Performances will take place at The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.

View the show program.

Remember the future? Nova Express is the final edition of DECODER, a sound and image cutup machine, that has been turning out concerts, digital transmissions, video art, and sound recordings for the last 8 years. This Machine is for everyone – according to William Burroughs whose instructions were followed closely to create it. With two tape recorders and a microphone, performers Jim Findlay and cassette tape artist G Lucas Crane take you on an interstellar adventure into the prophetic imagination of The Nova Trilogy, Burroughs’ 1960’s space odyssey whose central character is the virus. Acting as both fictional characters and real-time systems operators, our time travelers cut internet debris into kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, prophetic pronouncements, and surreal routines of colonial fantasies and alien eroticism that expose their complicity in the systems that control them. Created pre, mid and “post” pandemic, Nova Express is a fever dream turned time machine that confronts the physical sensation of living today by traveling back to a time when the political problems we now face, became unavoidable.

Text: William Burroughs. Director: Mallory Catlett. Performer and Set: Jim Findlay. Performer, Sound and Video Manipulation: G Lucas Crane. Video: Keith Skretch. Associate Video: Attilio Rigotti. Interaction: Ryan Holsopple. Dramaturg: Alex Wermer-Colan. Lighting: Yuki Nakase Link. Costume: Enver Chakartash. Associate Sound: Ryan Gamblin. Assistant Set Design: Stephanie Grey Glass. Stage Manager: Grace Gilmore. Associate Set and TD: Zilvinas Jonusas. Set Construction: Joe Silovsky Studios.

DECODER is a Creative Capital project and has received commssioning support from Gibney Dance and Theatre Conspiracy; a research grant from Stony Brook University; and development support from a CultureHub MicroResidency, Playwrights Theatre Center, the Collapsable Hole, Mabou Mines, Pioneer Works, and a Watershed Labresidency at Mount Tremper Arts, with lead support by the National Endowment for the Arts. DECODER was also created and supported (in part) at The Watermill Center—a laboratory for the arts and humanities (2019) and with a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and a Collective Fund grant. DECODER has recieved an Independent Artist Comission from NYSCA for deisgner Jim Findlay and sound artist G Lucas Crane and is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The full series (Soft Machine, Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express) is commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater. DECODER is co-produced by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Restless NYC and the Collapsable Giraffe.

THE SOFT MACHINE, THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED, NOVA EXPRESS, and THE JOB by William S. Burroughs. Copyright © [for SOFT: 1961, renewed 1966; for NOVA: 1964, renewed 1992, 2013; for TICKET: 1962, renewed 1964, 1967; for JOB, 1969, renewed 1970, 1974], used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.