ATM or this is [not] new york

As Watermill Center Spring Artists-in-Residence, Kevin Doyle and his company Sponsored by Nobody are developing ATM or this is [not] new york, a new play that investigates New Yorkers’ interactions with their city’s homeless population and the shifting demographics and values these encounters reveal. The piece will be an installation that simulates the automated teller sections of banks, where the city’s homeless have long masqueraded as “doormen” for bank patrons in return for change, and which, ATM suggests, serve as modern-day confessionals. In this open rehearsal, audiences will be able to glimpse the artists working through choreography in the installation environment they are creating, replete with text appropriated from financial institutions and the surveillance cameras used in ATM machines.

A mixed cast of actor-dancers will recreate a ritualistic routine of entrances, transactions, interactions, and exits. Live cameras will capture dialogue and the stylized physicality of pedestrian gestures. The words and movement comprising the performances will be transmitted via closed-circuit television and multiple monitors.

The ATM residency at Watermill exemplifies the performance laboratory’s role as a launching pad for internationally relevant new work. In their time at the Center, Doyle and his collaborators are working on the early stages of the show’s development. When the artists leave, they will further develop ATM in collaboration with University Settlement, which serves economically challenged families on New York’s Lower East Side. ATM will go on to MONTY, in Antwerp, Belgium, in November 2010, and will return to New York City to tour in January 2011.

Kevin Doyle is a writer and director of theater and film from Brooklyn. Since 2005, he has served as the founding Artistic Director of Sponsored By Nobody, which is based in the borough. A recipient of the 2008-2009 Thornton Wilder Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, Doyle has been supported by the Puffin Foundation; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; the East End Arts Council (NY); the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange; two Incubator residencies at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater; and a 2009 USArtists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, and Romanian and produced in Belgium, The Netherlands, Canada, and the United States.

Sponsored by Nobody is committed to developing original work that is relevant to contemporary America. SBN has established a reputation in New York and Europe for presenting abrasive, engaging theater while refusing to relinquish the idea of art as a catalyst for social change. While rooted in theatre, SBN incorporates multiple disciplines in their work—borrowing from dance, film, music, and installation art—while employing both found-texts and original writing. SBN remains committed to a collaborative development process and operates with a sense of urgency in each project they undertake as a company.