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© 2013 Third Rail Projects
All rights reserved.

"expect the unexpected" – Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

Roadside Attraction (2013),
A mobile, site-specific dance/theater/installation piece for six performers and a pop-up camper. Created by Bessie-Award winning Third Rail Projects.

Roadside Attraction is a versatile new work housed in and around a vintage 1977 Coleman pop-up camper that has been retro-fitted to become the stage and setting for a new dance/theater performance as well as functioning as a stand-alone interactive art installation.

Then She Fell (2012),
A new, full-length, immersive theater experience combining a former hospital space, the writings of Lewis Carroll, & just 15 audience members per show. In this fully immersive, multi-sensory experience, audience members explore a dreamlike world where every alcove and corridor of the space has been transformed. Then She Fell is designed to create an 'Alice-like' experience for audience members, who get to discover hidden scenes, encounter performers one-on-one, unearth clues to illuminate a shrouded history, use skeleton keys to gain access to guarded secrets, and imbibe elixirs custom designed by some of NYC's foremost mixologists.

Steampunk Haunted House (2011),
Through the Looking Glass

Back by popular demand for a third year, the visually stunning, lushly designed
Steampunk Haunted House returns this October to the Abrons Arts Center. An immersive theater experience, Through the Looking Glass explores the darker, more terrifying aspects of Lewis Carroll's classic Alice stories.

“... sophisticated and complex .”_—Donna Karan New York, "Notes on a City"

Looking Glass (2011),
Looking Glass is the first iteration of a multi-year project which reimagines the works of Lewis Carroll. In 2011, the work is made as a series of public, site-specific interventions for a number of public spaces in Los Angeles, and New York State. A full production, a completely immersive performance experience, is slated for spring of 2012 at a surprise location. Further performances of Looking Glass will be performed throughout the remainder of 2011. Check our performance calendar on the homepage for updates.

One New York Plaza Residency (2011-2012),
TRP makes One New York Plaza its artistic home through March, 2012 with a series of installation and performance projects based on Lewis Carroll’s classic “Alice” texts. Last winter, Third Rail Projects transformed the Art Space with the installation "A Series of Reveals," and then moved to the plaza over the summer for the site-specific dance piece "Looking Glass." This fall, Third Rail Projects returns to the Art Space on concourse level to create small scale installations with an interwoven narrative for visitors to explore – or become a permanent part of them.

Beautiful Dreamer (2010),
Beautiful Dreamer is a durational site-specific performance installation that inhabits the Great Hall of the Hudson Opera House. Evoking a dreamlike reflection of turn-of-the-century elegance, referencing the region's ties to whaling and maritime industries, and recalling performances and events that happened in the site in bygone eras, the work is an immersive performance that happens all around the audience, and is performed on a fifteen minute loop, without pause, for three hours during Hudson's Winter Walk Festival December 4, 2010.

Walking in Two (2010),
Walking in Two is a tale spun from the cultural bloodlines of “performing” Indians, from the time of the Wild West Shows to the present. Implicated in this trajectory, Tom Pearson and Donna Ahmadi examine the construction of Native identity through performance. The evening also features other works by Tom Pearson | Third Rail Projects and Donna Ahmadi | Mantis Dance Theater. In conjunction with the show, DNA’s Gallery presents Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter, an immersive, interactive art installation by Tom Pearson.

Kissing the Gunner's Daughter (2010),
Kissing the Gunner's Daughter, by Tom Pearson, is an interactive art installation that features fragments from a ship's interior, a captain's log of its travels, and the true tale of a man from Michigan who traded his home for a replica of the Santa Maria. The work simultaneously conveys the story of "The Santa Marias," a traveling band of Cherokee vaudevillians who find themselves immersed in the burgeoning roadside attraction performance culture of Florida in the Forties.

Steampunk Haunted House (2010),
Beautiful Dreamer

Back by popular demand, the visually stunning, lushly designed Steampunk Haunted House returns to the Abrons Arts Center this October. In this truly immersive experience, audience members are thrust into a beautiful and terrifying dreamscape of neo-Victorian elegance and phantasmagoric clockwork horrors.

“... a lavish delight for the senses.”
_____________________—The Village Voice

Undercurrents & Exchange
and The Drifting Encyclopedia (2010),
Undercurrents & Exchange is a rumination on the conundrum of love, infatuation and connection in modern America, manifested in a series of lunch-hour performances. The Drifting Encyclopedia is an assemblage of American oddities, scientific and historical ephemera, questionable accounts and implausible representations thereof. World Financial Center, New York City.

The One You Love Is Sick (2010),
Created by Tom Pearson and Zach Morris, with Aedas My Footsteps workshop participants in a week-long residency in Hong Kong, April 2010. The process shared techniques and methods for creating site-specific work and choreographic material borne from the topography of Bethanie in Pok Fu Lam. Inspired by the site's history as a sanatorium, the directors and workshop participants wove together images of sickness, healing, isolation, and community into an evening site-specific performance.

Steampunk Haunted House (2009),
Enter an immersive world of churning gears, mechanical monstrosities, and steam-powered cyborgs in NYC's newest haunted house. Created by contemporary performance and installation artists, the Steampunk Haunted House sprawls throughout the Abrons Arts Center's century-old Playhouse for a terrifying, visually stunning experience. Created by Zach Morris with Elizabeth Carena, Jesse Green, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, Liz Sargent, Brigid C. Scruggs, Barry Weil, Kryssy Wright, and Abrons' Urban Youth Theater.

Undercurrents & Exchange (2009),
by Zach Morris and Tom Pearson, is a month-long offering to the employees, workers, and visitors of the World Financial Center. For all of February, artists will present a new dance every workday during the lunch hour, unearthing the hidden, interpersonal undercurrents of our daily routines. Each short dance will be a world unto itself but also accumulate meaning over the course of the month as the performances reveal the often veiled but perpetually possible connections within the transitional spaces of the Winter Garden.

Vanishing Point (2008),
by Tom Pearson and Zach Morris, presented by Danspace Project, is as a site-specific work for St. Marks Church with music by Kris Bauman and his whisky powered alt-bluegrass band The Dang-It Bobbys. Vanishing Point is an exploration of family legacies that have been shrouded in secrets, blurred by liquor, or–in some cases–composed of outright lies. A confluence of slipping memories, improbable tales, and faulty recollections, the work lives in the blurry spaces between truth and fabrication.

Strangers on Tong Chong Street (2007),
by Tom Pearson and Zach Morris, is a site-specific dance work for TaiKoo Place in Hong Kong. Part of the Hong Kong Youth Arts Foundation's SWIRE Island East Urban Dance Festival, the work explores what it means for a group of outsiders to descend upon a site and gradually affix themselves to its geography. Through frequently poignant and often humorous moments of group locomotion and ritualized urban routines, it draws a connection between the changing, dynamic, mercantile, and maritime aspects of NYC and Hong Kong.

Rub the Sleep (2007),
by Zach Morris and Tom Pearson, is a dream about waking up. In a hallucinatory landscape of hope chests, merit badges and tupperware, the perfect housewife purees a cocktail of gin and a homecoming queen's corsage; a Japanese war-bride addresses the Junior League; and an erotically aggressive series of collisions sends two men stumbling. An irreverent, rambunctious, limping sleepwalk that traverses the space between polished societal veneers and the unraveling, sometimes sullied, realities that tread below the surface.

Lacuna (2006),
by Tom Pearson,is a site-specific work commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. for Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, 2006. The work is the last to be performed in the Reflecting Pool and North Plaza area before renovation. With its whiplash quality, the movement vocabulary borrows structures and images from both ritual and the urban environment and contemplates shifting notions of cultural identity, transition, and transformation in public spaces.

REEL (2005),
by Tom Pearson, is a site-specific work commissioned for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's SiteLines series at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian which turns the gaze back at the multiple levels of scrutiny within the old U.S. Customs House Rotunda. The performance explores the ideas of dominance which are inherently bricked into the architecture and puts pressure on the images of guardianship that manifest throughout.