Game for some brains? Want to (neuro)modulate as they tabulate?
Elections always generate electricity – they’re nearly the same word. As the delectably electable rise or fall on election night, the Forms of Fire team will be following an entirely different set of ups and downs — brainwaves. This night of mind game-play is aimed at, if not healing our collective trauma, at least distracting us from it for a few hours.
This party and live EEG brain demo is the game play before the play-play: a benefit for the Staged Reading + Biosensed Integrations of our multimodal, immersive theatre work, Forms of Fire by Andrei Codrescu, Lynnea Villanova & Micah Ariel James. December (8th), Bowery Poetry. Clove Galilee, director/choreographer
On the bill: Tony Torn, fresh from a killer turn in Late Fame, reads excerpts with Christianna Nelson and Susan Hwang. Our engineer Ted Stabile has wired up the night — watch your own brain light up, learn what a second drink does to your alpha waves and play brain games with friends. Swing states, indeed
Raffles, auctions, merch: Andrei's bibliomancy, signed editions (Andrei’s), a haircut from Will Johnson (Whistle Salon), a reading from Heather Carlucci, acupuncture neuromodulation-relaxation sessions — plus T-shirts, posters, brain-rings and more merch
Party event: [https://formsoffire.com/events/brain-game-night-forms-of-fire-fundraiser].
Can't come? Merch & Give: [https://formsoffire.com/events].
Every dollar goes to the people who make this — the room, the actors, and the immensely talented, generous artists that include composer Melvin Gibbs, installation artists & animator Jingjing Lin, sound designer Dean Parker, lighting artist Cat Tate Starmer and artistic counsel from renown visual artist and sculptor Mimi Gross, pioneering EEG artist Nina Sobell (BrainArt) and foundational computational neuroscientist Boris Gutkin
Exercise your franchise, then come exercise your frontal lobe!
Polls close at 9. Minds open at 7. Requesting $5 at the door to help support the effort
MORE:
Forms of Fire is a biosensed, immersive play: three lives, one script, and the brain's impulse to rewrite its own story. EEG headsets turn what's happening inside a nervous system into something the whole room can hear and see. Each character's inner ‘neurojourney’ unfolds within a theatrical world shaped by biosensed projections, immersive sound, choreographed movement and kinetic sculpture. They meet in a surreal clinical-lab-meets-ritual-space, presided over by a neuroscientist and former dancer whose interventions challenge the boundary between science and art. Moving between poetic realism and embodied metaphor, a chorus of dancers and sculptural environments create living tableaux of neural rewiring, emotional rupture and emerging (potential) connection.
We're honored to be first, and so far only, artist’s group BrainCo has opened their devices to. The work has been gathering momentum: a 2026 NYSCA grant; our companion installation, Projection Booth, exhibited at the BrainMind Summit; a staged reading at the Romanian Cultural Institute that had neuroscientists leaning forward; an academic paper on biosensed integration forthcoming in an international theater journal; the polished staged reading at Bowery Poetry, where we’ll mingle in the immersion — together, and then off to Europe in the summer.
Thank you, always, to Ram Devineni, Bob Holman and Bowery Poetry; to BrainCo; to Susan Hwang, Leah Wilemon and Ted Stabile; and to Clove Galilee (Mabou Mines, LaMaMa), who directs. With gratitude to the New York State Council on the Arts, Bowery Arts & Science, Ltd., Tricksaddle, and the Romanian Cultural Institute, NYC.
With love and a slight degree of excitotoxicity, the Forms of Fire team