-Courtesy of Perpetual Motion PR
Theatre director, designer and performer Thaddeus Phillips (Zoo Motel, 17 Border Crossings, A Billion Nights on Earth, Red-Eye to Havre de Grace, Lost Soles) and artist Steven Dufala (HOME & The Object Lesson) transport viewers across the Earth entire with a live cinematic play about humanity and coffee titled ZOO MUNDO. Tracing the path along the route out of East Africa and the bones of Lucy (and the first coffee beans), ZOO MUNDO weaves three stories that follow a line across Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map of Earth with stops in Marrakesh, Venice, on the Siberian Express to Pyongyang, across the Bering Strait and down the Pacific coast ending in Antarctica. Phillips performs all this live and over the world wide web, in and around miniature and surreal sets created by Obie Award winning Artist and Designer, Steven Dufala. ZOO MUNDO is an exploration on what makes us human, where we have been and where we are going and is performed for only 25 screens nightly
All performances are streamed live from Phillips’ home in Colombia South America.
Tatiana Mallarino is co-directing and the dramaturg for ZOO MUNDO while Steve Cuiffo, fresh off working on Dana H on Broadway and creating magic for the new season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, will be devising magic and illusions.
ZOO MUNDO takes the experiments made in “Zoo Motel” to the next level; Phillips says: ¨Zoo Motel¨ was about confinement but ZOO MUNDO is about exploration. With the first project, we touched on some ideas of what could be done making theater live yet via a camera and we wanted to create with absolutely no limits on where we could go cinematically or theatrically. Thus, we crafted the most ridiculously epic and technically impossible storylines for ZOO MUNDO and will be performing the work as one continuous shot to create a unique, fun and harrowing theatrical event that can be seen from anywhere on earth. Thematically, we are at an absolutely crazy time on this planet, this work seeks to look at the zoo we have created for ourselves and try to grapple with the huge questions we face, and try to understand how we, simply put, as a species are so intelligent and so stupid as the same time. ZOO MUNDO is a theatrical examination of this planet and all its oddities, curiosities, failures, and triumphs”.
ZOO MUNDO will feature sections that invoke spectator interaction through a surreal Jeopardy game show, various illusions, and magic. A Program PDF will be sent to online audiences complete with printable artistic objects, created by Dufala, that accent and enhance the live work.
ZOO MUNDO
Created by Thaddeus Phillips, Tatiana Mallarino & Steven Dufala
Designed by Steven Dufala & Thaddeus Phillips
Directed by Tatiana Mallarino & Thaddeus Phillips
Magic by Steve Cuiffo
Performed by Thaddeus Phillips
SHOW TIMES (Tickets are $33)
PREVIEWS – January 6th to January 9
Thur – 8pm ET
Fri – 8pm ET
Sat – 2pm ET (7pm UK, 8pm EU) & 8pm ET
Sun – 8pm ET
OPENING NIGHT – January 10th 8pm
PERFORMANCES – January 13th to 30th
available at www.zoomundo.org
BIOS
THADDEUS PHILLIPS is a theatre director, designer and actor known as “one of the most creative theater artists in the United States” (Westword Magazine). His innovative original creations have been presented at Assembly Rooms, Summerhall, Arcola Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre as well as Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop and the Barrow Street Theatre, at the BAM Next Wave Festival and have toured around the world from London to Hong Kong to Perth to Moscow. Selected creations include Red-Eye to Havre de Grace ,17 Border Crossings, Inflatable Space, ¡E. Conquistador!, Capsule 33, A Billion Nights on Earth & Lost Soles. He directs internationally for various theatres, most recently in Spain and Sweden. He is a Doris Duke Artist Award recipient and appeared as an actor in ´Narcos´ (Netflix) and ´The Amazing Spider-Man 2¨.
STEVEN DUFALA is known for his wildly imaginative stage designs of Geoff Sobelle’s Home and The Object Lesson. Home was a major hit at the 2018 Edinburgh International Festival and The Object Lesson was Summerhall´s 2014 breakaway hit. Dufala´s innovative designer work involved a disappearing house for Home and thousands of boxes for The Object Lesson. Both were presented at the BAM Next Wave Festival and toured the world over. He is recipient of an Obie and Bessie award for those designs and works as an artist in installation sculpture and multimedia as one of the Dufala Brothers.
STEVE CUIFFO is a famed NYC magician who has designed magic and illusions for Dana H of Broadway, David Blaine, the New Victory Theatre, Second Stage Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop. He is a co-creator of The Elephant Room and is designing magic for the current season of The Marvelous Ms. Maisel.
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