Special Effects Festival

wild project in association with Contemporary Performance presents the 7th Annual SFX Festival

January 9 – 11, 2025

Founded by the visionary duo, Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson of Big Art Group, the Special Effects Festival (SFX) has championed groundbreaking, genre-defying work since 2014. After a hiatus due to the pandemic, the festival is back to rekindle the spirit of the avant-garde and create a shared space to gather for contemporary performance.
Held every year in the midst of the Annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference in NYC, SFX celebrates the eclecticism of contemporary performance.

Past Alumni Include: Jeremy O. Harris, Sauda Aziza Jackson, Becca Blackwell, Lisa Clair, Braulio Cruz, Maiko Kikuchi, Agnes Borinsky, Joey Weiss, Kate Benson, Jill Pangallo, David Commander/ Rob Ramirez, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Adrienne Truscott, Colin Self.

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January 9, 2025

7:00pm
Illuminated Skies – A Night of Puppetry
Curated by Amanda Card

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Cumulo

by Emily Batsford

Cumulo follows protagonist Plum as she freefalls through the sky, meeting weather and whimsy along the way. A nonverbal puppet piece that (sky)dives into our accumulation of self, and the experiences that shape us.

Emily Batsford (they/them) is a theater maker and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. Their artistry prioritizes inclusion and accessibility, and includes immersive and physical theater practices, puppetry, & experimental forms.
Emily has an extensive performance history, traveling internationally and across the United States. True to their passion for devising new work, Emily has also participated in countless work-in-progress showings at theatrical incubators across the five boroughs.
When not performing, Emily is a Teaching Artist for Child’s Play NY, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New York City Children’s Theater, and CO/LAB Theater Group.

Where Did You Go, Connie?

by Amanda Card

“Where Did You Go, Connie” is an experimental puppet show blending shadow puppetry, toy theater, and live-feed puppetry. Inspired by musician Connie Converse’s life and disappearance, it explores themes of visibility, invisibility, and self-destruction. Developed at Concrete Temple Theatre’s CONCRETE BOOM: Volume 3 and the 2024-2025 Object Movement Puppetry Residency and Festival.

Amanda Glynn Card (she/they) is a multidisciplinary theatre artist. Her work has appeared at La MaMa, We Wiggle Dolls Puppet Slam, Teatro SEA’s Micro Theater Festival, Dixon Place’s Puppet BloK, Great Small Works’ Toy Theater Festival, Nasty Brutish & Short Puppet Cabaret, Sarah Finn’s Our Bodies Like Dams at Mabou Mines, Bee Hall’s music video Park Song, Maiko Kikuchi and Spencer Lott’s 9000 Paper Balloons, Maiko Kikuchi’s Daydream Tutorial, and Mason Holdings’ Small Acts of Daring Invention. She is a resident artist with the 2024-2025 Object Movement Puppetry Festival. MFA, Sarah Lawrence College.

An excerpt from Shiny One

by Jon Riddleberger
featuring Max Gayford, Nick Lehane, and Joseph Lymous

When Shiny One stumbles upon a dangerous sickness in the forest, they must use their unique light to save the forest and bring the people back to nature. Shiny One is a brand new puppet theater piece currently in development.

Jon is a director, puppeteer, and filmmaker based in NYC. Notable credits include: War Horse, Il Ritorno D’Ulisse (Handspring Puppet Company), Laser Beak Man and Argus (Dead Puppet Society), El Niño (The Met Opera), Fly Away (Derek Fordjour and Nick Lehane), Bill’s 44th, Clifford the Big Red Dog feature film, Moon and Me (The BBC), Hello Tomorrow! (Apple TV+), director of puppetry for demons. among others. Jon is an adjunct teacher at NYU and recently co conceived and directed FRNKNSTN written by Jaclyn Backhaus. You can find out more at: www.jonriddleberger.com

Cast From Heaven

by Jacob Graham
Performed by Jacob Graham and Avemaria Magdalena

Cast From Heaven is a ceremonial reenactment and dramatization of something that may or may not have happened in the deep past. A short, contemplative vignette in the vein of The Wormwood Star.

Jacob Graham is a multidisciplinary artist and the mind behind The Creatures of Yes puppet web series. He recently collaborated with the artist Marina Abramović on Emerald Sea, a live symphonic performance.

Avemaria Magdalena is an actress, performance artist and band member of the east village group The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Cast From Heaven is their new theater group as well as the title of this piece.

January 10, 2025

7:00pm
featuring Wonderful Cringe (Nicholas Sanchez), Harlequin (Adonis Huff & Jelani Best), and Lele Dai

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She laughed, as if she was innocent of everything

by Lele Dai

“Animals don’t laugh?

It’s supposed to make everyone laugh.

I’m more into it when musicians are serious as all get out… when they pour their heart and soul into it , but you still want to laugh .”

An angel is falling onto the earth and trying to save the post-human world with laughter.

LeLe Dai was born in Hangzhou, China and she moved to Sydney, Australia by herself when she was 18. In 2013, she visited New York City by accident, and she has stayed there ever since. Now she lives with her best friend and two lovely but strange cats in Brooklyn. She recently finished an MFA at Hunter College. She has exhibited works in various institutions, galleries and venues in the US. She sometimes makes hidden installations and plays secret shows at public spaces in New York City.

photo credit: Quinten Koroshetz/ IG: @m1lkmansmolotov

i havent been on instagram in three weeks and im thinking about you is this a funeral or just love withdrawals

by Wonderful Cringe

i havent been on instagram in three weeks and it feels like im not even alive

nicholas sanchez is the post internet performance artist wonderful cringe. or maybe the other way around.

Harlequin

by Jelani Best & Adonis Huff

“Harlequin” is a Noise Performance project formed by musician Adonis Huff and movement artist Jelani Best. “Harlequin” focuses on the immediately palpable energy of the transformation of self into other. Utilizing sound and movement the duo draw from the inspiration of folklore and spiritual practice to engage in a process of cathartic expression. The project values anonymity and non-hierarchical artistic criteria, and this allows them to live authentically in the moment during their work, enacting a “character study” that is interpreted kinesthetically and sonically.

January 11, 2025

7:00pm
Gray Spaces
Curated by Lisa Clair

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IDIOT VOID (working title)

by David Commander

Idiot Void (working title) is a work in progress and an initial effort to create a framework in which to amplify the dying scream of all humankind. It is also a musical puppet show.

David Commander writes, directs and performs in his particular style of modern toy and object theater. His work has been presented in NYC, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, and Chicago. As well as his collaborative efforts with Immediate Medium’s Rob Ramirez, Commander is a long time member of the legendary theater company Big Art Group. This work-in-progress launches him into his first solo work in 11 years.

double column

by Marissa Joyce Stamps

featuring Deja Rion

double column, is a performance piece with text and live music that looks to strings—those of the heart, those of rope and shibari, and those of stringed instruments—to explore Marissa’s relationship to
love (in all of its forms). The harmonies. The dissonance. The knots. The tuning. The rigging. The surrendering.

Marissa Joyce Stamps is a Black, Haitian-American NYC-born and based director, writer, and performer who creates vortexes that center, celebrate and amplify Black folks through an Afrosurrealist lens, often in dialogue with kinetics and landscape dramaturgy. She won the 2023 Princess Grace Playwriting Award. Memberships and Affiliations: Roundabout’s RDG, Lucille Lortel Alcove, Clubbed Thumb’s EWCG, The New Georges Jam, EST/Youngblood, TAG at The Tank. Select work: Letiche… (O’Neill NPC Finalist, National Black Theatre Special Project, Bushwick Starr SRS), …Twisted Juniper (O’Neill NPC Finalist; Chautauqua NPW), Rollback (Clubbed Thumb ECWG). She’s also directed her plays Being Up in Here… (Exponential Festival, Brick Aux), Blue Fire… (Exponential Festival; Orchard Project Performance Lab), and deadbodydeadbodydeadbody (Ars Nova ANT Fest). Additionally, Marissa has developed work as a writer and director of her own and of other playwrights at The National Black Theatre, The Vineyard, BAM, New Dramatists, Mercury Store, Conch Shell Productions, The Brick, Breaking & Entering Theatre Collective, NYU/Tisch, and more. MFA Playwriting: Brooklyn College. marissajoycestamps.com @marissajoycestamps

5G Maitreya

by Glenn Potter-Takata

5G Maitreya is a multimedia performance work that looks at parallel notions of the ‘real’ in Buddhist metaphysics and a digital/material divide. Using video projected 3D renderings of Buddhist deities and ritual objects paired with 3D-printed facsimiles, the work brings the digital into the tangible as an analogy for Buddhist distinctions between the consciousness and the material.

Glenn Potter-Takata is a Japanese-American artist based in the Bronx. He utilizes butoh, improvisation, media equipment, and consumer materials to create performances around the body as a historical site in post-internment America. His performance works have been shown in New York City at Mabou Mines, PAGEANT, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at Judson Church, Grace Exhibition Space, Gibney Dance Center, New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix, WestFest, and with Pioneers Go Easts, among other places. Nationally, his work has been presented by Cannonball in Philadelphia, and his first solo gallery exhibition opened in January of 2023 at Rogers Studio Gallery in Las Vegas. He has been awarded residencies with Movement Research, Gibney Dance Center (Work Up), CUNY Dance Initiative at Lehman College, and is the recipient of a MAP Fund Award, Bronx Cultural Visions Award, Bronx Dance Fund Award, and a Mabou Mines SUITE/Space Fellowship.

wild project is a proud partner of IndieSpace. We donate $0.05 from every ticket to support historically excluded Indie Theater artists in New York.

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