“A sweet, intense, and astute production with resounding messages about humanity.”
- The Sleepless Critic
The ICE FACTORY Festival at The New Ohio Theatre
New York City, 2023
A mind-bending, heart-rending – funny – transmedial performance experience, engaging questions of immigration, belonging, artificial intelligence, humanity, multiversality, and consciousness, at the heart of which beats the charming and engaging love story of AI and Zina – a wildlife-counting A.I. and the undocumented woman who cleans the lab where he “lives”.
We follow the course of their relationship across 50 nights, as Al and Zina learn from and change each other, opening up and swirling us through questions of language, love, the nature of existence, how humans treat each other, and whether two misfits can find fulfillment in this crazy, mixed-up world. As this rom-com moves towards its climax, the characters become gradually – and physically – subsumed into a romantic-comedy film, projected in the playing space, where they finally meet “IRL”. (Or do they?)
Zebra 2.0 originally performed at the 2021 Science In Theatre Festival, commissioned by Transforma Theatre from playwright Saviana Stanescu in conversation with data scientist Dr. Niki Athanasiadou, directed by Jeremy Goren and performed by Tim Craig and Amy Liou.
The ICE FACTORY presentation of the play is co-produced by AnomalousCo, a predominantly queer/woman-led, feminist, transdisciplinary performance collective, based in NYC, and involve the participation of Wild Me, a non-profit that builds open software and artificial intelligence for the wildlife conservation research community, in whose offices our story takes place.
Following one performance, we held a conversation with Hirina Nuñez, founder of the immigrant-women workers’ cooperative Brooklyn Community Cleaners, along with two of her colleagues, and Jason Holmberg, Executive Director of the wildlife conservation/AI non-profit WildMe, moderated in Spanish and English by Jeremy Goren, around questions of citizen science and tech access in immigrant communities.
Playwright: Saviana Stanescu
Director: Jeremy Goren
Science collaborator: Dr. Niki Athanasiadou, PhD
Performers: Timothy Edward Craig and TBD
Creative technologists: John Jannone and Amy Liou
This play was commissioned for the inaugural Science in Theatre Festival by Transforma Theatre, Inc. (in residency with The Cell Theatre) in New York.
SAVIANA STANESCU (Playwright) is a cutting-edge, award-winning Romanian playwright, poet, and ARTivist based in NY, author of Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, Ants, Lenin’s Shoe, Hurt, Useless, Toys, and many other plays centering the immigrant experience. Winner of New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Play (Waxing West) and UNITER Award for Best Romanian Play of the Year (Inflatable Apocalypse), Saviana has published over 15 books of plays and poetry, written in English and Romanian, translated and produced around the world. Other honors: Fulbright, Indie Theatre Hall of Fame, John Golden Award, KulturKontakt, Marulic Prize for Best European Radiodrama, Inaugural Audrey Residency with New Georges, etc. Saviana's plays have been developed/produced off-Broadway at Women’s Project, La MaMa, 59E59, NYTW, EST, HERE, New Georges, The New Group, Lark; regionally at the Hangar Theatre, Cherry Artspace, Civic Ensemble, Know Theatre, B Street Theatre, Traveling Jewish Theatre; and globally at Teatro La Capilla in Mexico City, Teatrul Odeon in Bucharest, Dramalabbet in Stockholm, etc. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, and currently works as Associate Professor of Playwriting and Contemporary Theatre at Ithaca College. www.saviana.com, www.savianastanescu.com
JEREMY GOREN (Director) is an interdisciplinary theatre artist, primarily in devised works, with a focus on experimental, socially focused performances. He joined AnomalousCo as a Co-Artistic Director in 2022. Formerly a longtime collaborator with both Polina Klimovitskaya’s Terra Incognita Theater and the U.S.-based projects of The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, Jeremy co-created Wistaria Project where his work You Will Make A Difference was called “A truly experimental and immersive experience….Avant-garde yet deeply felt” (Flavorpill), and Wistaria received 5 stars and ‘Best of the Capital Fringe’ by D.C. Metro Theater Arts. He has been a Lincoln Center Directors Lab Master Artist, Alivewire Theatrics A/M/P Resident, long-time Resident Artist at The Center at West Park, and four times a LEIMAY Fellow.
Working with other artists and organizations, variously as performer/director/producer, recent projects include: directing Saviana Stanescu's new Zebra 2.0 and facilitating for Target Margin Theater's Here & Now oral-storytelling. Training for years with both Klimovitskaya and with Mario Biagini of The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, Jeremy also trains actors of all ages – from youth beginners to adult professionals (and youth professionals and adult beginners) – with methodologies built from his training and his own years of performing experience.
Mr. Goren holds an M.F.A. in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from CUNY Brooklyn College and B.A. degrees in Spanish Language and Literature, Latin American Studies and Journalism from Brandeis University, which included a year of study at la Universidad de la Habana in Havana, Cuba. He has published writing in English and Spanish, primarily about film, theater and immigration. www.jeremygoren.com
NIKI ATHANASIADOU, MRES, PHD (Scientific Consultant)is a New York City-based data scientist, science communicator, and artist specializing in big data and biological systems. Dr Athanasiadou earned her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Edinburgh (UK). She has since worked on personalized-medicine solutions at the National Institutes of Health, the NYU School of Medicine, and the NYU Center for Systems Biology and Currant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. International, peer-reviewed journals and conferences publish her research work, which has also appeared in academic textbooks. Her scientific work has received numerous international awards, including the Open Data data-science award by the NYC Office of the Mayor. As a science communicator, Dr Athanasiadou developed a series of lectures on the principles of the scientific method for non-scientists, which she presented in public events in the NYC library system in collaboration with Pioneer Works. She has regularly contributed writing to BiteSize Bio, a magazine that tackles the latest technologies in molecular biology for biology enthusiasts. As an artist, Dr Athanasiadou has exhibited her work at the Flux Factory (NYC), in the group exhibition "Not everything that counts can be counted" to which she contributed the installation piece "Yeast dice”, exploring concepts of uncertainty, unfairness, and the rules of biology. Most recently, she worked as the science consultant for the writing of the new play Zebra 2.0 by Saviana Stanescu, commissioned by Transforma Theatre for its inaugural Science in Theatre Festival. http://www.nikiathanasiadou.com