NEW YORK CITY PREMIERE
“With such frequent shifts between the heartbreaking to the hilarious to the hopeful- a thing of beauty and suffering all at once.” – The New Yorker
ABOUT THE WORK
A NYU Skirball commission, My Town is a bold and darkly humorous dance-theater piece from acclaimed artist Jack Ferver, with multimedia by Jeremy Jacob. A queer reimagining of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, Ferver’s wry, razor-sharp storytelling transforms the nostalgia of small-town life into something far stranger — and far more unsettling. Also inspired by the haunting, Wisconsin Death Trip and the eerie undercurrents of Ferver’s own rural past, My Town unearths the ghosts that linger in America’s heartland, revealing how the places we leave never really let us go. With Ferver’s signature blend of biting humor and raw vulnerability, this electrifying performance invites audiences into a world where memory, myth, and menace collide.
RUN TIME
This production is approximately 65 minutes.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jack Ferver is a New York based writer, choreographer, and performer. Their genre defying performances, which have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” (The New Yorker), interrogate and indict psychological and socio-political issues, particularly in the realms of gender, sexual orientation, and power struggles. Weaponizing spectacle and stark naturalism, character and self, humor and horror, their performance practice is rooted in the shattering effects of trauma, and the numerous selves that can arise from that shattering.
Ferver has been presented in New York City at New York Live Arts; New Museum; The Kitchen; The French Institute Alliance Française, as part of Crossing the Line; Abrons Arts Center; Gibney Dance; Performance Space 122; the Museum of Arts and Design, as part of Performa 11; Danspace Project; and Dixon Place. Domestically and internationally, by the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (NY); American Dance Institute (MD); Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (IL); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (OR); the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (ME); the Institute of Contemporary Art (MA); Diverse Works in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston (TX); Théâtre de Vanves (France); and BalletLab (Australia).
Ferver’s work has been critically acclaimed in The New York Times, La Monde, Artforum, The New Yorker, Time Out NY, Modern Painters, The Financial Times, The Village Voice, and ArtsJournal. They are a recipient of numerous grants and residencies, including the notable unrestricted, by nomination Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists in Theater and Performance.
Jeremy Jacob (b.1985 Albany, Minnesota) lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York State. Jacob’s work examines mourning and desire—how we touch, or fail to touch, a world that seems unreachable. At the core of the work is a commitment to hand-crafted paper objects, a medium that serves as a tactile reflection of the fragility and intimacy inherent in our existence. This paper world, both constructed and deconstructed, is pushed and animated by photographic technologies, creating a space where contradictions in our sense of reality come to the forefront. Jacob’s work investigates the spaces between work and play through the question of childhood, the shifting borders of private making and public exhibition, the tension between what is found and what is created. Through the act of transforming books into art, Jacob explores how internal, isolated worlds can be externalized, translated into something tangible, and read by others. Jacob’s work calls into question the possibility of expressing the inexpressible, the difficulty of rendering one’s private, inner life into a form that others can experience.
A long lineage of writers, thinkers, and artists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Disney, and St. Augustine haunt Jacob’s work. Their thoughts on nature, solitude, and the human condition guide and inspire the framework within which the work operates. Emerson’s sentiment, “I am not solitary whilst I read and write though nobody is with me,” reverberates throughout the work when publicly exhibited, reminding us of the interconnection between language, nature, and human experience. Thoreau’s longing for unity between internal perception and external reality, call it community—when he asks “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”—resonates with Jacob’s desire to use art as a means to connect to other humans and to the world around us, and attempt to prove the existence of the world.
Jacob weaves together the familiar and the strange, using the medium of paper to deconstruct and reconstruct narratives, creating new dialogues from old words and images. The resulting works are both personal and universal, inviting viewers to engage with the fragility of existence and the possibility of reconnection through shared stories.
ABOUT NYU SKIRBALL CENTER
NYU Skirball holds close James Baldwin’s dictum that “artists are here to disturb the peace.” Our mission is to present adventuresome, transdisciplinary work that inspires yet frustrates, confirms yet confounds, entertains yet upends. We proudly embrace renegade artists who surprise, productions that blur aesthetic boundaries, and thought leaders who are courageous, outrageous, and mind-blowing. We are NYU’s largest classroom. We want to feed your head.
JACK FERVER
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SKIRBALL CENTER
CURTIS R. PRIEM EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA AND PERFORMING ARTS CENTER AT RENSSELAER