A powerful, surprising and fascinating evening of stories from Karen Ludwig, Joyce Aaron, Dawn D ‘Arcy, Nancy Gabor, Christina Maile, Shami Chaikin, and Diane Spodarek.

Bios
Karen Ludwig , actor, director, writer, teacher .
Performs, directs, writes and teaches in NYC. Her B’way credits include PRELUDE TO A KISS with Steve Guttenberg and John Randolph, BROADWAY BOUND with Joan Rivers, THE DEVILS with Anne Bancroft, THE BACCHAE with Irene Pappas and many plays at the Public Theater.
She was a member of Andre Gregory’s Manhattan Project for two years and performed THE SEAGULL and Wallace Shawn’s OUR LATE NIGHT with the company throughout the United States and Europe. Her first film was Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN, (Meryl Streep’s lover) THIRTEEN DAYS opposite Kevin Costner and most recently, THAT AWKWARD MOMENT.
TV includes NYPD BLUE, ER, ELEMENTARY, and many LAW AND ORDER episodes. Ms. Ludwig is very proud of her work as Ethel Rosenberg in HBO’s CITIZEN COHN opposite James Woods after which she helped raise money for the Rosenberg Foundation for Children. She just completed her solo show, WHERE WAS I? directed by Dorothy Lyman.
She produced/directed UTA HAGEN’S ACTING CLASS/DVD; available on Amazon.

More info on Karen Ludwig here

Joyce Aaron is an actor, director and teacher. She is a graduate of The Neighborhood Playhouse where she studied with Sanford Meisner and Martha Graham. She received an Obie in 1975/76 for her performance in Acrobatics which she directed and co-wrote with Luna Tarlo. She was a member of the Open Theatre for many years, working closely with Joseph Chaikin and touring internationally. She lived and worked with Sam Shepard after he cast her in his first play, Up to Thursday, at the Cherry Lane Theatre. She was in the original production of America Hurrah by Jean-Claude Itallie and played it at the Royal Court Theatre in London. She worked with Peter Brook at the Bouffes in Paris and Jerzy Grotowski in Denmark. She lived in Amsterdam for a number of years where she taught and directed in the Dutch theatre and TV and ran her own private workshops. In 2002 she performed in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, directed by Joseph Chaikin at the Cherry Lane Theatre.
Working with Joseph Chaikin was a source of un-ending inspiration.

Diane Spodarek is a Canadian-American artist & writer who grew up in Detroit. Her creative work is archived in The New Museum and she is the recipient of numerous awards including an NEA and three NYFA artist’s fellowships.

Nancy Gabor, director and acting teacher. Directed ‘Lost and Found,’ by Paul Binnerts, an on-site performance at Westbeth after Hurricane Sandy. She collaborated with Joseph Chaikin for years and directed him in ‘The War In Heaven,’ Sam Shepard/Joe Chaikin, and ‘Texts for Nothing,’ Samuel Beckett. She has taught and directed internationally and is a Master Teacher at the Amsterdam Theater School. She was an Associate Professor in the theater program at Princeton and offers private coaching and weekend workshops. Nancy is the creator of ‘The Core Technique

Dawn D ‘Arcy is an actor, writer and bass player. She joined Karen Ludwig’s earlier incarnation of this group, at the time called Word of Mouth, almost 20 years ago where she wrote, collaborated and performed under Karen’s wonderful direction. Acting credits include “The Queens”, performed at Alliance Francaise and directed by Estelle Parsons. Stage managing credits include Yeats’ translation of Oedipus at the Actor’s Studio with Al Pacino, Dianne Wiest, David Strathairn and Mary Beth Hurt.

Bass playing highlights include a performance on the lower East Side with the Detroit punk band, The Dangerous Diane Band. She is filled with gratitude to be spending her Wednesdays writing with these brilliant, beautiful women.

Christina Maile co-founded the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, one of the first feminist theater companies in New York City. Her landscape architecture work has been published in Garden Magazine, and Landscape Architecture Magazine, as well as ON- Site Journal in Canada. As a printmaker, she is a recent recipeint of among others, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant as well as Joan Mitchell Foundation Studio grant. Her print work was featured in the juried exhibiton at the 2016 International Print Center in New York City, and published in the Fall 2016 issue of San Francisco Journal of Peace. She is included in the online database of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
More info on Christina Maile here and here

Passage to China

Alison Armstrong came to Westbeth Artist Housing in 1981 as a published author; since then she resumed her interest in painting and began to exhibit at Westbeth in 1989. A member of Japanese Artists Association of New York for more than ten years, she also exhibits annually at Tenri Gallery. Her art is held in private collections in England and North America . She has an M.Litt. from Oxford University and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from NYU, teaches writing and art history at School of Visual Arts and BMCC, and continues to speak and write about art and aesthetics as well as to make art.

ALison Armstrong Artist Statment for OLD GOLD EXHIBITION

This series of textured gold paintings arose from various interests. I have painted in other ways, including the use of Sumi-e, Japanese brush painting studied with my late Sensei, Koho Yamamoto. However, I also became interested in other forms.
Antique gold screens from the Meiji period, Russian orthodox religious icons, and gilt bronze used in 18th-early 19th century Federal style household furnishings are uses of gold as a reflecting method in interior spaces. The metal itself is very special in comparison with other precious metals. As a metaphor in literature and in museum collections I have pondered my attraction to the qualities of gold: ancient gold artifacts such as bronze age gold torques, earplugs, and other jewelry dug from the bronze age bogs in Ireland and similar objects found in bronze age Greek, Trojan, Persian, and Egyptian cultures and later in Rome and to our present day, all point to the special qualities of gold. Gold does not oxidize/rust/tarnish, gold is very heavy but soft enough to be beaten into feather-light gold leaf. It has the associations of the eternal, the perfect. When a sculptor friend gave me several pounds of steel dust from the floor of his studio, and a painter friend gave me a jar of marble dust, and then I began to collect quartz pebbles and sand from the beach, I experimented with thickening and texturing gold oil paint in order to enhance its reflective qualities and give it the depth and illusion of age.

–Alison Armstrong
Westbeth
October 1st 2016

“Why is the background in your still life paintings blue?”, a viewer asked Peter Ruta recently, and then the asker answered herself, “Because the sky is blue and you used to be a landscape painter.”

In fact Peter Ruta, 98 this year of 2016, never stopped being a landscape painter.

His work of the last few years, done in his 7th floor Westbeth studio could be called indoor landscapes.

He began this long ambitious series in 2001, after losing his priveleged perch in the communal studio on the 91st floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center. An early resident of Westbeth, for many years he also painted the twoeres and their surrounding neighborhood, from the roof of the building. Several of these city views are in museum collections in New York and in Europe.

These still lives are shown here for the first time.

Thursday at 4pm – 5pm,
Taught by Doron Tadmore Guild-certified Feldenkrais teacher

Westbeth Community Room 155 Bank St (enter through courtyard) between Washington and West Streets. Take A C L or E Train to 14th St and 8th Avenue and walk south to Bank St. Turn left.

$5.00 per class

Contact: Sandra Kingsbury westbethperformance@gmail.com

Sponsored by Westbeth Beautfication Committee

Awareness Through Movement consists of verbally directed movement sequences presented primarily to groups. A lesson generally lasts from thirty to sixty minutes. Each lesson is usually organized around a particular function.

In Awareness Through Movement lessons, people engage in precisely structured movement explorations that involve thinking, sensing, moving, and imagining. Many are based on developmental movements and ordinary functional activities. Some are based on more abstract explorations of joint, muscle, and postural relationships. The lessons consist of comfortable, easy movements that gradually evolve into movements of greater range and complexity.

Awareness Through Movement lessons attempt to make one aware of his/her habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities and to expand options for new ways of moving while increasing sensitivity and improving efficiency. There are hundreds of Awareness Through Movement lessons contained in the Feldenkrais Method that vary, for all levels of movement ability, from simple in structure and physical demand, to more difficult lessons.

A major goal of Awareness Through Movement is to learn how one’s most basic functions are organized and improve. By experiencing the details of how one performs any action, the student has the opportunity to learn how to:

attend to his/her whole self
eliminate unnecessary energy expenditure
mobilize his/her intentions into actions
learn and improve