The Nerve Tank is the exploratory and developmental wing of LIVE Theater Company. Founded in 2006 by Melanie S. Armer and Chance D. Muehleck, The Nerve Tank is an incubator for theatrical performance. We collaborate with actors and designers in a spirit of artistic adventure, and our rehearsal methods lie outside the traditional models. We combine elements of popular culture, mediated image, and physical presence to test lines of engagement between spectator and live event.
Based in New York, we have staged works at Theatre for the New City, chashama, the New York International Fringe Festival, Dixon Place, The Tank, and Pittsburgh’s Flux Festival. From 2008 to 2010 we were the resident theatre company of the Brooklyn Lyceum.
Much like its subject matter, bauhaus the bauhaus... is a thoughtful, well-researched project that demonstrates keen insight into contemporary life.
--OffOffOnline
Perhaps the most successful and interesting notion in bauhaus the bauhaus is the stripping away of the artifice of art. All of the technology required to make a work of theatre is thus presented to the audience...
--NYTheatre.com
The Nerve Tank presents us with a mashed-up picture of humanity, contrasting highly poetic language with robot-like characters... we are led to reanalyze the mundane but essential objects we interact with in our everyday lives.
--Eye On the Arts
Through a series of vignettes, games, gestural dances, and found texts, writer-assembler Chance Muehleck primes his ensemble to speak in the breathless tones of early-20th-century utopianism.
--Village Voice
As LIVE/FEED proves quite ominously, these are certainly interesting times. The ensemble is unanimously excellent... Nerve Tank leverages humor and stunning visual panache to create a textured and timely commentary on today's informational feeding frenzy.
--L Magazine
So much of our existence is based on not knowing and wanting to be in control of it all, nonetheless... It’s a concept that LIVE/FEED expresses, imaginatively, with bold aesthetics and patchy dialogues.
--Show Business Weekly
A Gathering is a bold, exciting work that pushes and frequently explodes the boundaries of conventional theater... If you enjoy intrepid, brash new work, you’ll find this production to be greater than the sum of its parts.
--OffOffOnline
[Eating the Dead] is a compelling, intriguing tale, punctuated by fanciful spirits of the haunted night that may or may not be real. Melanie S. Armer directs this sometimes chaotic play with a kind of pixilated naturalism that suits the material well.
--NYTheatre.com
Chance D. Muehleck's The Honeypot Redux is the most fully-realized play of the program... It's all very Pinteresque, with a creepy, off-kilter feel.
--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In System Eternal, Chance D. Muehleck's mysterious, oddly compelling play with music, a sordid group of characters from both sides of the law banters about in the pithy, haunting language of noir... An original, stylish piece.
--Back Stage