Organization History

The Hotel Savant, a theatre company based in New York City, explores the livid, the uncertain, the magical and sublime: the seminal ideologies of history and mythology and their impact on contemporary narrative. Committed to mounting or developing one original work per year, they utilize a variety of performance techniques that include pageantry, dance and tableau. In addition they are dedicated to reviving obscure and rarely performed texts that correlate to present day topics.

Upcoming works include The Archery Contest, an online radio play by Artistic Director John Jahnke, which will be recorded through Art Radio WPS1.org Web Radio Station and performed at PS122, New York City in November 2007, and Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty work The Cenci, premiering in its first American translation by Richard Sieburth at The Ohio Theatre, New York City in February 2008.

The Hotel Savant originated as The Deranged Cousins in 1990 at the California Institute of the Arts with their mischievous performance work, The Deranged Cousins (from which they borrowed their name), the company, headed by Director/Playwright Jahnke, began as an art school vivisection of the formal theatrics taught at the institution. As a result of this experiment, in which inebriated non-actors controlled every aspect of the onstage production, Jahnke established a formative relationship with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, a then important fixture of the California performance art scene. Soon after he was given carte blanche to create a number of original performance works under the auspices of the institution, helming an ever-expanding coterie of players and designers that collectively formed the company.

These works include The Monster of Düsseldorf, or Paint Me, Paint Me Peter Kurten, 1992, an irreverent play that followed the obsessive wanderings of an unbalanced ballerina; Syphilis, 1994, an intertextual theatrical 'travesty' which married the Comte de Lautreamont (the pre-surrealist author of Maldoror) and the tragic hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (whose memoirs were published by Michel Foucault); and The Beasts of Luxury, 1995, their most ambitious work to date. Modeled on Baroque Opera and incorporating some 20 song and dance numbers, the work paralleled the murderous case histories of Gilles de Rais and Erzsebet Bathory.

In 1996, Jahnke turned his interest for the first time to presenting a series of obscure and difficult