>>Grown-Up StoryTime + WE’RE GONNA DIE at Oberon

Company One Theatre is teaming up with GUST to host a night of storytelling at ART’s Club Oberon in Harvard Square after a performance of WE’RE GONNA DIE, featuring Obehi Janice, on Wednesday, October 5th! WE’RE GONNA DIE is the first half of the evening. GUST is taking over for the second half. What does this mean? For one – mark you calendars for October 5th. Two – Get your tickets.

Rules for GUST are the same: Under 1800 words (hint: even shorter tends to read better), fact or fiction (or everything in between) is welcome. Send them in to BostonGUST@bootown.org by Wednesday, September 28th. Feel free to message us or email us with any questions. Can’t wait.

New to GUST? Here are the deets:
BooTown Boston presents GUST: an hour of funny, heartwarming, crazy, amazing stories read aloud. We take short stories (fact, fiction, and everything in between) written by local writers and pair them with local readers who bring them to life once a month at Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville, MA.

>>STUDIO SESSIONS | REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN.

Thursday, October 6th | 7 – 9:3ish
Cocktail hour: Masa, 439 Tremont Street, Boston
Open Rehearsal: Deane Hall, Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, 537 Tremont Street, Boston

Part happy hour, part exploration of the rehearsal process, Studio Sessions is an opportunity to interact with our productions prior to opening night. Join the cast of REVOLT. SHE SAID. REVOLT AGAIN. at Masa for food and drinks before heading over to Deane Hall at the Calderwood Pavilion for a look into how a Company One performance takes shape.

This event is free, but registration is required to ensure your space. Click HERE to RSVP.
Snacks are free, cash bar.

Link Roundup! – 8/12/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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The Guardian has a post illuminating some of the exploitative work practices in theatre:

It’s not a question of setting those in salaried positions against those who work as freelances. Or indeed those who work in different areas of theatre. Those in administration, stage management and the technical side of theatre may be in a position where, if they don’t like the contract, they can refuse the job because their skills are in demand. But that won’t be the case for many artists and companies in a theatre ecology over-saturated with talent, facing funding cuts and looking to make savings wherever they can. At the recent All Tomorrow’s Theatre event, the refrain was of artists feeling they had to be grateful and not complain about the deals they are offered for fear of not being asked by a venue again. This is “performing gratitude” as Chris Goode described it. “We spend our lives trying not to be too demanding and it doesn’t change anything.”

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The Nonprofit with Balls blog looks into the new overtime laws:

What we seriously need to discuss is the philosophical and cultural shift that we as a sector needs to make, in light of these new laws. Despite the challenges we will encounter, the new FLSA overtime law is good for the nonprofit sector and thus for our community. It will force us to address some entrenched, destructive philosophies and practices plaguing our sector. I am hoping that the new law will make us realize that:

It is not OK or normal to underpay people. I have written about our need to increase pay in our sector. Well, now we have no choice, so let’s embrace it. One ED puts it, currently “many exempt workers also qualify for food stamps, government subsidies, and can’t afford to live in the city where they work.” This is not acceptable, that so many people in our sector qualify for the services they offer clients. Progress is being made. Another ED says, “My Fiscal staff and I have worked to move us to have no positions on our staff working for an amount that qualifies them for our low-income programs. We are at 96% of that goal.” That’s awesome, though sad that we even have to work for that. We all need to do better.

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Link Roundup! – 8/5/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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The Huffington Post has a story about the recent casting controversy surrounding a Chicago production of In The Heights:

The casting decision raises important questions about diversity and representation on the stage. When there already exist so few roles for Latinx performers, what does it say when the few roles that do exist go to white actors? In a musical that deals explicitly with the issue of gentrification as a theme, the casting seems especially mishandled.

In an interview with American Theatre, playwright and composer Quiara Alegría Hudes, who wrote the book for “In the Heights,” expressed her disappointment, describing how one of the main motivations behind the musical was to create complex, dynamic roles for Latinx actors when hardly any exist. “For decades, the vast majority of Latino roles were maids, gangbangers, etc,” she said. “It’s demoralizing, obnoxious, and reductive of an entire people. It’s a lie about who we are, how complicated our dreams and individuality are.”

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Oregon Shakespeare Festival has announced a new round of American Revolutions commissions:

The commissioned artists are the 1491s, Aditi Kapil, Basil Kreimendahl, Mona Mansour, Carlos Murillo, Susan Nussbaum, Robert O’Hara and Jiehae Park. Two of the commissions are in partnership with other theatres: the 1491s with New Native Theater in Minneapolis and Kreimendahl with Actors Theatre of Louisville.

“In this extremely important election year, we are so proud to welcome these extraordinary artists,” said American Revolutions Director Alison Carey. “We have a responsibility to history to tell it and a responsibility to the future to listen to history’s lessons.”

American Revolutions is a multi-decade program of commissioning and developing 37 new plays about moments of change in United States history. Launched in 2008, the last five plays will be commissioned in 2017, with the writing and development of the plays expected to last at least through 2027.

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>>THE GENDER PLAY AFTER PARTY

C1_TTO_Gender Play After Party

The Theater Offensive and Company One invite you to The Gender Play After Party! Linger with the TTO misfits on Wednesday, August 10 as we continue the celebration after Company One’s newest ’90s prom hit THE T PARTY. Burlesque sensations Madge of Honor and McKersin Previlus and guest DJ Manu will tantalize your eyes, get your body moving, and throw all gender norms to the wind.

The bar will be open, and guests are encouraged to dress in their favorite 90s prom attire. Remember: gender “rules” do not apply.

A ticket to the 7:30 PM showing of THE T PARTY is required for entry and can be purchased here: http://bit.ly/295uWrW

About the show
The party to redefine all parties is coming to Boston — and you’re invited. Shake things up. Bend the rules. Break the binary. Through an exhilarating series of scenes that blur the line between audience and actors, real stories and fantastical satire, THE T PARTY casts an exuberant, kinky, and surprisingly tender look at gender expression and sexuality. This wild mash-up of a performance will sweep you off your feet and take you for a ride. The only house rule? Leave your expectations at the door.

About the performers

Madge of Honor is a queer performance artist whose work centers the body as a site of both socialization and rebellion. Madge uses femininity, sexuality, and spectacle to expose and confront social conventions, constructions, and our collective fantasies/pathologies about race and gender. Their practice evolved from and continues to incorporate the nightclub traditions of drag and burlesque.

After graduating from MMMMaven, manu. hasn’t stopped exploring sounds. His sets usually include deep, bass, techno and experimental music, and dynamic shifts where unexpected beats interact with sensual vibes. He is also known for his continued collaborations with art and dance projects in Boston, including Urbanity Dance, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Houseboi, Zuesday, Boyfriends. manu. is also the music director of Darkroom, a platform to display photography using unconventional forms at alternative spaces and combining photography with other artistic expressions.

Growing up without the means for dance classes, McKersin started absorbing every form of dance he could find from patient friends and eventually a youth program while in High School. With Ethnic-Haitian dance already in his vocabulary, he started building a bigger arsenal with Hip-Hop, Jazz and Tap. In college he started trading work hours for classes and started studying Ballet and modern intensively. At the moment, he is leading workshops throughout various parts of the country orientated towards social justice, the roots of African American culture and movement, all while working with the city to implement more youth and arts programs. He is currently aiming to launch a project next fall that shows the connection between the stigmatization of mental illness among men in inner city communities and crime, using the arts.

>>STAGE ONE TEACHING ARTIST WORKSHOP

Company One Theatre (C1) will host a workshop for local teaching artists in preparation for the 2016-2017 school year. C1 values the knowledge that teaching artists already possess as educators and artists; convening as a community to share that knowledge will serve to enhance our skills and our capacity to serve young people all over the City of Boston.

August 19 at 9:30 am – 5 pm
Black Box Theatre at the BCA
539 Tremont St., Boston

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Workshop activities will include:
• Welcome Reception
• Peer taught best practice warm-up exercises and lessons
• Panel on ‘Success in the Classroom’ with Allyssa Jones (Senior Program Director for the Performing Arts BPS Visual and Performing Arts Department); Dr. Dania Vázquez (Headmaster Margarita Muñiz Academy); Mark Abby VanDerzee (Education Director, Company One Theatre); Kadahj Bennett (Teaching Artist, Company One Theatre)

Participation Fee: $20 per person
• Cash, checks, or credit cards are accepted upon registration.
• Checks can be made payable to Company One Theatre.

*Registration deadline: August 17, 2016
Workshop is limited to 30 participants. First come, first served basis.

>> POST-SHOW PROGRAMMING | THE T PARTY

Immediately following the listed performance date and time.

>>Closing the Gap: A Conversation on Intergenerational LGBTQ History

Thursday, August 4th at 7:30pm

Join the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis’ John Rosario-Perez and cast members of THE T PARTY for an engaging, intergenerational panel on the history of the gay rights movement, from the Stonewall riot to present-day challenges and triumphs.

>>THE T PARTY Cahllege Mixah

Saturday, August 6th at 8pm

The celebration isn’t over after The T Party! You’re invited to a spoken word open mic event sponsored by Company One’s ONERush, happening immediately after the August 6th performance and open to all college students. Come share your own story or just sit back and listen to the skills of our featured artists as they share their own experiences of gender and sexual identity expression – spoken word style. Participate by providing support and enjoying complimentary refreshments, or get up there and share your own story! Student tickets only $15 – get yours now!

>>Join the Party: An Interactive Experience

Sunday, August 7th at 2pm

Curious about everything that goes into bringing a performance to life? Enter THE T PARTY set after the performance to check out specific design elements from the show, and learn more about how they were created.

>>Gender Play After Party with The Theatre Offensive

Wednesday, August 10th at 7:30pm

Ain’t no party like a C1 party, cause a C1 party don’t stop! Join us after the performance to dance, eat, laugh, play, and have your expectations challenged with members of The Theatre Offensive family, the cast of THE T PARTY, and your fellow show attendees.

RSVP HERE: http://www.thetheateroffensive.org/happenings//5783db5b3f5f8903008c01b2

>> CAHLLEGE MIXAH | THE T PARTY

THE T PARTY-26

The celebration isn’t over after The T Party! You’re invited to a spoken word open mic event hosted by Company One’s ONERush, happening immediately after the August 6th performance and open to all college students. Come share your own story or just sit back and listen to the skills of our featured artists as they share their own experiences of gender and sexual identity expression – spoken word style. Participate by providing support and enjoying complimentary refreshments, or get up there and share your own story!

Cahllege Mixah student tickets only $15 – get yours now!

More about THE T PARTY…

The party to redefine all parties is coming to Boston — and you’re invited.

Shake things up. Bend the rules. Break the binary. Through an exhilarating series of scenes that blur the line between audience and actors, real stories and fantastical satire, THE T PARTY casts an exuberant, kinky, and surprisingly tender look at gender expression and sexuality. This wild mash-up of a performance will sweep you off your feet and take you for a ride. The only house rule? Leave your expectations at the door.

Link Roundup! – 7/29/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Zelda Fichandler poses for a portrait inside the Arena Stage in 1990. (Lucian Perkins/The Washington Post)

The Washington post has a story on Zelda Fichandler, who co-founded Washington’s Arena Stage and just passed away at the age of 91:

Mrs. Fichandler helped will Arena Stage into being. A Cornell University graduate with a degree in Russian language and literature, she enrolled in a master’s of fine arts program at George Washington University in the late 1940s and confronted a drama teacher who bemoaned the lack of professional theater outside New York.

“So I said, ‘Why don’t we do something about that?’ Whimsically sealing my fate for the next 40 years,” she told the New York Times.

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HowlRound posted a lovely essay by friend of Company One, P. Carl:

Personal transformation is complicated and terrifying. It’s been a little surreal and sometimes seemingly indulgent to be transitioning as an individual in this dire social moment. We white liberals never imagined an overt white supremacist becoming a viable nominee for president of our country. It didn’t really occur to us, and at some levels feels like it just happened, out of nowhere. But as Claudia Rankine makes so clear in her wrenching book Citizen: An American Lyric, though the fiction of the facts may assume “innocence, lack of intention, misdirection,” the reality, as many people of color have known all along, is that white supremacy is nothing if not intentional, a plot with a clear objective, a plot cascading toward an endpoint, one we see in the numerous and “unbelievable” shootings and deaths of black men and women—black people in cars, on the ground with their hands up, in jail cells for no apparent reason.

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Link Roundup! – 7/22/16

Link Roundups feature articles and bits of internet goodness that our dramaturgy team digs up. If you find something you want to send our way, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

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Jones and DeGroat: “What’s RACE got to do with it?” Photo: Peter Irby

Oregon Artswatch reports on a conversation about race and the arts held at Imago Theatre earlier this month:

The event was a conversation called “What’s RACE Got To Do With It?,” produced by the group The Color of NOW and hosted by Third Rail Repertory Theatre, which shares the Imago space. Part performance, part talk show and part back-and-forth with the audience, it included a monologue to an unborn child – a child who, given the state of the world and its racial volatility, would remain unborn, an idea derailed – by actor Joseph Gibson, and a little music from Ben Graves, and a long conversation about the nitty gritty of race in America and Oregon in particular with the actor, director, and activist Kevin Jones, artistic director of the August Wilson Red Door Project, an organization whose ambitious goal is to “change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts.” It’s a tall order, given the ratcheting of racial tensions across the nation and much of the rest of the world in recent times.

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Boston Globe has a feature about the city’s redevelopment efforts and how the arts are included in those plans:

First came Boston Creates, now comes Futurecity Massachusetts, a joint project of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Foundation that seeks to place arts and culture at the heart of redevelopment and revitalization efforts in the state’s three largest cities. The partnership, which is working with consultant Mark Davy’s London-based Futurecity, will focus on real estate projects in Boston’s Fenway Cultural District, the Springfield Central Cultural District, and Worcester’s Salisbury Cultural District. As these cultural districts undergo transformation, it’s essential to understand the various stages of real estate transactions. One important term you might encounter is ‘active under contract.’ Knowing what does active under contract mean can help you navigate the real estate market more effectively. This status indicates that a property is under contract with a buyer, but the seller is still accepting backup offers. Understanding such terms ensures you stay informed and prepared during your real estate ventures.

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