News: Krista Knight's "Crush" Named a Finalist for the Broadway On Demand Film Festival

Image courtesy Emily Owens PR

Crush, a VR puppet play by Krista Knight, is a finalist for the Broadway on Demand Film Festival, a short film festival to honor the groundbreaking ways in which creators approach theater in a digital age and socially-distant world. The short film with the most views by September 13 will be live-streamed on the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Emmy® OTT platform this fall. To watch Crush, just create a free account at Broadway On Demand.

Crush is a six-part video puppet play created by No Puppet Co. using virtual reality. Picking up roughly from where Kafka left off—a loner, squatter, and rebel dares to love. We follow the anti-morphosis through a series of beat poetry performances as our hero draws nearer to the object of his desire and his undoing. 

When Crush, a finalist for the 45th Annual Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, was canceled due to COVID-19, Knight and Barry Brinegar decided to use the virtual tools they'd been experimenting with prior to the pandemic to create something completely remotely, completely in-house (as in literally in their house). Crush was created in Knight and Brinegar’s 500 sq-ft home studio in the East Village. They recorded actor Ben Beckley in two sessions over Zoom (on his iPhone) and set up a home nerve center with 5 monitors (assembled from a motley crew of tablets, computers, and spare screens) and used virtual technologies to capture motion in 3D space to match the vocal performance. With one person in virtual reality and the other watching the footage, they recorded the live animation.

You can read our review of Crush from last summer here (and our review of Knight and Brinegar's recent "roadkill musical" Sloppy Bonnie here).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: "How To Eat an Orange" Cuts into the Life of an Argentine Artist and Activist

Image
How To Eat an Orange Written by Catherine Filloux Based on the writing of Claudia Bernardi Directed by Elena Araoz Presented by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club at The Downstairs at La MaMa 66 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC May 30-June 16, 2024 Paula Pizzi. Photo by Steven Pisano How To Eat an Orange , making its world premiere at La MaMa, does in fact include a real orange as a prop, and its multifarious symbolizations–evoking at different points cultural specificity, family history, matriarchal inheritance, and even a skull–are representative of the play's boundary-blurring, non-linear presentation of memory. The memories in question belong to visual artist, educator, and activist Claudia Bernardi , who lived through several years of her native Argentina's military junta, which held power from 1976 to 1983, before departing her country and eventually settling in the United States. How To Eat an Orange , from Catherine Filloux, a French Algerian American award-winning playwright,...
Read more

Review: The Immersive "American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams" Takes Audiences on a Marvelously Crafted Journey

Image
American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install...
Read more

Review: From Child Pose to Stand(ing) Up: "Yoga with Jillian" and "Penguin in Your Ear" at the Women in Theatre Festival

Image
Yoga with Jillian Written by Lia Romeo Directed by Andrew W. Smith Presented by Project Y Theatre and Richard Jordan Productions in association with The Pleasance June 2-17, 2023 Penguin in Your Ear Written and performed by Eliza Bent Directed by Jess Barbagallo June 10, 2023 Part of the Women in Theatre Festival , presented by Project Y Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres Michole Biancosino. Photo courtesy of Project Y Theatre This June, Project Y Theatre Company presents the eighth annual installment of its Women in Theatre Festival (WIT), which showcases new work by women and maintains "more than 50% female representation of all artists involved." This year, the festival includes a lobby installation project, titled In the Betweens , from scenic designer Chen-Wei Liao, through which audience members pass on their way into the theater proper. One first chooses first between "light" and "dark" rooms and then moves into "the gardens" before re...
Read more