6×6: SHORT PLAYS by Brown University MFA Playwrights & Guest Artists
WHEN: November 7 and 8, 2013 at 8:00pm
WHERE: 95 Empire Black Box, 95 Empire Street
TICKETS: Available at the door. $3 minimum suggested donation
Join us for an exciting line up of short plays by MFA playwrights Casey Llewellyn, Katie Ka Vang, Katie Pearl, Rick Burkhardt, Dalia Taha; Michelle Castaneda (PhD); and Doruntina Basha (Guest Artist). Produced by Casey Llwellyn and Flordelino Lagundino.
part 1 – scanning
Scanning Dreaming Reaching by Katie Pearl (‘15)
Director Caitlin Ryan O’Connell (‘16)
Performers Dennis Kozee (‘16) & Nicole Damari (‘16)
River Graze by Katie Ka Vang (‘15)
Performers Olivia Khoshatefeh (‘16) & Myah Shein
Fight. Flight. Plant. Possum. by Michelle Castañeda (PhD)
Director Hans Vermy (PhD)
Perfomer Lindsay Goss (PhD)
Dalia’s Piece by Dalia Taha (‘16)
Director Kyle Terry (‘16)
Performers Alexandra Woodruff (‘16) & George Olesky (‘16)
part 2 – dreaming
Halloween 2: Return of the Break-up
by Casey Llewellyn (‘14) in collaboration with Ren Evans
Performers Casey Llewellyn & Ren Evans
Why I Shaved My Head by Doruntina Basha
Director Lee Osorio (‘16)
Besa Jessica Ko (‘16)
Mom Anna Miles (‘16)
Dad Peter Martin (‘16)
Sister Ashley Butler (‘16)
Ministry of Oil by Rick Burkhardt
part 3 – reaching
Doruntina Basha (Guest Artist) A playwright focusing on such topics as gender, memory and responses to the past, Basha has received recognition throughout Europe. Her plays have been staged in Kosovo and Macedonia, and published in Kosovo and France. Her most recent play, Gishti (The Finger), was awarded best socially-engaged contemporary play in the Western Balkans. From 2004 to 2006, she was invited by the United Nations Kosovo Office for Missing Persons to create pieces based on the challenging situation of families who suffered losses. The short plays were turned into participatory theater with family members performing. She is interested in bringing her work to the US to present human stories of the Kosovo war and to explore documentary theater writing.
Michelle Castañeda (PhD) Her research focuses on the intersection between performance and law—how and what the law performs. Her MA thesis at Laban (London) treated the discursive and epistemological implications of “contract” as a metaphor for the performer-audience relationship. She was guest editor of a 2013 issue of the Dance Theatre Journal on performance and law, which brought together perspectives from performance makers and legal scholars. At Brown, she focuses on the performance of “credibility” within asylum trials, an interest she initially developed as an undergraduate in Political Science at Yale University. In order to understand the production of truth in that context, she explore phenomena such as the embodiment of affect in witness testimony, constructions of the “good refugee” within legal discourse, and the religious/mystical roots of purportedly secular legal processes.
Rick Burkhardt (playwright, class of 2016) is a composer (PhD Music Composition UCSD 2006), playwright, performer, and songwriter of original experimental chamber music compositions (performed in over 40 US cities and on four continents), text pieces and plays (published in poetry journals and in the anthology Plays and Playwrights), and original cabaret songs (performed for audiences across the US, recorded by folk, punk, jazz, and even “adult contemporary” artists, and released on two CDs by his cabaret / folk band The Prince Myshkins). He acts / composes / plays music in original theater, including the off-Broadway play Three Pianos, for which he won an Obie award in 2010. www.rickburkhardt.com
Katie Ka Vang (playwright, class of 2015) is a performance artist, playwright, prose poet and mover. She has been described as a “dynamic performer and relentless writer of truth.” She has performed for Pangea World Theater (as ensemble member), Theatre Mu, Pillsbury House Theatre, Exposed Brick Theatre, Ordway Center for Performing Arts, Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, The Walker Art Center. She has self-released a collection of poetry and prose called Never Said. Her work has been published in Saint Paul Almanac, Bakka Mag., Asian American Press, BlueFifth Magazine and Voices from the Asian American Experience. Her commissioned performances and plays include wtf, Hmong Bollywood, 5:1 Meaning of Freedom; 6:2 Use of Sharpening (as a Naked Stages Fellow), Youth In Session (CHAT’s Creative Drama Youth class), and Myth of Xee (CHAT’s Creative Drama Youth class). She’s received grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and was awarded a Creation Fund to complete Hmong Bollywood. She’s worked with C.H.A.T. Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, the first known Hmong Arts organization in the world, for over a decade as a program director, teaching artist and volunteer. In 2012, she received recognition for her contributions to improving the lives of Hmong women and the community and received the Woman Of The Year award. She is at Brown University in the MFA Writing for Performance program.
Casey Llewellyn (playwright, class of 2014) is a queer theater artist whose work interrogates identity, collectivity, and form. Her work has been shown in her apartment, at Collect Pond, Brown University, Pratt Institute, Haverford and Pomona Colleges, and at Dixon Place as part of the 2011 HOT! Festival, Puppet BloK, and Little Theatre. Works include Obsession Piece (to be presented at the 2012 HOT! Festival), The Body which is the Town I dream about which is where some people in the United States live (and die) or Our Town (commissioned by The Foundry Theatre), The Quiet Way, Existing Conditions (co-written with Claudia Rankine), and I Love Dick, an adaptation for theater of the book by Chris Kraus. Casey has developed work at MacDowell and Millay Colonies and is currently studying writing for performance at Brown with Erik Ehn. She is the Assistant Editor of Play of Journal of Plays.
Katie Pearl (playwright, class of 2015) authors alternative, often site-specific performance and develops new works for theater with artists around the U.S. Together with longtime creative partner Lisa D’Amour, Katie received the 2012 Lee Reynolds Award from the League of Professional Theater Women, given annually to a woman whose work for, in, about, or through the medium of theatre has helped to illuminate the possibilities for social, cultural, or political change. PearlDamour has also been honored with a 2003 OBIE Award, a 2009 Creative Capital Award, and is a multiple year grantee of the Kennedy Foundation’s Multi-Arts Production Fund. Katie’s work has been seen at such NYC institutions as PS122, The Kitchen, HERE Arts Center, and the Women’s Project, as well as in her regional performance homes of Austin, Minneapolis, and New Orleans. Katie is currently pursuing her MFA in Brown’s Writing for Performance program, where she is the Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellow. www.pearldamour.com
Dalia Taha (playwright, class of 2016) is a Palestinian poet and playwright. She was born in Berlin 1986 but grew up in Ramallah-Palestine. Her first play “Keffiyeh/Made in China” was produced by the Flemish Royal Theater and A.M. Qattan Foundation. The play was premiered in Brussels in 2012, then brought to Palestine where it toured 7 Palestinian cities across the west bank. The play was given a staged reading in July 2013 at the Mosaic room in London, as part of the Shubbak Festival: A window on contemporary Arab Culture. In addition to that two scenes of the play where staged in Mohamed V theatre in Rabat-Morocco. The play was published in four languages, Arabic, English, French and Flemish. In 2013 Dalia was awarded the young artist grant, to travel to both Kinshasa and Hanover to attend the theater festivals in the two cities. In addition to plays, Dalia writes poetry and fiction. She has published two collections of poetry, and one novel. Her poems were translated into English, French, German, and Swedish. She is now working on a new Play which was accepted to take part in the Royal Court International Playwriting residency. Dalia graduated from Birzeit University in 2009 with a degree in Architecture.
Romp of Otters 