Playwriting and Collective Creation
I’ll Find You
written by Kristen Holfeuer
directed by Ilana Khanin
performed by Kristen Holfeuer & Matthew Keyes
“I’ll Find You” is a documentary theatre piece that investigates a friendship via an ongoing, real-life correspondence. The work is composed of various letters, emails, FB messages, texts, and photographs and is accompanied by live music. Moving between the banal and the astonishing, "I'll Find You" evaluates family, death, and love in the actions and ephemera of everyday life.
Virgin/Punk/Archive/Speak
written and performed by Kristen Holfeuer
The F train rushes me under the East River to Manhattan where MoMA houses the PS1 archives. I am here to reconstruct an unlikely collaboration that occurred at PS1 thirty-six years ago between housewives from Queens, club kids from the LES, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1982 a young curator-for-hire sent a hand-written letter to a housewife in Queens asking her to perform in “Performance Rites”: a four-weekend extravaganza featuring performers from the club scene exploring themes of religion at PS1. The housewife, Veronica Lueken, not a performer in the usual sense, instead infamous among the Catholic community for receiving visions from the Blessed Virgin Mary. The curator and author of the letter was Andrew Rees, an employee and regular performer at Club 57 in the Lower East Side.
Virgin/Punk/Archive/Speak blends documentary theatre and glyphwork techniques to investigate and recapture the story of Andy Rees and the real and imaginary performances he curated for PS1.
Amy Surratt's First and Last (show)
created by Amy Surratt, Tosha Taylor, & Kristen Holfeuer
directed by Kristen Holfeuer
Amy Surratt's First and Last (show) uses Audre Lorde’s term “biomythography” as its guiding light. The production re-imagines artist Amy Surratt's true story growing up queer and poor in rural Appalachia as a cruel beauty pageant. Set in a recreation of Surratt’s family (junk)yard, family members constructed from trash confront Amy as she enters the arena of self-exploitation.
Premiered at La MaMa ETC, 2017
Apple Juice
co-created by Charles Schnitzer and Kristen Holfeuer
Responding to Trump’s election and no-DAPL, Apple Juice is a pessimistic exploration of neoliberalism in the New World. In a green world furnished entirely with IKEA products, ghosts mouth apples, pollute glasses of water with olive oil, and haunt the internet.
The Pied Piper
co-created by the 2014 SUM theatre ensemble: Joel Bernbaum, Christina Cuglietta, Kate Herriot, Kristen Holfeuer, Lauren Holfeuer, and Dalton Lightfoot.
directed by Angus Ferguson
An adaptation of the beloved folk tale.
For The You
written by Kristen Holfeuer
directed by Raymon Montalbetti
sound by AeRan Jeong & Matt Voyno
film adaptation by Brad Proudlove
Our hero, Orlean, after a long journey returns to the bones of her long-abandoned ancestral home carrying the only object she owns: her grandmother’s chair.
For The You is concerned with evolution and ancestral history vs. immigration and globalization as it affects and is affected by “Blood or Genetic Memory”. Genetic memory is the memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience. As we become increasingly global citizens that move from our most genetically influential landscape and corresponding culture what happens to our blood memories? Through globalization are we becoming a generation of lost citizens? How can those who have “lost themselves” act to uncover their personal stories?
Red Sonata
written by Kristen Holfeuer
directed by Raymon Montalbetti
sound by Matt Voyno & AeRan Jeong
Late one night Birdie breaks into her high school’s Industrial Arts Lab. She conducts elaborate experiments with electricity and glass to discover the root of the voices she hears.
This is a duet between actor and musician. A study of laments from around the world. An experiment in bending sound and light waves. A transmission to another plain.
Tundra
created by Kristen Holfeuer & Jules Mercier
directed by Raymon Montalbetti
sound by Matt Voyno
Late one night Birdie breaks into her high school’s Industrial Arts Lab. She conducts elaborate experiments with electricity and glass to discover the root of the voices she hears.
This is a duet between actor and musician. A study of laments from around the world. An experiment in bending sound and light waves. A transmission to another plain.