Update for 2009!
Remount of Lightning Never Strikes
December 12-13, 2009
SomArts, San Francisco
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*MOST ORIGINAL THEATER PIECE*
*BEST ACTOR Brandt Adams*
Skena UP Festival of Theater and Film, Pristina KOSOVO
November 2006
The multimedia dance-theater-film production Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice, created and directed by Catherine Galasso, was performed at the Kosovo International Student Theater and Film Festival (Skena UP) in Prishtina, on November 14, 2006. Our performance received two awards: The New Spirit Prize for Original Outreach in Theater and Best Actor (awarded to Brandt Adams).
Skena UP Theater and Film Festival:
Every year since 2003 the Kosovo festival
has provided vital cultural-political exchange between the coming generation
of film and theater producers, directors, writers, actors and audiences from
Kosovo and other nations around the world. Sponsored by cultural and peacekeeping
councils the festival is also attended by prominent and influential members
of the political and cultural elite of both Kosovo and neighboring nations,
as well as the Kosovar and European public. It is widely recognized as the
most important international cultural event in Kosovo since the war, promoting
international peace and mutual understanding. The festival's website: www.skenaup.com
Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice:
is a theatre,
dance, and projected video performance based on the true story of American
Roy Sullivan, the man with the Guinness record for being struck by lightning
seven times. Lightning is a critical, virtual journey through
Sullivan's psyche, as he encounters and falls hopelessly in love with the
enchanting Hot Wire Honey, a woman made of glow-in-the-dark electrical cords
– a symbol of both the high voltage violence that afflicts him and his
own undeniable vital energy. Sullivan is also partially seduced by the flamboyance
and graceful sophistication of the possibly inaccessible, cosmopolitan Ballerina
Internationale, who seems to promise global inclusion. Sullivan's adversary/rival,
the prickly and competitive Testosterony Pony, flaunts a masculinity that
Sullivan can never achieve, and steals his love.
In Lightning we take the audience concretely and metaphorically into the anxious quest for meaning and the desperation of being the victim of seemingly arbitrary fate – literally from the skies above. Our performance brings the audience into thoughtful reflection on the allure but also the desperation of reactionary counter-violence, the different roles that males and females end up playing in the midst of modern forms of devastation, and the inextinguishable energy of Sullivan's hope for love and understanding.
Lightning was originally performed in the three-night Spring Dance Concert at Cornell's Schwartz Auditorium in the Spring of 2006, and was popularly and critically praised. Jumay Chu, Senior Lecturer, Cornell Department of Theater, Film, and Dance, writes:
In Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice Catherine demonstrates the dedication and seriousness of the most promising of artists. Weaving through critical issues of aesthetics and politics, she carefully examines them through a narrative structure which she continually shapes and refines without ever losing the rigor of the form. Her thoroughness gives the work with its many sections its coherence and emotional strength, its disparate parts modulated perfectly by feelings of lost, whimsy, bodily pleasure, wit, and companionship.
Type: Dance-Theater-Video
Running time: 35 minutes
Date of Premiere: March 2006
Direction/choreography and video: Catherine Galasso
Music: Michael Galasso, Miss Kitten
Performances by: Brandt Adams, Satya Stainton, Kathryn Shearman,
Harlan Work (Cornell), Robert Turner (Kosovo)
Voice Over by: Alex Kinney