Select press articles available upon request.
“Continuous City surprises, questions, puzzles and fascinates with its mastery of the very technologies it speaks about. Visually superb, the show directed by Marianne Weems, evokes a multitude of small matters that will keep you thinking long after the last haunting scene”
“Using the latest in theatrical stagecraft, The Builders Association makes most other multimedia theater look as if it’s from the Stone Age.”
“The high-tech proficiency of director Marianne Weems and her Builders Association is dazzling and unsettling in "Continuous City" (...) But it's the low-tech skills of writing and acting that breathe life, humor and poignancy into a provocative exploration of technology as a global force for connection and disconnection.”
“Director Marianne Weems employs considerable technological resources with sensitivity to match. She never assails you with wizardry. The human component is always first and foremost.”
“For Ms. Angelos, a Builders regular since 1999, acting with technology has been a lesson in asserting her stage presence. “When you’re in the audience, and you see the flickering image on screen, you want to look at that,” she said. “To be the little human down there on the stage is challenging. It’s like you’re performing next to a big electronic drag queen, all sparkly and fabulous, and you have to learn how to stand your ground.””
“The high-tech proficiency of director Marianne Weems and her Builders Association is dazzling and unsettling in "Continuous City" (...) But it's the low-tech skills of writing and acting that breathe life, humor and poignancy into a provocative exploration of technology as a global force for connection and disconnection.”
In A 'Continuous City,' A Meditation On Connection
Builders Association Creates a Continuous City
“That's not politics—it's poetry. And it's the quintessence of SUPER VISION, a work of theatrical alchemy in which ideas are turned into art by making them more beautiful.”
“Super Vision, the ingenious, bitingly funny, richly provocative multimedia piece you shouldn't have missed [...] draws in its audience from the word go. [...] A wondrous 80-minute voyage through the twisted webs of identity continually being constructed in our silicon chip-based world.”
“What is so interesting about Weems' work is that she is able to function with a certain delicacy in that intersection of glee and creepiness. The glee is in the technology, which she uses better than just about anyone.”
“Those who left "The Woman in White" unconvinced that video projections can make effective set designs should head to BAM for "Super Vision," a multimedia warning about identity theft that puts technology to stunningly visceral use.”
“The technology on display in mind-boggling in complexity and dazzling presentation, as actors on stage merge with the video and film sequences.”
“All three [stories] are beautifully acted by a superb live cast of six; and they carry overwhelming weight, in a civilization that's shifting inexorably from the surface of Mother Earth into a digital universe we have barely begun to map.”
“At once hypnotic and eerily unnerving to watch, the show has the magnetic visual pull of a gigantic slow-motion video game. It's a woozy, faintly disquieting seduction.”
“Super Vision ranks as one of the most fascinating and rewarding mutlimedia theatre works in years. [...] All the world becomes a stage under Marianne Weems' seamless direction, thanks to the kaleidoscopic imagery—words; numbers; faces; floating photographs; and convincingly real (albeit digital) living rooms, offices and airports.”
“It was superb [...] I was dazzled. You could even say I was transported.”
“What was most striking about ALLADEEN was its use of video technology to create an inhabitable world for the actors: not since the 1980's have I seen anything quite so innovatively striking.”
“Ms. Weems and her collaborators have turned this [idea] into a poetic extravaganza that effortlessly blends words, music, film, video art, and the vivid performances of five versatile onstage actors who waft you into the mysterious world of a Bangalore call center.... If you're anywhere near any of [the show's touring venues], go out of your way to see it.”
“ALLADEEN has received lavish praise for its hallucinatory technical virtuosity, which strives ultimately to capture trends in contemporary consciousness.”
“This is a glossy multimedia spectacle full of dazzling technology that actually works, and it is easy to see why it has been such a hit as it tours the world's arts festivals.”
“ALLADEEN is lavish in its projections of technologically enhanced cities and workplaces—huge split-screen images send competing messages of hard-edged urban sophistication and glamorous oriental romance [...] ALLADEEN is fascinating theatre, dazzling to the eye and ear, yet sending us away with many disturbing ideas.”
“ALLADEEN [...] turned the fabulous magic carpet flying between America and India into a sophisticated allegory on the modern mania of communication.”
“[The Biennale's] ... highlight came at the beginning: with "ALLADEEN [...] this 'cross-media-performance' exposes everything local theatres do with video cameras as dilettantism.”
“Silent movies always make me envy the thrill audiences have when form is new .... Lucky us, it turns out. Video technology can bring the same kind of thrill to theater.... ALLADEEN will haunt you. Wit keeps morphing into seriousness. Narrative and abstraction play games with each other. It's unsettingly clear that the literal boundaries of America's global empire stretch as far as the boundaries of our imagination.”
“...Add superb acting by an international cast and a luminous stage design and you get a show that slices to the heart of our new global industrial revolution with a force that's not only impressive but moving.”
“This Orwell-like idea is staged with Bollywood pathos and multimedia hysteria.”
“Marianne Weems' production is highly sophisticated... It's entertaining and, I think, illuminating... truly a phenomenon of 2003.”
“ALLADEEN is one of the first shows that fully embraces the multi-media potentiality for 21st-century theatre.”
“A riveting exploration of the social, cultural, economic, intellectual and emotional magic carpet ride we all are on at this moment.”
“A fascinating look at how cultures are shared, and how technology is used to create and manipulate identity.”
“A fun, fascinating, and heartfelt tribute to the pioneers of over-the-top performance spectacle, from the Buffalo Bill Wild West to Busby Berkeley [...] Unlike most multimedia productions, this one manages to make the technology feel integral, by drawing a clear parallel between the innovations it's presenting—like electricity- and those it's using to do so, like real-time filming onstage.”
“The Builders Association is itself an innovator in multimedia theatre, using video, animation, sampled sounds and god-knows-what sorts of computerized gizmos to produce gorgeous illusions.”
“Xtravaganza is an audacious, inventive and thoroughly entertaining multimedia production...(with a) successful blending of film and live performance, this witty, remarkable show proceeded with dispatch and panache.”
“What is surprising is that the actors, directed by Marianne Weems, can turn a spare, deft script...into a play that transforms the technological wizardry into human passion, elation, delight, wonder and understanding.”
“With Jet Lag, the New York company The Builders Association once again explores the influences and interplay between theater and video media...rarely do you see it demonstrated in this way.”
“Jet Lag remains a brilliant piece which uses technical methods like rippling echoes. Combining live action, video and computer images, Jet Lag has a disconcerting and unsettling side with forms in need of definition and at the edge of several forms of expression.”
“Jump Cut (Faust)... is alive and thrilling, not a contemporary reduction of Goethe's play but an entirely new event that throws a harsh contemporary light on it.”
“This restraint exploited by dead-pan Americans brings about a wonderfully unusual and unpredictable kind of comedy.”
“The Builders Association develops its own personality through a great attention to narrative, omnipresent humor and a perpetual interaction between stage and screen. This version of Faust takes fiction apart while bringing it back to life with keen reality and, revealing all of its tricks, succeeds nonetheless in making us forget the enormous work behind the apparent simplicity.”
“In Jump Cut, the acting and film sequences are linked together in an exciting whole...this happens very quickly, is confusing and extremely exciting at the same time. In such exactly balanced moments—with a brilliant artfulness for details—the live theater-technical synthesis of the New York performance group works like a charm. This evening becomes an adventurous roller coaster ride through highlights and lyrical moments, examining the past and the present with a wonderful, pitiless irony.”
“An evening full of surprises...The mixed cast from Zurich and America, under the direction of Marianne Weems, presents us with a sort of sensual-intellectual theatre, cool but nevertheless full of restrained passion, innovatory as far as the acting, virtually mind-expanding as far as the use of technical material is concerned.”
“Anyone who takes a critical view of the work of the Wooster Group, for example, knows how dreary it can be when monitors just blink away without providing an alternative insight into what can already be seen on stage. However, The Builders Association has not simply sold out to technical vacuity. Imperial Motel's many wonderful, radiant moments reveal the piece to be a mysterious movie screen.”
“The MASTER BUILDER house is alive with raw exposed nerves (MIDI triggers) that elicit shocking sonic and visual responses. It's in-your-face theater of the future.”
“I think MASTER BUILDER is one of the most valuable and original theatre projects being done anywhere in this country.”