All Together Now (FringeNYC)

Categories: Solo Show, Multi-Media, Local. Written by Ilana Simons.

FROM THE ARTIST:
An intimate audience of twenty lies down in a handmade tent for highly imaginative storytelling that evokes a proud and fantastical escape. Lying with strangers is electrifying, and recollects sleepovers in the backyard, with the awed stargazing of those nights. The writer and performer of this one-woman show, Ilana Simons, is a psychologist, literature professor, and animator who wrote this psychologically-rich narrative after her divorce, as a way to name childhood longings, or to learn why she married a man just like her father. She stitched the cloth walls of this tent and animated the intricate videos that project onto them. Simons embeds herself in the tent alongside her audience members to deliver an uncommonly evocative and beautiful reverie of love and loss.

Ilana Simons is a clinical psychologist, Virginia Woolf scholar, and animator. She is the founder of Tin House Reels, an online site for short videos at Tin House magazine and a writer for Psychology Today. Her short animations have premiered at Sundance and been featured online at sites like Hyperallergic and Electric Literature, where her short animated film about Haruki Murakami garnered 30,000 views. She is the author of A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf (Penguin), and collaborated with Alain de Botton on his Great Writers series. She has performed her work at The Flea, the Nuyorican Poetry Café, and the Moth and lives in Brooklyn.

Features artistic contributions from Eamonn Farrell, director and media designer of Anonymous Ensemble, who has worked extensively with Mabou Mines, Jessica Scott, and with theaters like HERE.

This is an immersive show with a limited number of audience members let in each night. a special storytelling experience.