My summer is kicking into high gear! Over the next two months, I have two thingNY projects in New York, regional tours with The World/Inferno Friendship Society and Valerie Kuehne and the Wasps Nests, the premiere at the LUCERNE FESTIVAL of NOMOZART, the show for children I’ve been developing in Switzerland since March, and more! Read on for details.

thingNY as Pandas. If you like this, come today to our installation for more!

thingNY’s first big project of the summer wraps up today at Harvestworks. It’s been a very interesting one for us, our first collaborative project where we’re not performing. Instead, via motion-sensing electronics, you control what you hear from eight speakers around you by playing with boxes on the floor and sliding balls of paper along strings that crisscross the room. Plus, out of an extensive collection of memorabilia from our decade together, we’ve fabricated a space for this sonic experience resembling the insides of our brains. If you’re free today from 4-7pm, please drop by and check it out!

Next week is thick with shows. After a return to Rockwood Music Hall with folk rocker Bill Steely and band on Tuesday, I head off on a four-day tour across Pennsylvania with Valerie Kuehne and the Wasps Nests, playing Pittsburgh – where we open for Lydia Lunch – Harrisburg, and Philly before landing back in Brooklyn at the new location of Spectrum by the Navy Yard. PA and NY friends, come see the new songs we’ve been cooking up!

The two weeks after that are a juggling act of dashing back and forth between shows in Brooklyn, Boston, Philly, and Baltimore with the World/Inferno Friendship Society – my first shows with this mischievous band of cabaret-punk ruffians since Halloween – and thingNY’s second big project of the summer, a two-week collaboration with Orange Theatre on Governor’s Island, which began last year when Paul Pinto and I traveled to their home base in Phoenix on a NET/TEN Travel Grant. We’ll be continuing that work with the aim of devising a new piece of music-theatre centering around memory and maps, a surreal book of coordinates, click bait, tangents, and a fresh take on the classic American road trip. Get in touch if you’d like to attend the Monday afternoon work-in-progress showing on the island that caps our residency!

Finally, after a bit of European travel, I land back in Switzerland at the end of August for the final rehearsals and premiere of NOMOZART, the 50-minute long performance for preteens I’ve been developing in Lucerne since March. The premiere will be on September 10th at the Lucerne Festival in the fabulous KKL Luzern. If you’re anywhere nearby, I’d love to share this with you!

Lots more projects are coming down the pike after that, including a few soon-to-be-announced globetrotting performances right after the NOMOZART premiere, the New York premiere run in October of the puppet piece by Daniel Fay and Andrew Livingston I worked on last year in Norway, the world premiere run in New York this November of Paul Pinto’s Thomas Paine in Violence, and also in November, another tour with Swiss über-jazz band Hildegard Lernt Fliegen and the Orchestra of LUCERNE FESTIVAL ALUMNI in Germany and Switzerland, including an already sold-out performance in Hamburg’s shiny new Elbphilharmonie. Stay tuned!

Every apple you’ve ever bought in the supermarket is a clone,
Jeff