This night at JACK features the unveiling of several new music-theater works by writer-composers (Dr.) Rick Burkhardt and (Dr.) Gelsey Bell, written specifically for thingNY’s unique blend of chamber music, theatre and improvisation. The evening features two tabletop works from Burkhardt (including the newly commissioned PASSOVER) and new scenes from Bell’s Rolodex explore the vocalizing instrumentalist in disjointed modes of storytelling.

​PROGRAM:
Rick Burkhardt – PASSOVER Part One
Gelsey Bell – Selections from Rolodex
Rick Burkhardt - The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving

thingNY:
Gelsey Bell, voice, celtic harp, and percussion
Paul Pinto, voice and percussion
Erin Rogers, voice, percussion, and saxophone
Dave Ruder, voice, clarinet, and guitar
 
With special guests
Sarah Haines, violin and voice
John Murchinson, double bass and voice
 
TICKETS: $15, available here or cash only at the door

Commissioned by thingNY, Rick Burkhardt’s PASSOVER is a performance-ritual for six singing/speaking performers, seated at a dinner table on which there lies a double bass. Each performer relates the story of a friend's escape: from a bad marriage, from an unfair situation at work, from a run-in with a traffic cop, from an ethically compromising opportunity, from an awkward family dinner. Ultimately, it becomes clear that all of these friends form one collective identity. 

thingNY's own Gelsey Bell will lead the ensemble in five new solo songs from her evolving game-piece opera Rolodex (“B – Bureaucrat,” “L – Lover,” “P – Politician,” “T – Trophy,” and “V – Visitor”). Praised by the New York Times as "imaginative," with work that is "uncomfortably powerful," "virtuosic," and "haunting," Bell draws on techniques across music and theatre to create a disjointed storytelling with a score in the form of a rolodex.

Also on the program, Burkhardt's award-winning table-top music-theater piece The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, for three speaking percussionists. Time Out New York declared that Hymn "has taught us to listen to the conversation in several keys, and the virtuosic performers play them all—the troubling bassline of violence, the abrasive tenor of self-righteousness, and, every now and then, the clear, bright treble of a really funny joke."
 
thingNY is a quirky collective of composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song, and installation. Founded in 2006, thingNY performs experimental sound works created collaboratively by the core ensemble (Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Jeffrey Young, Gelsey Bell, Dave Ruder, and Andrew Livingston) and by composers we like to listen to, such as Rick Burkhardt.