CRS presents an evening of Action Theater Improvisation by former CRS teachers and longtime performance collaborators Heather Harpham and Cassie Tunick. Their improvisations play in a highly physical realm and incorporate vocalization and speech to conjure surreal yet utterly immediate worlds. Evoking humor and pathos, Harpham and Tunick masterfully explore human experience through relationship and metaphoric image.

The performance will take place on Saturday, October 21, 2017 at 7:30 pm in the CRS Studio. Tickets are $20 and are available online, by phone (212-677-8621) and at CRS. There will be no late seating at this performance.

Action Theater is a training system in physical theater improvisation that builds vocal, verbal, and physical performance skills, hones awareness and increases expressive range. Created by Ruth Zaporah, Action Theater uses embodied presence as a doorway into the agility of a vast imagination, the inhabiting of mercurial energies, and a way of relaxing into the active nature of time and change with eloquence, precision, and passion. http://www.actiontheater.com.

Heather Harpham has written six solo plays, including Happiness and BURNING which toured nationally. Her fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in Slate, Parents, MORE Magazine and Water~Stone Review. Harpham is the recipient of the Brenda Ueland Prose Prize, a Marin Arts Council Independent Artist Grant and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women. She has taught as a guest artist in physical theater and solo performance in colleges and universities throughout the US and currently teaches at SUNY Purchase. In August of 2017, Holt released her memoir, Happiness. It has been Heather’s joy to improvise with Cassie since they were ten. http://heatherharpham.com

Cassie Tunick is a performer, writer, and teacher. Her physical theater works have played on stages across the U.S. and abroad. She is a Senior Teacher of Action Theater, co-founder of the company Second Nature (with Danny Tunick and Heather Harpham), and currently teaches at Emerson College. Collaborations: film work with David Finkelstein (Suggestive Gestures); experimental music and performance with Keren Rosenbaum; and dance theater works with Abby Bender. An ongoing fascination with the nature of being continues within the daily body as a vehicle for the mind and imagination to express itself visibly. http://www.cassieterman.com

Danny Tunick is a veteran of an array of musical scenes in New York City and beyond. From many varieties of rock (Jowe Head, Dan Kaufman’s Euro-literary-underground band Barbez, Rebecca Moore’s Prevention of Blindness, New Zealand cult legends The Clean) to classical (he has conducted music by Pierre Boulez, Charles Wuorinen, and Sam Hillmer, among others, and performed in countless premieres as percussionist), to music falling between any convenient category (Alvin Lucier, Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings, Elliott Sharp’s Orchestra Carbon, Christian Dautreme’s indescribable Sugarlife, the pagan Civil War rituals of Flaming Fire, David First’s The Western Enisphere). He has worked closely with many dance/theater companies, including Juliette Mapp, Armitage Gone! Dance, John Jesurun and Rinde Eckert. His performances can be heard on over 30 record labels.