Note: All three works presented each night.

The 9th annual New Original Works Festival closes with works by Emily Mast, Melanie Rios Glaser and Heather Woodbury.

EMILY MAST: B!RDBRA!N 
Within a landscape of vivid colorful forms, seven distinct performers describe, transcribe, interpret and gesture in a series of vignettes that expose the problematic nature of communication and the ways in which words serve as objects onto which meanings are projected. Working at the intersection of visual art and theater, Emily Mast casts an ASL interpreter, an auctioneer, a stutterer and others in this stylized and exploratory performance. With allusions to the true story of Alex, a verbally skilled parrot that was the subject of controversial findings, B!RDBRA!N questions whether our understanding is, as one of Alex's critics wrote, simply a “complex discriminative performance.”

MELANIE RIOS GLASER: LA TRIBU
Following the end of Guatemala's 30-year civil war, Melanie Rios Glaser performed site-specific dances in Guatemala City as part of a fearless group of performance-based artists. In the late 1990s, these artists' electrifying work overtly confronted decades of ongoing violence, enforced social norms and repressive politics, and now Rios Glaser returns to the impulses behind that creative flourishing. Along with four multitalented improvisors—Karinne Keithley Syers, Jmy James Kidd, Rebecca Bruno and Luke Hegel-Cantarella—her new scores for improvisational dance stem from the strategies of those years, and reflect on an influential era through messy, obsessive movement and humorously confessional commentary.

HEATHER WOODBURY: AS THE GLOBE WARMS
Obie Award-winning theater artist Heather Woodbury is known for crafting sweeping dramatic narratives with contemporary echoes of 19th-century serial fiction. Now, she presents the first glimpse at a live solo distillation of her epic, web-cast soap opera, part of a planned 12-hour opus. Weaving the stories of a multitude of characters that inhabit Vane Springs, Nevada, As the Globe Warms takes on the soclal complexities of climate crisiswith sympathetic humor while it generates unexpected empathies: between rural and urban populations, atheists and devout Christians, wired-up humanity and the other forms of life on this planet.

“Turning stylized slang into verbose monologues, Ms. Woodbury has created her own rich language, as densely intricate as a Shakespearean sonnet.” —The New York Times