Theater for the New City and ASOBI NY Present LOVE MASTERS 8/14-31

Theater for the New City (Crystal Field, Executive Director), in association with ASOBI NY, presents the Dream Up Festival production of Love Masters, a multimedia performance art play on the journey of a tantric massage, beginning Sunday August 14th and continuing through August 31st only, at Theater for the New City, 155 1st Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets, for nine performances only (see schedule below). The performance runs 70 minutes: a live tantric massage (containing nudity and sexual content) is accompanied by a 50-minute experimental film by Erick Paiva-Nouchi and a 20-minute Sci-Fi music film by Tyler Stone.

Rico Noguchi stars as The Tantric Master along with Gerry Visco, Antton Harri, James Orona, and Michael Russnak. Love Masters features video design by Erick Paiva-Nouchi, Tyler Stone, Soon Park, and David Sanchez Tarrillo; and lighting design by Tim Pioppo.

Love Masters is a multimedia performance art play centered around a seventy-minute tantric massage session with the Love Masters: the tantric massage master and his tantric massage slave. During the 70 minute session, the audience will have the unique opportunity to presence a spiritual, yet highly sensual and at times erotic connection between master and slave, in a piece that aims to urge the audience to focus on the present moment.

Music, visual images and narrative mixed with free-style poetry will serve as the "brain" of the piece. These elements will bring forth the worries, anxieties, thoughts, fears and memories (good and bad) that invade the minds of the master and slave as they surrender to each other during the session, revealing the "soul" of each character. These revelations, conceptualized around each one of the seven chakras in our body, are all true events, the real stories behind the master and slave. This way, the master and slave share their own humanity with the audience in a naked, honest and humble way, while they journey together in search of divine light. The movement of the master as he "dances" through the massage and of the videographer who will be capturing the massage session sending live video feed onto the screen(s) onstage, plus the natural physical interaction between slave and master, will add to the dynamics of the play.

Rico Noguchi has been preparing for the role of The Tantric Master for over a year now. Following training in New York and Tokyo on Shiatsu, Swedish and other intuitive massage techniques, Rico discovered massage as a dance form. His search for self-expression with movement was enriched by this revelation, especially since it was no longer a "solo" but a beautiful "duet". At the same time, Rico was immersed researching on Tantra as well as Chakra healing. Fascinated by this newly acquired knowledge, Rico was able to combine his long standing interest in Eastern philosophy and meditation practice with massage, encouraging his subjects to "learn to surrender" and "focus on the breath" during the massage sessions. The result was a fascinating experience in learning how to work with sexual energy for the purposes of concentration, relaxation and especially, to train the brain to trust and let go. Rico's "initiation" as a Tantric Master reached a climax in May 2011 when he went back to his native Peru to attend his first ayahuasca ceremony. Under the guidance of a Shaman at Ayahuasca Wasi in Pisaq, Cusco, Rico experienced "love as a divine source of energy pouring down, available to all of us, waiting to be discovered inside of us." Like the Shaman that lead his journey on understanding the source of love, Rico sees the role of a Tantric Master in the same way, as a channeler of love and a healer of the soul.

Born in Cusco and raised in Lima, Peru, Erick Paiva-Nouchi has spent half his life between two continents: the Americas and Asia. As a third generation Japanese-Peruvian, Erick at the age of seventeen, joined the thousands of Japanese-Peruvians (including his parents and sister) that left Peru in the early 1990s to work in factories across Japan. In 2006, Erick decides to move to New York City to pursue a career in the performing arts. At Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, Erick discovered his creative path as an experimental dancer and performance artist and adopts a new name: Rico Noguchi. At the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Erick finds his third eye: video; a medium which he naturally extends to his performances but which also sparks an interest in documentary filmmaking, interest that would grow after being accepted to the School of General Studies at Columbia University. Armed with these new talents, Erick returns to Japan briefly to stay with his parents and document what is like to live there as an immigrant blue-collar worker. From this footage, Mirror of Stone, his first short film, was born. Mirror of Stone has been shown at the Globians Film Festival in Germany and obtained an honorary award by the Asian American Research Institute in New York. Erick then went on to create Latinos in Japan, a short film featured on the BBC as part of their My World competition. Back in New York, Erick as Rico Noguchi, is spotted by Nicky Paraiso, curator at La Mama E.T.C., who invites him to perform there in 2008. In 2009, Rico returns to La MaMA as part of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, which in turn leads him to INTAR Theater, where Erick develops a full-length piece entitled Butoh Rocks!

The 2011 Dream Up Festival, hosted by Theater for the New City, will present a wide array of theatrical performances by artists from New York, the continental U.S. and abroad including Austria, Croatia, and Puerto Rico. With its Dream Up Festival, Theater for the New City (TNC), which customarily presents new work by local artists, opens itself up to theater from the country at large and to artists from overseas. Its founders, Crystal Field and Michael Scott-Price, feel this is especially needed now in a time of declining donations to the arts, grants not being awarded due to market conditions, and arts funding cuts on almost every level all across the country and abroad.

Performances for Love Masters will be Sunday August 14 at 7pm (Opening Night), Wednesday August 17 at 9pm, Thursday August 18 at 9PM, Tuesday August 23 at 9pm, Wednesday August 24 at 9pm, Thursday August 25 at 9pm, Monday August 29 at 9pm, Tuesday August 30 at 9pm, and Wednesday August 31 at 9pm.

Tickets will be $12 and can be purchased by visiting www.smarttix.com or by phone at (212) 868-4444.

 

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