Nicholas Vargelis staged reading of ELLIS ISLAND and HÔTEL NEPTUNE

SATURDAY, JULY 27th, 8PM @ LPV

Nicholas Vargelis' new text ELLIS ISLAND (published in LPV's Plot #4), centers on a recent visit to the NYC landmark where both Nicholas' maternal and paternal grand-parents arrived after having traveled from Greece to the United States. Nicholas' journey to the island provoked a series of dreams reflecting both on the trauma of this passage and his own struggles of integration in France. As George Perec states in his 1980 text, Récits d'Ellis Island, histoires d'errance et d'espoir, "Ellis Island is the very place of exile, that is to say, the place of placelessness, the non-place, the nowhere". In Nicholas' text on Ellis Island, he forms a narrative situating himself somewhere between France and the United States, albeit, haunted by a departure from Greece. 

ELLIS ISLAND will be accompanied by a reading of a short except of Nicholas' text HÔTEL NEPTUNE; an account of the author's final visit to his grandparent's hotel prompted by a clair-voyant dream about the hotel's infrastructure that led him on an existential voyage revisiting an architecture that during his childhood was in constant movement and transformation and sets the stage for a family drama.

The program will feature a light show along with a surprise sound intervention.