talya chalef
  • About
  • Projects
    • ASSEMBLE
    • SANCTUARY CITY
    • BEYOND THE WALL
    • ACCESS POINTS
    • WE DON'T LIVE ON MARS YET
    • PORT CITIES NYC >
      • PORT CITIES - The developmental process >
        • Spectral Traces symposium, Maynooth Dublin.
    • L'CHAIM
    • AN IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE
    • EYTON RD >
      • Eyton Rd - the exploration 2007
    • IN OTHER WORDS >
      • Spaces Of Listening - conversations in Melbourne and Buenos Aries
    • SITE >
      • site - research and development
      • Heritage Sites / Political Spaces: Rethinking Belonging - symposium, University of Minnesota 2007
    • THE LACUNA PROJECT
    • TOKOLOSHE
    • Workshops /Residencies / Guest Artist presentations.
  • Photography
  • Press
  • Awards
  • Contact
  • Archive
    • Supporters
    • Europe 2008 - Heritage & Performance Research
    • thoughts

ASSEMBLE 

Assemble is a playful, tasteful, and profound invitation to take a look behind the cardboard facade of the catalog-ready dreams imposed on us by brands.....It is a straightforward and unapologetic criticism of the modern, super-achiever culture that demands “high performance” in everything: career, marriage, raising offspring, and decorating your apartment.

Asya Gorovits
FULL SOURCE: Guerrilla Audio Experience Lets You ‘Assemble’ Your American Dream (Review) A walk through a retail store becomes a meditation on life, No Proscenium

This monthlong festival lauding local artists returns to Brooklyn. Participating locations this year will include the Brick, JACK, the Doxsee Theater and Vital Joint, as well as a superstore that will play host, wittingly or otherwise, to an immersive, choose-your-own-adventure show.
Alexis Soloki
FULL SOURCE: 17 PLAYS AND MUSICALS TO GO TO IN NYC THIS WEEKEND, The New York Times. 

A bizarre and exciting new immersive theater show sent me creeping through a waterfront furniture store early this week, seeking drama and romantic tension somewhere between the curtains and the bookshelves. 
Ben Verde
FULL SOURCE: ASSEMBLY REQUIRED: EXCITING NEW SHOW TURNS A FURNITURE STORE INTO A STAGE, Brooklyn Paper

If you like events such as the MP3 Project and other guerrilla events, definitely check out Project Assemble, a secret choose-your-own-adventure performance/art show that transforms the mundane spaces of a well-known store in New York City into a series of worlds, fantasies and meditations. 
Michelle Young
FULL SOURCE: Project Assemble, Project Assemble, A Secret Guerrilla Choose Your Own Adventure Will Take Place This Month in NYC, Untapped New York

Assemble creates drama out of the otherwise exhaus
ting tedium of dealing with Ik—er, the store’s—contention that navigating twisting, never-ending aisles of easily breakable shit constituents a satisfying shopping experience.
Howard Halle
FULL SOURCE: An interactive performance is secretly taking place inside this famous furniture store. TIME OUT 

Assemble: Interview with Director Talya Chalef
Meagan J. Meehan
FULL SOURCE: HVY JOURNALISTS

The Best Things To Do In NYC This Week, A Mostly-NYE Edition
Oriana Leckert
FULL SOURCE: GOTHAMIST
​
The 10 best cheap things to do this week, generous laughs edition. 
Alex Piorun
FULL SOURCE: BROKELYN


WE DON'T LIVE ON MARS YET
Theater piece explores stories of Rochester immigrants past and present. 
Radio Interview on WXXI News. Audio Here. 

International Theatre Program presents its first devised work. 
FULL SOURCE


PORT CITIES NYC

What makes Port Cities NYC so immersive and at times, breathtaking, is how Chalef uses the current waterways as her canvas. To view the performance, audience members meet at Pier 11 off of Wall Street and board the Water Taxi to Red Hook. From the dock to their final destination at the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge, virtually every second of their experience is choreographed. 
Justin Rivers
FULL SOURCE Port Cities NYC, A Historical Theatrical Journey Between Manhattan and Red Hook


The show’s text blends poetry and prose, exploring, as characters traverse four hundred years of history, dropping references to slavery, lynching, mass incarceration, and police brutality. It is a major undertaking that Port Cities NYC pulls off beautifully. All in a thirty-five minute run time.
Port Cities couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time in American history. We are more ready for it now than we ever have been. 

Claire Tighe
FULL SOURCE CULTUREBOT


It's not every day you board a boat in order to get to the theatre. And it isn't every play the includes a gorgeous view of the Statue of Liberty in the price of the ticket...Port Cities NYC captivates through its dreamy exploration of compelling historical subject matter.
Rachel Kerry
FULL SOURCE A Ferry Ride into the past, New York Theatre Review


Port Cities leaves the audience with a sense of awe. Moody and evocative, Port Cities NY is a unique theater experience.
Marcina Zaccaria
FULL SOURCE  PORT CITIES PROJECT, THEATRE PIZZAZ


MAY PREVIEW: QUIARA ALEGRÍA HUDES, DUKE RILEY, ANAÏS MITCHELL, BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS
FULL SOURCE: MAXAMOO, ART, CULTURE, THEATER, AND PERFORMANCE IN NEW YORK CITY

MAY NYC THEATER REVIEW: KENTUCKY, DEAR EVAN HANSEN, STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, DAPHNE’S DIVE, THIS TIME & PORT CITIES
FULL SOURCE MAXAMOO

Port Cities NYC holds a mirror up to the history of New York City, highlighting the economic and social systems of oppression that still haunt public consciousness
​FULL SOURCE: QuickTheatre
​

This kick-off of this global multimedia performance art project was a big success, with great press coverage and interesting talk-back sessions for a more in-depth understanding of the Dutch colonial history in New York.
FULL SOURCE: DutchCulture

IN OTHER WORDS
Argentina & Australia


​There are no monsters, just human beings capable of monstrosities…
Diego Braude
FULL SOURCE Imaginación Atrapada​

​
A sharp cry, an empty space where pain takes its form and transmits through time.  This play, that is a work of art and a cry that remembers…....She seems peaceful, smiles when she speaks and her voice seems as if it doesn´t have the strength necessary for the subject matter.  But she does… In Other words, another way of giving form to the violence and remembering through art things that must not be forgotten and must never be allowed to happen again. Never again.
Jose Luis Ferrero
FULL SOURCE ObservadorGlobal.comSource page 1

page 2, page 3


When the performance ends, the applause invades the space and the lights are turned up, those words remain exposed to be read, now part of the space and piercing with their gaze.  The spectators slowly go closer, but little by little they lose their shyness and explore the immensity of the space, the perfect place to perform a piece with these characteristics that pays tribute to alternative theatre.
Laura Gilardenghi
FULL SOURCE abccultural Source


Chalef infuses this performance with a movement vocabulary
that oscillates between quiet stillness and violent tremolo allowing us to comprehend the poetry of trauma, as well as the trauma itself.
Tony Reck

​FULL SOURCE Beyond Words, Realtime

​
This is a short strange work that unfolds only gradually, but its a deeply rewarding journey.
John Bailey
FULL SOURCE Show of the Week, The Age  


The aural and visual are set to collide when In Other Words opens next week...!
David Chen
FULL SOURCE Lessons to learn about reconciliation, The Melbourne Times


In Other Words is theatre not as you know it...
Rohan Trollope
FULL SOURCE The Weekend Starts Here, The Age


Surreal fragmented worlds collide with real places in Talya Chalef's latest production...
Darren Levin
FULL SOURCE Dealing with Shared History, Arts Beat, Australian Jewish News.


Stories begin, merge into others’ stories, disappear and re-emerge in another form. At times it is a slow, mesmerizing dance, at  other times rapid-fire and confrontational. It is the kind of meaningful site-specific work both in terms of its content and style that I think is so important, integrating the human being into what can be a quite sterile new-media/installation form. It is both theatrical and political.
Liz Jones – Artistic director, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne


...congrats on ‘in other words’. I found the work took me on a journey  that was very special. The piece wraps and encapsulates people in a space that they then importantly take images of the work with them. Days after,
the words, dialogue and images return and play with your thoughts
 and the issues- it was very powerful.  

Jill Morgan – Executive Officer Multicultural Arts Victoria


Audience comments 

The story, the image, what is said, what is lived, we need to speak about this but words alone, without images, don't transmit everything. I feel that you were there and that these stories are also yours.  
Carolina Restauro 

Thank you for this kind of theatre.  In my opinion, theatre is not entertainment; it is an obligation and a social action.  Remembering is an uncomfortable but fundamental exercise for the identity of all humans.
Thank you for coming to Argentina to show us your art.

Anonymous

Beautiful.. and painful.. terrible and latent memories...soft and profound images.. congratulations!
Florencia Firpo


EYTON RD 
Australia & South Africa


... incredibly precise, painstakingly crafted in terms of the minutia
of bodily movement and visual stimulation, meticulously scripted, often sparking literary nuggets of great power and impact, but also very quiet,  very still, cognizant of the overflowing of silence and dead space as the body, mind and soul gets caught in the liminal sites between places, between times, between desires, resigned to always be en route…  

Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town
FULL SOURCE An incomplete and unresolved meditation on Infecting the City

…a profoundly moving work about loss, memory & displacement... Staged in the intimate Distrix Hall on the outskirts of District Six, Eyton Rd is haunted by the melancholic memories of forced removals and displacement that have robbed people& their communities - both here in South Africa and across the world - of their sense of place.
FULL SOURCE A Road Less Travelled

...intricately weaved into a menagerie of stained glass, woodcarvings and longing for places visited and unvisited."
FULL SOURCE page 1 page 2  Melbourne Arts Hub: Melynda Woodward, February 06,

For performance artist Talya Chalef, 2008 was an eye opening experience. The 29 year old went on an odyssey of sorts to Eastern Europe and South Africa, where she grew up, in an effort to retrace the steps of her family, most of who were Holocaust survivors. 
Adam Kamien 
FULL SOURCE  - Everything is in its place 


Chalef and Gray are traversing an exciting, if not difficult path.
Tony Reck 
FULL SOUCE - Life on Screen 


SITE 

Set in Melbourne's old city Watch House amid iron doors and blue stone walls, this one woman performance uses sound & light to take the audience on a trip through a haunted history.
FULL SOURCE Bold Trek uncovers a city's old haunts

The Site theatre space may be tiny(40seats) but the audience  guaranteed to experience an ethical debate of great cultural and political significance...

Gretel Hunnerup
FULL SOURCE Theatre relies on a body of evidence, Melbourne Times


Talya's performance projection is a broader mapping of the ways former lives inhabit the contemporary moment and trouble progressive agendas, such as urban renewal. site thus gains a texture and richness as it travels for it juxtaposes stories of one place onto and through the spaces of other societies.
Dr Karen Till

FULL SOURCE Artistic and activist memory-work: Approaching place-based practice



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  • About
  • Projects
    • ASSEMBLE
    • SANCTUARY CITY
    • BEYOND THE WALL
    • ACCESS POINTS
    • WE DON'T LIVE ON MARS YET
    • PORT CITIES NYC >
      • PORT CITIES - The developmental process >
        • Spectral Traces symposium, Maynooth Dublin.
    • L'CHAIM
    • AN IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE
    • EYTON RD >
      • Eyton Rd - the exploration 2007
    • IN OTHER WORDS >
      • Spaces Of Listening - conversations in Melbourne and Buenos Aries
    • SITE >
      • site - research and development
      • Heritage Sites / Political Spaces: Rethinking Belonging - symposium, University of Minnesota 2007
    • THE LACUNA PROJECT
    • TOKOLOSHE
    • Workshops /Residencies / Guest Artist presentations.
  • Photography
  • Press
  • Awards
  • Contact
  • Archive
    • Supporters
    • Europe 2008 - Heritage & Performance Research
    • thoughts