What We Do

Directed by Polina Ionina

What We Do was created by the ensemble over a four day, four and a half hour rehearsal process. It is a movement theater piece that explores attention, attraction, separation, and oneness.

It is an study of what it means to be a part of a whole and what it means to be alone.

“Compelling, organic choreography…It moved me deeply.” Joshua Crone, Outerstage

It premiered in The Lab at Alchemical Studios, May, 2019. It then had a full run at IRT Theater in NYC July-August 2019.

Featuring: André Vauthey, William Hand, Maria Swisher, Rosalee DeHuff, and Shay Wisniewski, Olya Mikhaylova, Nathaniel Ansbach, William Hand, and Rand Faris.

I Am the Wind by Jon Fosse

Directed by Will Hand

Two strangers meet in the midst of beautiful desolation. Can the vastness push them closer together, or will it tear them apart? Immense and immediate, I Am The Wind is a night of intimate intensity.

Premiered at Unruly Collective in Bushwick 2017.

Performed by Akmal Rakhimov, Polina Ionina, and Lucie Vítková.

Hunger

Written and Directed by William Hand

When a manic episode prompts a struggling artist to create a YouTube Live persona and disappear into Times Square for four days, he emerges with a primer on how to survive Late Capitalism.

Hunger specifies theater making as an act of labor, and examines the collective reimagining of labor in our digital fame economy.

Artist’s Statement by William Hand: I am exploring the work of Knut Hamsun, whose extraordinary novel Hunger shares my assumption that artistic endeavor is a means of survival. Hamsun and I believe that art making is a high wire act.

This production of Hunger is a schizoanalysis of Hamsun after Deleuze and Guattari. I got hungry to superimpose that analysis onto the contemporary mode of celebrity guru status, i.e. for everything that is a job, there is someone on the internet who plays at that job as a performance for extra cash.

Premiered at IRT Theater August 2019.

Performed by William Hand and Polina Ionina.

The Vyuga Project

Directed by Polina Ionina

The Vyuga Project is a whirling dervish of physical theater, appropriated poetry, and sound. Kane’s 'Crave', written on residency in America, took for inspiration T.S. Elliot’s 'The Wasteland' where identity is blurred as characters melt into each other, and all are observed by the indifferent but omniscient intersexual Tiresias. As Elliot compiled a poem of associations into 'The Wasteland,' and Kane consumed 'The Wasteland' to form 'Crave,' so Polina follows them both into The Vyuga Project.

Premiered at Dixon Place 2016.

Performed by Ofri Laski, Rand Faris, Akmal Rakhimov, William Hand, Alejandra Venancio.
Soundscape created by Laura J Bowler and Du.0 (Charlotte Munn-Wood and Aimee Niemann).

Vandals

Devised by the Ensemble
Directed by William Hand and Polina Ionina

One year after the killing of Heather Heyer at the Charlottesville riots, the world is a different place. Vandals, developed over the course of 2018, charts our national mood and the crisis of public monuments.

Vandals is about Gettysburg, where a nation is built, about the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, where a nation faces its guilt, and finally about Heiner Muller’s Horatian, and the retelling of a Greek public trial of a war hero/ criminal that culminates in a founding myth for democracy.
Vandals explores the personal histories of the cast to unearth the question, “What do you need to change about the past in order to live in the present?”

Premiered at Dixon Place NYC 2017. Then went on to The Tank NYC for a full run 2018.

Performed by Ilker Oztop, Weronika Helena Woźniak, Tanya Chattman, Linus Ignatius, and David Lawrence Glover, Gabby Beans, Eri Miller.