Thurs, Feb 24 - Sun, Feb 27
Hunter Center
$10/$20 with gallery admission
Member tickets are not available via the internet.

The groundbreaking Berlin-based theater artist David Levine brings a new iteration of his installation Habit to MASS MoCA for a developmental residency. Habit is an installation/durational event/realist play that reorients the way we watch performance. Inside a four-walled, fully furnished, functioning ranch house (stocked fridge, working stove & plumbing) designed by Marsha Ginsberg, actors inhabit the set for extended periods each day, performing the play on a loop, communicating only through the dialogue, improvising staging as it suits their needs --if they're hungry, they cook; if they're dirty, they wash-- and the needs of the characters. Audiences, meanwhile, circulate around the outside of the set, and watch the action through the windows of the house or (eventually) on a live, eight-camera video feed. Habit fuses TV production, durational performance, behavioral psychology, and realist theater into a project that asks basic questions about spectatorship, performance, routine, reality and realism.

Developed at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center and MASS MoCA, premiering in Toronto's Luminato Festival in summer, 2011

"My original plan was to drop in, take in the "set" . . . watch one of the loops of the play that was performed within it, and then go back to enjoying more recreational pursuits. The problem was, three and a half hours later, I could barely tear myself away." --East Hampton Star

This engagement is supported by the Appelbaum-Kahn Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.