Events

“‘When they say, Come here and play and experiment and move the furniture around and don’t worry about making a mess, it really creates an atmosphere that is conducive to discovery and surprise’. As the theater settles into its new home — two adjacent warehouses that were once a tool and die factory — that ethos will likely endure, along with the founders’ cultivation of local relationships.” – Siobhan Burke, New York Times

Current Season

In NOTHINGBEING, Portland, Oregon-based choreographer Takahiro Yamamoto uses highly physical movement, communal meditation, and the internal activation of sensory memories to construct a sustained and complex meditation on subjectivity and erasure within and between states of “nothingness” and "being".
The Gangbangers blossom and wilt in a dance-theater performance conceived by choreographer Antonio Ramos. In a mixtape extravaganza of cultural misappropriation and reappropriation, Ramos calls on his ancestors and carries the audience on a journey to the bottom of the ocean and back again. This piece is a ceremony.

October 20-28, 2023

chameckilerner

Aging Prelude - chameckilerner’s first live performance since 2007 - explores co-creators Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner’s shared experiences with their aging bodies, and their shifting relationship to a visual landscape that idealizes the “perpetuation of youthfulness,” where bodies are eternally young and beautiful, where any sign of the passage of time is not an option, and where the aging process erases any signs of histories and futures.
Emerging through mannerisms and characteristics of “characters“, Zurich-based actor/creator Phil Hayes and choreographer/performer Jen Rosenblit (who last appeared at The Chocolate Factory in 2019) play Grifters, Hustlers and Tricksters in search of the promised land...

December 6-9, 2023

Brian Rogers

Returning with his first new work since 2018, Chocolate Factory co-Founder / Artistic Director Brian Rogers constructs a “performed listening environment” for the release of Small Songs, an LP of short form synthesizer works (recorded 2019-2021), with audio/video/vocal/bodily/extrasensory contributions by lighting designer (and long time collaborator) Madeline Best, creator/designer/performer Tei Blow, and writer Claudia La Rocco.
Dream Body Body Building choreographs lucid dreamwork, automatic movement, breath and other territories in which the unconscious touches the conscious. It physically feels good to watch, a sensitive sensory nuanced and gentle unexpected adventure.
Womxn suffer, alone and in relationships. Those who have not suffered, are not human beings. So many different kinds of pain, from the physical to the societal/mental. This work will juxtapose the macabre with the naive bubble of the un-real beings in this world...are they not of this world?
For All Your Life is a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death. The performance includes live performance and video that exhibit abstracted growth charts, the history and mechanism of life insurance, to offer a complication between proprietorship and legacy.
Pouffy piles, wobbly stacks, loops, lists, gerunds, slaps, slips, crashes, splits, sobs, bad mother fuckers and shitty mommies.* Take that, and that, and that, and that, and that. “There is no such thing as repetition," Gertrude Stein says. overly merry is a gift made for Mary Overlie from this shore to the other. It asks her, “did you mean this?”