Noel Salzman
Noel Salzman is a second-year PhD candidate at Brown University in the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies department.
He is a director who has worked in theater, video, audio, installation and web design. He is co-artistic director of The Butane Group, a collective of theater and media artists that create new work based on politically-charged non-fictive material, as well as multimedia forays into extant experimental texts. From 1994 to 2006 he taught directing to New York University Undergraduate Drama students at Playwrights Horizons Theatre School. He has lectured at various universities on multimedia performance and the work of Gertrude Stein. His acclaimed production of "The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky" represented the artistic component of his MA thesis at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he studied digital media and social activism within a theatrical context. The written component of his thesis considers how directors Erwin Pisactor and Peter Sellars have used multimedia elements to further the sociopolitical agendas of their theater productions.
His award-winning video adaptation of "The Merchant of Venice," which combines Shakespeare with Kathy Acker’s radical version of the play, has been screened all over the world. His audio adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s "Listen To Me," ten years in the making, is now available at www.thebutanegroup.org. The focus of his studies at Brown is on "bad acting"--performance in theatrical, cinematic and digital contexts deemed incompetent, amateurish, pathetic, embarrassing, risible, baffling, incoherent, inexplicable, preposterous, uncontrolled, and monstrous.
