to convey deep and subtle relationships–e.g. between objects that are involved in suffering and freedom or relief from that suffering. My spiritual “work” usually evolves into the imagery I am drawing, and I will find myself in agreement with a principle that appears in the work: of reconciliation or aspects of despair, separation, or transcendent love. Teachers and traditions that have been fundamental to the development of my thought and art are Buddhist Foundations: Chogyam Trungpa, Shunryu Suzuki, Christian Foundations: Soren Keirkegaard, Thomas Merton, Other: Hafiz and other Sufi voices, Martin Buber, Early Indian theology, and my Friends!

Thank you to everyone who came out and made our Open Training Day truly special. Thirty-five people explored a variety of approaches to developing performance, performer, and generative ensemble work. We had a great time, we learned a lot, and we can’t wait to do it again! Click here to see photos from the day.

The Making of a Monster has closed after playing to sold-out audiences at the NWNW Festival! The Satori Group is previledged to have had so many great experiences meeting new artists, audience members, and friends. We want to keep these new connections strong.  If you saw the production, please use this space to share your thoughts. Or see what others are saying below…

Amy Mikel, The Seattlest:
“The creativity in conceptualization was through the roof, like the approach to a slow-motion underwater scene, or petals falling from a tree, or fighting, or yelling, or disgust, or anger.“

“…the theatre group tackles adolescent sexuality with their trademark inventive style.”

Jeremy Barker, The Sunbreak:
“…[The Satori Group] breaks new artistic ground for themselves with their first fully derived work.”

Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times:
“…high-tech wizardry…”

Shango Los, Blog the Boards:
“It is always exciting to reach the end of a piece and say to myself, ‘Well, I’ve never seen anything like that before.’ That was definitely the case with this performance.“

Here’s what people have been saying about The Satori Group’s WINKY which closed on April 5th. Thank you to everyone who made it out to our first original composition in Seattle. Please share your thoughts about the experience! Here’s what others had to say:

“When you see the show, you respond to the sheer ambition – to say nothing of the overall accomplishment of the performances and writing.” -Jeremy M. Barker, The SunBreak

“The direction (by Caitlin Sullivan) and the acting are strong, particularly Darnell as Yaniky and Standley as the smug self-help shyster.”

“The result is a shape-shifting experience that knocks us off balance, sucking us into a world where a kitchen wall becomes a theme park, an alleyway becomes a video game, and stairways dance.”

“…it’s a rewarding (and often ruefully funny) experiment in blowing down old walls and building up new ones. Let the Satori Group be an example to the rest of us.” -Brendan Kiley, The Stranger

“Winky” just lays this existential dilemma out, with the full-bodied acting and multifaceted staging (by director Caitlin Sullivan) we’ve come to expect from the intrepid Satori folks.

Standley’s riffing Rodgers is aptly smooth and toxic. Darnell’s Neil is a feverishly implosive schlemiel, as pitiable as he is creepy.

And Wilson’s portrait of Winky won’t let you off the hook. She has the right balance of doe-eyed vulnerability, manic zaniness and social ineptness.
– Misha Berson, Seattle Times

Satori takes a multi-media, collaborative approach to live theater, working hard to inject the Seattle scene with creative conceptualization and new, original work.

Saunders painted Winky’s mental state with the written word, but Satori has figured out how to effectively communicate this visually.

The acting is generally solid – Anthony Darnell’s Neil Yaniky is excellent…
- Amy Mikel, The Seattlest

The following review, Many Mansions - The Satori Group Tears Down the Fourth (and Fifth and Sixth and Seventh) Wall, by Brendan Kiley appeared on The Stranger on Wednesday March 24th.

First, for the doubters: Forgive the Satori Group its name. A bunch of theater kids naming their company after a bit of Buddhist enlightenment should give any reasonable person pause—as would the Salvation Theater, the Beltane Company, or the Five Pillars Players.

A bad name can smother a worthy endeavor in its cradle, but the Satori Group has already proven itself strong and adventurous. Its members are throwing their young selves directly against two acute Seattle anxieties: first, whether this is a town you have to move away from if you want to make theater (Satori moved here from Cincinnati after taking reconnaissance field trips to Chicago, Austin, and other cities), and, more importantly, whether Seattle audiences care about new work (they’ve recently dedicated themselves to finding out). Not too shabby, considering that many of our older, homegrown companies have been too chicken to do the same.

Last weekend, Satori opened Winky, its adaptation of a short story by George Saunders. It’s an ambitious choice, both because Winky largely takes place inside its characters’ heads and because Saunders’s short stories are more about mood than action. Saunders has picked up the torch left burning on the ground by Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Kennedy Toole. He writes sweet, sad satire about Americans, our stupidly reductive culture of ads and slogans, and our striving—and failure—to be better than we are.

Fiction has a freedom that theater lacks: It can easily jump between universes (from, say, the cockpit of a spaceship to the scalp of a policeman) in just a few sentences. But a play must work especially hard to break the physical continuity of things happening in the same room, on the same stage. For Winky, Satori found and colonized a loft in Pioneer Square where they built four different environments, use puppets and projections, and move their sets and their audience around to accommodate the story’s authorial shifts (it keeps changing narrators). The result is a shape-shifting experience that knocks us off balance, sucking us into a world where a kitchen wall becomes a theme park, an alleyway becomes a video game, and stairways dance. (Saunders helped Satori with the adaptation and staging concepts. “He seemed excited that we were blowing out his story,” said company member and lead adaptor Spike Friedman.)

Winky begins at a perverse self-help seminar called People of Power. A hype man whips up the real-life audience (”Let’s get stoked! Woo!”) before a smug motivational speaker named Tom Rodgers (Adam Standley) appears. He strides onstage with some action-movie music and cheesy theatrics, fake-fighting actors with shirts labeled “Whiny,” “Self-Absorbed,” and “Blames Her Fat on Others.” It’s a wry gesture to begin a play that heavily relies on theatrical trickery: winking at how easily people are manipulated by a few idiots on a stage.

Rodgers offers us two metaphors, oatmeal and crap. Oatmeal, Rodgers says, represents our soul in its pure state: “Every day your soul cries, ‘Today, let me be oatmeal!’” But we let people crap in our oatmeal, polluting our souls and ruining our lives: “In real life, people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time—friends, coworkers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids—and that’s exactly what you do. You say, ‘Thanks so much!’ You say, ‘Crap away!’” The key to success, Rodgers declares with an arrogant flip of his long black bangs, is to do exactly what we want, to accommodate no one, to cut the oatmeal-crappers out of our lives.

Then a voice-over commands the audience to turn our chairs around. We’re facing a small closet where a frustrated loser named Neil Yaniky (the round, ruddy, and appropriately pitiful Anthony Darnell) is having a private consultation with Rodgers. Together, they identify the person crapping in Yaniky’s oatmeal—his sister, Winky. Her problems? “Too religious. Crazy-looking. Needs to get her own place.” This Winky, by Yaniky’s account, is a soul-sucking monster.

For the third transition, the audience walks around a corner into the Yaniky household, where the charmingly batty—and perhaps schizophrenic—Winky tries to clean up the kitchen for her brother but is constantly derailed by hallucinations. Actress Greta Wilson, with dyed white hair and an expressive, long-limbed body, waltzes airily through Winky’s bright, distracting world. Roller coasters appear on the walls, stenciled geese come alive, and a sock she keeps on her shoulder dispenses advice. Winky sings and smiles while Yaniky storms home, chewing over past humiliations, determined to become a Person of Power. The two siblings are living on different planets, and their inevitable collision is both tragic and pathetic.

Satori’s third ensemble-generated piece, and its first in Seattle, Winky is a collection of strong ideas with a few rough edges. The puppetry, video, and set changes mostly succeed, giving the play the light-footed freedom of fiction, despite a few clunky transitions. (”It was a little bumpy,” one cast member quietly confessed to a friend in a hallway after opening night.)

The direction (by Caitlin Sullivan) and acting are strong, particularly Darnell as Yaniky and Standley as the smug self-help shyster. Spike Friedman’s adaptation re­­­­arranges some of Winky’s narrative furniture to good effect. An audience’s attention, for example, is different from a reader’s: Winky-­the-­play foreshadows and echoes bits of inner monologue that the story only mentions once. But the script bogs down in the overlong third and fourth sections—solo passages with Winky and Yaniky—leaving the actors to twist in the wind.

Winky may not be the fullest flowering of Satori’s potential, but it’s a rewarding (and often ruefully funny) experiment in blowing down old walls and building up new ones. Let the Satori Group be an example to the rest of us.

The Seattle Times has singled out the Satori Group for praise in its annual Footlight Awards highlighting the best theatre in Seattle, and we couldn’t be more proud.  How were we singled out?  Glad you asked…

The Satori Group’s production of TRAGEDY: a tragedy by Will Eno was named Best of Fringe. The company was named the runner up in the illustrious Friskiest Fringe in Seattle category.  And Satori designers Andrew Lazarow and Clare Strasser were heavily involved in Washington Ensemble Theatre’s production of Titus, which was highlighted for having the Coolest Production Design for a small theatrical production in Seattle.

As we wrap our first full year of production in Seattle, we would like to thank the Seattle Times for the recognition, and more importantly thank our audience for coming out, seeing our shows, and continuing to push our work.  We’ll see you all in the new year!

The following review of Artifacts of Consequence, by Kevin Phinney, appeared in the Seattle Weekly on Wednesday, November 11

Artifacts of Consequence runs through November 22nd at the Little Theatre.  Tickets available at Brown Paper Tickets.

Satori Group’s sharp new production of Ashlin Halfnight’s Artifacts of Consequence is like the Coen brothers meets Woody Allen’s Sleeper. It’s also a sweet, bizarre mash-up of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Thornton Wilder, and Huey Lewis and the News.

With little more than suggestion and an underground-bunker set that looks like a Soviet-era medical facility in decline, Halfnight’s dreamscape imagines a world where food is catalogued rather than eaten. Its inhabitants are slowly starving to death because there aren’t enough meal-replacement pills to go around. And guess what? This dreary-sounding scenario is more engrossing than any Hollywood blockbuster of the past four months. Not only is Artifacts a more visceral experience, but it’s interactive, too: We in the audience get to decide what’s worth archiving in this bleak future-world and what gets literally flushed away. Some audiences get to vote on Hula-Hoops and other cultural detritus. We chose between a Polaroid camera (save it, we voted), and a single Converse All-Star lace-up (we passed).

As the play begins, supervisor Minna (Lindsey Valitchka) is striving valiantly to keep her facility running despite the stresses of too little food, too much work, and no real signs of help. Nubile Ari (Adrienne Clark) is supposed to be pitching in, but she’s a bit of a dreamer, utterly hypnotized by the lost culture she can contemplate only by endlessly rerunning old VHS copies of Pretty Woman and Dirty Dancing.

Their drudgery is interrupted by occasional visits from Dallas (Alex Matthews), a fellow charged by “The Department” with collecting artifacts for review by a panel of judges (i.e., us). Unfortunately, the one thing Minna really needs is FRPs—the Food Replacement Pills keeping everyone in the facility alive. (Actual food is being stored for future use outside the bunker.)

Things go from bad to worse with the arrival of Theo (Spike Friedman), a lost soul who provides just the sexual distraction that Ari’s been daydreaming about for so long. Frustrations, pheromonal and otherwise, mount until the inevitable snap occurs. Artifacts’ denouement, with its themes of duty and discontent, recall the mental collapse that led to the recent Fort Hood massacre, though the play was first performed in New York this spring.

In terms of production, I haven’t seen a better, more well-rounded cast this year. Not only are the principals a treat to watch, but a kind of Greek chorus of actors is intermittently trotted out from seclusion to demonstrate the merits of one artifact or another—be it a speech from Our Town or an old Broadway show tune. They’re creepy, robotic ciphers who come to life only on command to sing, dance, and perform impeccably. Their renderings are uncanny, too perfect, and they scare the bejesus out of us.

Andrew Lazarow stages the action throughout with precision and economy—although Halfnight’s text makes its point a good half-hour before the play actually concludes. Deanna Zibello’s set is a thing of eerie beauty. Combined with Monty Taylor’s lighting and Julian Mesri’s soundscapes, the effect is like sitting too close to an IMAX David Cronenberg flick. Artifacts doesn’t so much grab you as suck you in. Before you know it, you’re part of this sinking ship of humanity. And if you can’t save yourself, how about that first edition of Catcher in the Rye?

Save Salinger if you must. But did you know Huey Lewis and the News had 19 top-10 hits?

Tickets on sale now at Brown Paper Tickets.

Artifacts of Consequence

By Ashlin Halfnight
Directed by Andrew Lazarow
Nov. 5th – Nov. 22nd; Thurs. - Mon. @ 8PM; One matinee, Sun. Nov. 22 @ 2PM

@ The Little Theatre (608 19th Ave E)

Artifacts of Consequence premiered in New York City in 2009, co-produced by Electric Pear Productions and PL115, and directed by Kristjan Thor.

SEATTLE, WA – The Satori Group, Seattle’s award winning ensemble-based theatre company dedicated to innovative and rigorous theatre, celebrates the one-year anniversary of their Seattle residency with the announcement of their 2009-2010 Body of Work, ‘Choose, Witness, Live.’

After a successful Seattle debut – Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs smART Ventures Award; sold-out performances of Will Eno’s TRAGEDY: a tragedy – Managing Artistic Director Anthony Darnell announces that in 2009-2010, the Satori Group will connect with Seattle.

“This year is about connecting our work to our audience, collaborating with local artists, and fine-tuning our ensemble-based process,” says Managing Artistic Director Anthony Darnell. “It’s a body of work filled with risk. It’s meant to challenge our company, excite our audience, and bring Seattle artists together. We are committed to the creation of unique theatrical experiences that can change those who witness them. It’s not about teaching, it’s about the experience, and you have to be part of it.”

In preparation for 2009-2010, Satori has produced their first Webisode series: the Satori Group presents The Making of Venetian Blinds. Follow the Satori Group as they attempt to produce Venetian Blinds, an ambitious staged reinterpretation of an American classic to have been presented in Seattle, WA in the summer of 2009.

To view part one visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8GqjY1tmD4

The Satori Group’s 2009-2010 Body of Work, ‘Choose, Witness, Live,’ includes:

Artifacts of Consequence

By Ashlin Halfnight
Directed by Andrew Lazarow
Nov. 5th – Nov. 22nd  @ The Little Theatre (608 19th Ave E)

America is ruined. Our infrastructure has collapsed. In Elliott Bay, a select group of people take refuge in an underwater bunker. Their task: Perpetuate America’s Legacy – Protect the Colony. One of them, 17-year-old Ari, has little memory of the outside world. But when an unexpected visitor arrives, she finally discovers her libido. As their relationship heats up, the situation above worsens, and resources run out. You decide what ‘Artifacts’ are kept and what is flushed to sea. Our legacy is yours to maintain. How will you choose?

Artifacts of Consequence premiered in New York City in 2009, co-produced by Electric Pear Productions and PL115, and directed by Kristjan Thor.

Featuring Adrienne Clark, Quinn Franzen, Spike Friedman, Lauren Hester, Alex Matthews, Nathan Sorseth, Lindsey Valitchka, and Greta Wilson.

“Deliriously imaginative and talent rich…this show is as much pulp fiction as theater of ideas.”(New York Times)
“An existentialist horror story and a meditation on canonicity…” (Village Voice)

Winky

By George Saunders

Adapted with the Satori Group by Spike Friedman
Directed by Caitlin Sullivan

Ordinary life is pretty complicated stuff, but after attending a self-help seminar, Neil is finally on the path to Inner Peace. His new mantra: ‘Time for Me to Win.’ The only roadblock: he still lives at home with his demented, fundamentalist sister, Winky. Adapted from the celebrated short story by George Saunders, Winky is, “A tragicomic duet for codependents.” (New York Times)

Featuring Anthony Darnell, Adam Standley, and Greta Wilson.

The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol

Based on a story by John Berger
Adapted by Simon McBurney and Mark Wheatley
Devised by the Original Cast
Directed by Anthony Darnell

Lucie Cabrol is dead and only her lover Jean will mourn her.  In her third life, the afterlife, secrets she took to the grave will be brought to light. Comprised of lyrical poetry, movement, and magic, this is a story as big as life itself. From the acclaimed London-based Theatre de Complicite, the Satori Group is proud to present the astonishingly theatrical event, The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol.

Featuring Adrienne Clark, Spike Friedman, Andrew Lazarow, Alex Matthews, Adam Standley, Lindsey Valitchka, and Greta Wilson.

Performances made possible by kind permission of Complicite, London.
“The definitive theatrical event of the 90’s.” (Time Out)