Discounted Pride Happenings this Weekend!

This weekend is packed full of exciting and innovated LGBT inspired Pride Goes East events!

This weekends line-up is:

Bull Dyke Chronicles
June 5 9:30PM,
Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St.,
Free FABPass with ticket purchase

Shelly Mars & Kirby (Shelly's four-legged mascot) offer a night of bull-dyke bullshit, artistry and edgy performance. Shake your tails off.

The Final Episode of Room for Cream
June 5, 5PM & 6:30PM,
La MaMa E.T.C.,
74A East 4th Street

This is the final installment of the live lesbian soap opera Room for Cream. If you missed the first few episodes, no worries!... here is a recap. This final installment will be a must see !

To Believe
June 6th at 6PM,
La MaMa La Galleria,
6 E. 1st St., Free FABPass with on-site donation to HMI

This art show features artists who are a mixture of skeptics and believers, participants and observers. Through their work they consider the actions taken to achieve self-fulfillment and enlightenment through the otherworldly.

Red Mother
June 4th & 5th at 8pm, 6th at 2:30pm
La MaMa First Floor Theatre,
74A East 4th Street

Muriel Miguel, the acclaimed Native American performer and co-founder of the Obie-award-winning collective Spiderwoman Theater, has cast herself as a Mother Courage character in her newest play, "Red Mother." Murielle Borst, Artistic Director of The Silvercloud Singers and Dancers, and Miguel’s daughter, is director and choreographer.


This weekend is filled with both comedic and enlightened LBGT stories. We hope to see you there!

Inside Look at LAVA Loving & Daring at Dixon Place!

Sarah Johnson, the Artistic Director of LAVA talks about putting together the past, present and future to make LAVA Loving & Daring which will be premiering at Dixon Place on June 3rd, 2010:

On January 3rd 2010 we began rehearsing LAVA Loving & Daring at our Brooklyn studio.  On June 3rd 2010 we will begin performing LAVA Loving & Daring at Dixon Place.  LAVA is celebrating 10 years by creating a show that has highlighted, remixed, and revived some of our and our audiences' favorite material from the past decade.  It has  been really interesting to look at all of our past work and to try to assess what has withstood the test of time. 

We are including many of our most acrobatic and virtuosic pieces:  double trapeze, human pyramids, hoop diving and team tumbling.  All are done by a cast of women who are amazingly strong and synchronized, some new to the company, some veterans with 10 years under their belts.  Also a good dose of geology and earth sciences with duets inspired by volcanoes and plate tectonics, a semi-accurate geology lecture that involves audience participation, swing dancing that combines with wrestling to point to the complexity and humor of socially-dictated gender roles, and a section from Tides inspired by the sounds and rhythms of ocean waves.  We will be showing some of our site-specific video collaborations with Nancy Brooks Brody from residencies that we did in California, Hawaii, and New York. And a parade of props that refer to the heroics and inanities of scientific knowledge.  

I am hoping that audiences will get to see the unusual combination of aesthetics, politics, and physicality that is unique to LAVA:  our feminist resistance embodied in female strength and intimate relationships, our connection to the natural world, our movement vocabulary that spans from the virtuosity of acrobatics to the simplicity of pedestrian movements that anyone could do, and our commitment to a humanity and accessibility in our connections with each other, our community members, and our audiences.  


Get a preview of the show here.

La MaMa Moves! Festival & Benefit

La MaMa is bringing back their dance festival this summer along with a benefit honoring Sara Rudner and Laurie Uprichard.  Both of these women have made wonderful contributions to the dance world: Sara with her undeniable grace and beauty in movement and Laurie for her international support and outreach to other dance communities.
The line up for the benefit is impressive: Rocky Bornstein - Robert Een - Doug Elkins - John Kelly - Jon Kinzel - Jodi Melnick - Rashaun Mitchell - Quarry Film by Meredith Monk - David Neumann - Bill Ruyle - John Scott  and Vicky Shick.  Sara Rudner herself will also be performing with her collaborators--definitely not something you would want to miss.
You can buy tickets here, and do so if you can!  It'll be a lot of fun and is for a great cause:  La MaMa E.T.C. is an institution for performance that has been giving opportunities to many artists for almost 50 years. 
 The festival itself is also hosting scores of talents from all different areas of dance.  Each day has a theme to it, including Mavericks in Motion, Dancing Divas and a showcase of NYU alums.  The festival runs from June 3rd-20th and definitely has something in store for everyone.

Elephants on Parade - Interview with playwright Isaac Rathbone

Check out the first in a series of interviews with the six playwrights from Elephants on Parade 2010, EBE Ensemble's New York Innovative Theater Award winning festival (for best New Short Play, 2009) of new one-act plays. Interviews will appear online every other day through the end of next week, so make sure to check back!

Today we feature Isaac Rathbone ("Nice Paper"). Isaac was a 2007 Nantucket Short Play Competition Finalist for Jon Katsberg, a 2008 Heideman Award Finalist at Actors Theatre of Louisville for The Guests at Table 11, and a 2009 Theatre Arts Guild of Omaha Awards, Best Short Script Nomination for Death & Motor Vehicles. Backstage has praised his “Funny dialogue and thought provocing observations on complex issues.”



Check it out on EBE Ensemble's Tumblr blog at ebeensemble.tumblr.com. For more information on the show, visit www.ebeensemble.com, or check out the show page at SmartTix to buy tickets. Use code FAB411 for $10 tickets (normally $15!)

Lower East Side/East Village Theater Tidbit

This is an image of what was called "The Invisible Cinema" that lived in part of The Public Theater from 1970 to 1974. The filmmaker, Peter Kubelka, designed the theater with blinders on either side of each chair so as to focus your gaze entirely on the film that is being viewed.
The cinema was built for Anthology Film Archives and was made to promote their philosophy of enhancing (or prioritizing) the visual experience of film.
Kubelka said the following about the room:
The cinema built for Anthology Film Archives was comparatively small in size, seating less than one hundred people. Ceiling, walls, seats were all covered with black velvet, the floor was covered with black carpeting, doors and everything else were painted black. In the whole room, only the screen itself was not completely black. Consequently, the screen and film projected on the screen were the only visual points of reference. In a cinema, one shouldn’t be aware of the architectural space so that the film can completely dictate the sensation of space.
A friend of mine sent me the post made by the blog We Are Independently Wealthy that wrote about the Invisible Cinema which was such a serendipitous moment. I thought that this would be some fun fact information that could be enjoyed by all. If possible I would jump at the chance of watching all my movies like this. Of course, it does make movie-watching hand holding difficult.

People don't know how we say things... yet.

Chris D: So The Pumpkin Pie Show, Commencement
Samantha W: Yes! At Under St. Marks. Presented by Horsetrade Theater Group.
C: Yes!
S: Si! (british accent) It was my first time at Under St. Marks, at all!
C: ...
S: We're PERFECT for each other! Why do I have to be the douche?
C: You're not! We're the perfect couple! of douchebags. The show! the show was great!
S: I liked how the performer, Hanna Cheek, greeted everyone in the audience and thanked them for coming.
C: The atmosphere was totally welcoming and warm.
S: And the beer was totally foamy.
C: but cheap! and good. I wouldn't expect anything less from Horsetrade.
S: Welcoming, warm, cheap, and good.
C: And foamy... The house was packed, too. That's always good.
S: Why are we still talking in british accents?
C: True.

(they clear their throats)

S: backpedal for a second. We are not critics.
C: and this is not a revue.
S: buuuuut, Hanna's performance was amazing and Clay McLeod Chapman's writing was superb.
C: This was our first time seeing the long running Pumpkin Pie Show, and I hear that this performance was a little different from their normal productions.
S: (back to british) Namely, the absence of Clay!
C: (ahem) the onstage presence, anyway.
S: Pip pip.
C: I want to mention that this production is traveling to Edmonton for the final stop of the Canadian Fringe Festival before returning to New York sometime this Fall.
S: Check out Horsetrade's website for any updates and details and whatnot.

(silence. We hear construction workers drilling into the walls of P.S. 122)

C: Pip pip.

I know who you are

Samantha W here.

After recieving Chris' first email I wrote back. We spent the day on gchat and made plans for coffee the following Monday. Luckily for me, I didn't have to wait that long to meet him. (teehee) He ended up sneak attacking me at P.S. 122 the very next day under the guise of seeing one of the shows that was a part of the undergroundzero festival. He walked in with a somewhat sheepish expression not unlike the one in the magazine, with the telltale Devil's hat atop his head. So I smiled and said, "I know who you are."

Long story short, we didn't have to wait until Monday to have our first date. We met, we laughed, we decided we didn't need to keep checking our TONY personals email. And we decided to join forces and blog together about the wonderful shows made available to us by the amazing people at Fourth Arts Block.