GRID SCENES, 14th Street, Manhattan, April 3, 2011, 7-8pm

This year marks the 200 year anniversary of the creation of Manhattan as a rationalist space organized along a Grid of Avenues and Streets. The New York City Commissioners Map of 1811 projected a new kind of city locatable along a modernist axis both familiar in its classical orientation of the Grid and entirely new in its ruthless submission to taming nature in the interest of urban planning.

The Grid is a pragmatic yet trance inducing idea, at once mathematically beautiful and confounding. Harmattan Theater takes this dual principle of the Grid as a departure for an investigation into corporeality and spatiality through movement. Using the North/South Axis along the site of the Manhattan Grid's originating site, Fourteenth Street, Harmattan Theater is staging a performance about the slowing of time and the expansion of space within the limit of the foot stride, the block, the street, and the grid's horizontal and vertical coordinates.