Katogora
Opening Night: June 24, 2014
Closing: June 29, 2014
Theater: Incubator Arts Project at St. Mark's Church
KATORGA revolves around the experiences of a woman exiled to OZET’s prison colony for revolutionary activities in the turgid, waning days of the Fifteenth Generation. Electronic and acoustic music, spoken and sung text, gestural choreography, and an immersive environment all combine to vivify a richly imagined world where prisoners labor in dimly lit mushroom fields as wardens struggle to communicate with the givers of the law, and somewhere on the outskirts a hundred-year-old hermit is setting out tea for his missing son.
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June 26, 2014
Katorga; An Ozet Performance is the new production at St. Mark’s Church and the last Incubator Arts Project to be held at St. Mark’s. And for a farewell, this show goes out with a very interesting bang. Katorga is an experience. It is a non-traditional show, in the sense that there is very little dialogue, very loose scenery and a story that is quite difficult to follow. It is a Twilight Zone-esque dystopian musical that follows a woman trapped in a prison who must pick mushrooms on an asteroid in a concentration-camp gulag on an asteroid passing the sun. If you are not into contemporary art nor having trumpets blare in your face in an air-conditionless room while screens flash time-lapse clips of butterflies, this play might not be for you. Although the musicians who perform these numbers, with titles such as “The Pioneer” and “The Conspirators,” are clearly musically gifted, the plot is so odd and difficult to ascertain that it is not enjoyable.
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June 26, 2014
Comrades, art enthusiasts, theater nuts: Attend. It’s time to bid do svidaniya to one of our most beloved spaces. It saddens me to say it, but Katorga: An Ozet Performance—Aaron Meicht, Scott Blumenthal and Daniel Baker’s densely imagined, utterly baffling music performance—will set the capstone on the Incubator Arts Project’s tenure at St. Mark’s Church. It’s a bizarre note to end on—or perhaps a perfect one, somehow in tune with all that went before. Lord knows, the Incubator always cooked ’em weird, and from its inception under Richard Foreman, the room leaned toward the interdisciplinary, image-thick and strange.
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June 25, 2014
Welcome aboard Ozet, a colossal spacecraft launched from Moscow in 1929 carrying nearly 700 eager pioneers and a lake full of sturgeon. Of course, colossal is a relative term, seeing as much of the ship apparently fits inside the limited space of the Incubator Arts Project, now hosting its final show, Katorga: An Ozet Performance. Still, as the program informs you (and this is definitely one of those times when you should read the program), Ozet has forests, fields, taverns and facilities for light manufacturing. (No birds, however. The flying cats saw to that.) It also has a penal colony, Katorga, where much of the action seems to take place.
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