Casting Breakdown: BACCHANTES, for THE IRRESISTIBLE, April 10-26

5-6 Performer/Dancers Gender:3-4Women, 1-2Men

Seeking 5 dancers or actors with strong movement skills. The roles involve nudity. The performers will play the role of the ecstatic disciples of Dionysus in The Irresistible, an immersive, multi-media performance that combines The Bacchae and Hedda Gabler. The Bacchantes will perform ensemble movement sequences, in reaction to events in both Hedda and The Bacchae, including a representation of the death of Pentheus, that will be seen primarily through live-video feed, processed and layered with other imagery. The audience is free to move throughout the building during the performance – and those who wander into the Bacchantes performance area will also be able to see the live performers, somewhat obscured through several layers of scrim-material. The performers will be completely or partially nude for a substantial period of the performance.

Performance Dates: Friday and Saturdays, April 10 –April 26. Rehearsals begin March 1

Project Summary:
The Irresistible is a completely immersive theatrical experience. Through projection, live cameras and a mesmerizing soundscape incorporating live musicians, the audience is enveloped in a collision of two classic plays. Ibsen’s psychologically thrilling Hedda Gabler is mashed with The Bacchae, Euripides’ riveting drama of ecstasy and murder. The two worlds interweave, yielding a layered, captivating, expansive drama of the human condition. The Irresistible, adapted by Caleb Hammond from Ibsen and Euripides, runs April 10th -26th at Immersive Gallery, 132 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

History crashes in from all directions and the location of that cataclysm is the body of Hedda, as she searches for an escape route out of the suffocating constraints of the modern western world. Dionysus brings to Thebes an euphoric erotic frenzy that suggests an alternate path - but we are headed at breakneck speed to a bloody conclusion. Live cameras mix with projected light, creating a living installation artwork through which the audience wanders. The cameras and projection surfaces act as dynamic mirrors: reflecting, fragmenting, distorting and repositioning the performers and the environment. The live performers mix with this imagery in a seamless style through which themes of freedom and control, feminine and masculine, wildness and society, and reality and illusion are explored and exploded.

Director’s Bio:

Caleb Hammond is a theatrical and visual artist. Directing work includes: Prop 8, staged reading at Carnegie Mellon University, featuring The Book of Mormon's Rory O’Malley; 1000 Wolves at Incubator Arts Project, NYC; Walks Through Walls at Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles; How Delightful to Know Mr Lear, in the New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas; Mac Wellman's Antigone at Carnegie Mellon; SICK at UndergroundZero Festival NYC and FIRE (sex and death), at Divaldo Kampa, Prague. Acting credits include: Hal Hartley's films Ned Rifle and Meanwhile; John Jesurun’s webseries Shadowland; Sam Shepard's True West, at the Factory Theater, Boston; Tennessee William's The Demolition Downtown, at the Provincetown Williams Festival. He was a regular featured performer in Jay

Scheib’s work including: the Obie-award winning Untitled Mars, at PS122, NYC and the National Theater of Hungary; Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, at the Kitchen, NYC and Maison des Arts, Paris; and This Place is a Desert: Under the Radar Festival, The Public Theater NYC and Boston ICA. He has worked as an assistant director on several theatrical productions and a web series with MacArthur Fellow John Jesurun as well as a tour of Jay Scheib’s opera Addicted to Bad Ideas, presented at the Spoletto Festival South Carolina, the Cutler Majestic Theater in Boston, Urb Festival in Helsinki and Luminato Festival in Toronto. His original production The Irresistible, adapted from texts by Ibsen and Euripides, will premiere this April at Immersive Gallery in Brooklyn, where he is a 2015 artist in residence. He is also currently developing a new performance in collaboration with actress Anna Kohler and working on a series of video installations based upon Rainer Maria Rilke’s Elegies in collaboration with Glass artist Sean SalstroI?m. His visual art has been exhibited at the Nishida Art Museum, Toyama, Japan, Gallery 825 in Los Angeles; Vaudeville Park in NYC; The Copley Society in Boston, and Visual Research in New Haven. He has taught theater and art at Eugene Lang College (The New School), Hartford Art School and Carnegie Mellon. He has been a special guest lecturer at Colgate University and the Toyoma Glass Institute in Japan.