Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver: Extreme Behavior

Part of New Museum Presents

Music / Performance

Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver are New York City artists who mix physically intense performance, personal confession, pop culture satire, and profane humor to create playfully explicit work that is disarming, charming, and shockingly direct. Neal Medlyn’s work cannibalizes and regurgitates the most absurd aspects of pop culture into a type of spastic avant-garde religious revival, while Jack Ferver’s work combines confession, explicit choreography, and a darkly knowing gaze to elicit contradictory intellectual and visceral responses from the audience. Both artists’ work explores role-playing, crises of identity, extreme behavior, and the absurdity of the human body. Tonight, Medlyn and Ferver share the same stage for the first time to premiere two new performance pieces: The Neal Medlyn Experience Live--Neal’s fanatical deconstruction of The Beyonce Experience Live DVD, featuring a cast of Destiny Child impersonators, birthday cake, and a box fan to blow his hair—and I AM TRYING TO HEAR MYSELF—Ferver’s tell-all, show-all choreographed actualization of America's unrequited sexual fantasy with “more.”

Neal Medlyn has appeared at Joe's Pub, P.S.122, the Public Theater (as a featured performer in Suzan Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays), Fez at Time Café, the Knitting Factory main stage, Ars Nova, Galapagos Art Space, Here Arts Center, The Culture Project, and various other venues. He has staged dozens of original works, among them the sold-out Neal Medlyn, the Paris Hilton of Performance Art, Neal Medlyn’s Lionel Richie Opera, and Kenny Mellman + Neal Medlyn = R. Kelly with Kenny Mellman of Kiki & Herb. He has toured extensively around the U.S., and has appeared at the T:B:A Festival in Portland and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival Late Night Cabaret. Medlyn holds the title of Mr. Lower East Side 2004 and co-starred with Karen Finley in George and Martha. In addition to performing, he has appeared in several Rev. Jen Miller/Nick Zedd films, go-go danced, written horoscopes, appeared in dances by Adrienne Truscott and David Neumann, and been to a party with Monica Lewinsky. His work has been written about in the New York Times, The Onion, Time Out New York,and Gothamist, and was featured on NPR’s Here Now. His Internet TV show, Neal Medlyn’s Land of Make Believe, a children’s show/soap opera about stuffed animals who have complicated sex lives and plot to destroy each other, was bought and shown on nerve.com and was highly rated and widely viewed.

Jack Ferver received Dixon Place's Mondo Cane commission this past summer for his evening length dance/theater work, When We Were Young And Filled With Fear. He previously performed Eshge Khoda va Sheitan or God and Satan Fucking, created with Matthew Rogers, at the same venue. Other self-created works include Why Can't Condi Sleep (BRIC and Makor), Cliterature and Camille vs. Karen (HERE, The Culture Project, BRIC, and The Oni Gallery), Bad Dating (The Oni Gallery), and The Ophelia Project (The Culture Project). He has been commissioned by Dixon Place for his next full-length work, MEAT. As an actor he has appeared off Broadway in But I'm A Cheerleader, Black Milk Quartet, and Christopher Durang's Betty's Summer Vacation. Ferver has worked regionally at Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Market Theatre, The Long Wharf, The Huntington Theatre, Arena Stage, and The Old Globe. His film and television credits include Outside Providence, The Devil and Daniel Webster, and the role of Jimmy Tickles in Strangers With Candy.

This presentation contains sexually explicit content.