Lost Lounge

Lost Lounge (2009)

Lost Lounge is a tribute to last holdouts–both the people and the places people gather to face or fend off encroaching cultural extinction. Recreating their favorite lounge acts like Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, Shaw and Weaver attempt to rescue some old haunts of the newly gentrified Bowery Corridor and resurrect some old entertainers who, except for an occasional outing on You-tube, might otherwise fade into a black and white memory. Lost Lounge deals directly with invisible and ephemeral aspects of memory and is an investigation of what is lost and found when memory and identity are confronted with progress. 

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Lost Lounge is a Dixon Place Mondo Cane Commission and was funded by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, the University of Richmond Tucker-Boatwright Fine Arts Lecture Fund, The Cultural Affairs Committee and the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Virginia. Further support provided by an Artist Residency at the Hemispheric Institute, New York University, NY.

Lost Lounge performed at venues including Dixon Place (December 2009); Outside AiR Festival, People’s Palace, QMUL, London (March 2010); Under the Radar theatre Festival, NYC, (January 2011); Vision and Voices, University of Southern California (September 2011) .

In August 2011, the piece was the keynote performance for the 25th Anniversary of the American Theatre in Higher Education Convention in Chicago and the keynote performance for Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies in Brisbane, Australia in July 2012.