Mike Iveson

Mike Iveson is an award-winning composer, playwright and performer based in New York City. He began composing and performing in New York amid the aftermath of New York’s amazing 1980s performance scene, with legends like DANCENOISE (Anne Iobst & Lucy Sexton) and the Alien Comic, and alongside future legends such as Antony Hegarty. Work created during this time included many short plays-with-songs as part of shows put on by the “Summer of Bad Plays” collective (“Break For Lunch,” 1997; “No People On Earth At All,” 1998, and many others; other members of this group were video artist Charles Atlas, painter Nicole Eisenman, writer Laurie Weeks, and other luminaries), the solo musical “Buffalo Zpringfeld” at Dixon Place in 1998, and many individual songs for performance and cabaret events throughout the 1990s.

More recent work as a composer has included participation in New Dramatists’ Composer-Librettist Workshop (2012) and as composer for songs in plays by Sibyl Kempson (“Crime or Emergency,” P.S.122, New York, 2009, as well as tours to Austin, Texas; Bonn, Germany, and others; “Potatoes of August,” Dixon Place, New York, 2008), Mia Chung (“You for Me for You,” Woolly Mammoth, DC, 2012), and Kate Ryan (“DOT,” Clubbed Thumb, New York, 2010). He also workshopped a play/performance/musical for six voices and piano, “The Tear Drinkers,” at The Kitchen in New York City in late July and early August of 2013; the full production of this show is due to be mounted at The Kitchen sometime in the 2016 range.

His training includes a B.A. (Theater) from Oberlin College; certification at the Institute of Audio Research in New York; and many years of piano instruction (he continues to work sporadically as a pianist for plays, most recently for Bob Cucuzza’s “Cattywampus” at Incubator Arts in New York in 2012, but also for many years as the pianist for Richard Maxwell/New York City Players’ play-with-music “Ode to the Man Who Kneels,” with tours to Reykjavik, Hamburg, Vienna, and Italy, among others). He currently teaches music and theater to public-school teens yearly at the Wooster Group Summer Institute; from time to time at LOMA high school in New York, via New York Theatre Workshop; and most recently as part of Elevator Repair Service’s semester-long master class at Princeton University.