User:Jntrcm/Hotel Savant

The Hotel Savant is a not-for-profit theatre company based in New York City which explores the livid, the uncertain, the magical and sublime: the seminal ideologies of history and mythology and their impact on contemporary narrative. Committed to mounting or developing one original work per year, they utilize a variety of performance techniques that include pageantry, dance and tableau. In addition they are dedicated to reviving obscure and rarely performed texts that correlate to present day topics.

History
The Hotel Savant originated as The Deranged Cousins in 1990 at the California Institute of the Arts with their mischievous performance work, The Deranged Cousins (from which they borrowed their name). The company, headed by director/playwright John Jahnke, began as an art school vivisection of the formal theatrics taught at the institution. As a result of this experiment, in which inebriated non-actors controlled every aspect of the onstage production, Jahnke established a formative relationship with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, a then important fixture of the California performance art scene. Soon after he was given carte blanche to create a number of original performance works under the auspices of the institution, helming an ever-expanding coterie of players and designers that collectively formed the company.

These works include The Monster of Düsseldorf, or Paint Me, Paint Me Peter Kurten, 1992, an irreverent play that followed the obsessive wanderings of an unbalanced ballerina; Syphilis, 1994, an intertextual theatrical 'travesty' which married the Comte de Lautreamont (the pre-surrealist author of Maldoror) and the tragic hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (whose memoirs were published by Michel Foucault); and The Beasts of Luxury, 1995, their most ambitious work to date. Modeled on Baroque Opera and incorporating some 20 song and dance numbers, the work paralleled the murderous case histories of Gilles de Rais and Erzsebet Bathory.

In 1996, Jahnke turned his interest for the first time to presenting a series of obscure and difficult works that fit the fragmentary, literary aesthetic of the company: Oscar Wilde's incomplete La Sainte Courtesane was given a high voltage treatment, with the heroine of the title serenading the dying Christ with Motörhead songs, and in 1997, Jean Anouilh's take on the Antigone of Sophocles was rendered as a fascist fable for the twentieth century.

After his experience working with Reza Abdoh's influential Dar a Luz, Jahnke moved to New York to work with a new set of collaborators, rechristening the company as The Hotel Savant. Increasingly focused on schematic and design, he presented his first original work in the city, an enigmatic yet topical pastorale entitled Lola Montez in Bavaria… The play premiered in workshop form at the 1998 New York International Fringe Festival and explored the relation of fame to motivation, finding as its protagonists the nineteenth century figures of Lola Montez and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, whose obsessions with power triggered a revolution and resulted in the loss of his throne. The work was successfully remounted at HERE performance space in 1999.

In 2001, temporarily abandoning the usage of music and dance, their next production, the scandalous and violent Mercurius, a Greek tragedy-cum-Guignol, was inspired by the alchemical writings of CG Jung, and premiered at HERE on Valentine's Day.

Mercurius, a haunting tale examining the ramifications of lost childhood, conjured the mythological god of the title, summoned to take revenge on the parents of a pair of alchemist sisters, abandoned in their youth on a remote island.

In 2002, their follow-up work, The Shady Maids of Haiti, inspired by that island's infamous slave revolution of 1803, premiered at Walkerspace, having been developed through an Artist in Residence program at Chashama, Inc. Exploring the presentation of narrative on more sophisticated terms, The Shady Maids of Haiti followed four desperate characters, of mixed races and intentions, playing an ever-shifting game of control in their quest to possess a singular piece of property. The play was published by New York Theatre Experience the following year.

In 2004, their next project, Funeral Games, premiered in workshop form at The Public Theater. As filtered through a modern eye, it is an exploration of Achilles' doomed love for his favorite Patroclus during the Trojan War, an episode central to Homer's The Iliad. The musically sonic and tableau-laden work explores the military events that open the door of the protagonists' romantic isolation to chaos, destruction, and death. The work will make its formal debut in 2009.

In 2006, the Hotel Savant presented their highly publicized production of Susan Sontag's never-performed play A Parsifal, which had its world premiere at PS122. Revisiting his love of staging obscure and fragmentary texts, Jahnke presented the terse and highly visual deconstruction of the Wagner opera through the permission of the Sontag estate. The work was developed through Chashama's AREA Space Grant Program and a workshop at The Public Theater.

Due to the success of this work, Jahnke established a relationship with Editions Gallimard in Paris to pursue his long-term goal of staging Antonin Artaud's notorious Theatre of Cruelty play, The Cenci. Commissioning Richard Sieburth of The French Institute/NYU to translate the difficult text, the Hotel Savant was fortunate enough to gain the approval of the Artaud Estate to stage the first American translation of the play. Based on an infamous trial and Shelley's controversial play of the same title, Artaud's version of the Roman scandal of 1599 takes on a venomous tone in his clipped account of incest, patricide and Catholic oppression. The work was created in part through a residency at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center in May 2007.

Another new work, The Archery Contest, an abstract sex comedy of secular insurgence, which investigates an isolated American community's rejection of antiquated Puritan dogma, began development as a radio play for Art Radio WPS1.org Web Radio Station. Working with Sound Designer Kristin Worrall to create a soundscape that complements the theatrical nature of the text, Part 1 of the play was recorded in studio in the fall of 2007, and Part 2 was recorded in development performance at PS122 in November 2007. Both are available online at WPS1.org. Studio versions of Part 3 and 4 will appear when the work premieres in complete theatrical form at PS122 in October 2009.