Sylvie’s Playhouse presents: Semiotext(e) Dinner Theater

WHEN:  Thursday, May 2nd

WHERE: The Cannabis

Sylvie’s Playhouse presents… Semiotext(e) Dinner Theater

Readings by: Chris Kraus & Hedi El Kholti
Performance by: Tarren Johnson, MC Matt Fishbeck, Plus Special Guest

7pm – Beer, Wine, Music & Weed

8:30 – Dinner, Readings, Performance

10pm – Ecstatic Inevitability

The Cannabis Café
1201 N La Brea, Hollywood, CA

About Our Host:  Sylvie’s PlayHouse is a performance series featuring artists, authors, and musicians showcasing the contemporary avant-garde. In this edition, Sylvie Lake highlights the counterculture zeitgeist from New York, LA, and Western Europe. Each night/chapter reveals the richness of a burgeoning underground community, linking worlds as seemingly disparate as punk rock and literary fiction, bringing generations X through Z together in an artistic exercise sure to challenge preconceived notions of live entertainment.

About Semiotext(e):  Best known for its introduction of French theory to American readers, Semiotext(e) has been one of America’s most influential independent presses since its inception more than three decades ago. Publishing works of theory, fiction, madness, economics, satire, sexuality, science fiction, activism, and confession, Semiotext(e)’s highly curated list has famously melded high and low forms of cultural expression into a nuanced and polemical vision of the present.

About Chris Kraus:  Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, three books on art and cultural criticism, and a literary biography of the writer Kathy Acker. Kraus’ work has been widely translated, and her first novel, I Love Dick, was adapted for television. Kraus is a co-editor of the independent press Semiotext(e) alongside Hedi El Kholti and Sylvere Lotringer. She has written for Artforum, Frieze, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, and many other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow, she lives in Los Angeles.

About John Tottenham:  John Tottenham’s  poetry, essays and performances have led to him being described as “our preeminent contemporary poete maudit.” A unique purveyor of magnanimous misanthropy and magical cynicism, he is the author of one novel, numerous essays, and four volumes of poetry: The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment, The Hate Poems. A new collection, Fresh Failure, will be published by Hat & Beard Press this Spring.

About Tarren Johnson:  Tarren Johnson is an American artist and choreographer from Southern California. Her performance practice incorporates systems and poetry to transpose contexts, allowing performance to exist in an incomplete and indeterminate state. Her work has been presented at institutions across Europe, including Volksbühne, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Les Urbaines, Sophiensæle, Festspielhaus Hellerau, and the Paris Internationale’s public program. Tarren has also performed at venues and festivals such as Festival d’Avignon, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Faurschou New York, Romaeuropa, Manifesta 11, and Art Basel.
 
About Matt Fishbeck:  Matt Fishbeck is some supercool rocker who formed the band Holy Shit with Ariel Pink, and who murmurs songs like Marriage Monologue or I Wonder Why on his now-solo effort, the 2017 LP Solid Rain.  He also graduated from Harvard in 1998 and has had exhibits around town, in San Francisco, and at Yale.  Despite this lofty CV, Fishbeck belongs to the class of artists who are known as “permission givers”—a phrase that, when I looked it up on Google, seems to have been hijacked by the self-help crowd, but which nevertheless describes cultural producers like Calder, as well as Louise Bourgeois, Sid Vicious, Carrie Brownstein, and Jean Dubuffet.  All of those artists have special gifts for realizing rough and witty visions that observers may also feel that they share and could possibly also communicate.