CYCLE 10 AUDREY RESIDENTS

CYCLE 10 AUDREY RESIDENTS

12 resident artists working on 8 new-play projects over the course of the year! Setting out individually or in a collaboration, they are: Erin Courtney; Kallan Dana; Jeanne Dorsey; Kedian Keohan and Minna Lee; Arika Larson; Deneen Reynolds-Knott and Arminda Thomas; Jeana Scotti and Tara Elliott; and Normandy Sherwood and Nikki Calonge.

The residencies are named for Audrey Bernfield, Susan’s mom, an innovative mentor and of course a great supporter of our company. Open to New Georges affiliated artists, the Audrey Residencies are our primary program for generating and developing new works. In year-long project-based residencies, residents spend up to 3 weeks of space in The Room working on their project in a process of their own devising; meet monthly with the full resident cohort for a meal and conversation; and have access to whatever additional resources we can muster as needs emerge.

Big thanks to prior residents Deepa Purohit and Emerie Snyder, who joined Susan, Jaynie, Sonya, and Deadria for two inspiring conversation sessions with potential residents, hearing all their very cool ideas (honestly: it’s our favorite day of the year).

Here are the artists and projects our panelists chose:

Playwright Erin Courtney will write a play with songs (in collaboration with singer/songwriter Todd Almond) that explores the Celtic roots of Halloween, the celebratory nature of survival rituals, and the relentless appeal of masks.

For a project that concerns the intersection of faith and literature, and reading as both private and communal experience, playwright Kallan Dana will convene and facilitate a temporary book club (composed of strangers who are mostly not theater people) to read and discuss four novels by Virginia Woolf.

Playwright Jeanne Dorsey, with collaborator Jackson Gay, will focus on a key theatrical element in her play The Kit: Made by Martha, about Martha Goddard, inventor of the standardized rape kit and a talented maker of miniatures: externalizing Martha’s interior life via Little M, a tiny figure (perhaps a puppet?) who inhabits a miniature room and is a metaphor for how rape victims, when not believed, are made to feel tiny.

Beef Bowls™ ambassadors Kedian Keohan and Minna Lee will collaborate on a play about figure skating, sports capitalism, and the rivalry between love and success, set at the Winter Olympic Games—and brought to you by Beef Bowls™.

To build an episodic, thematically-linked, multi-venue theater piece, playwright Arika Larson will compile a TV-style writers room of playwrights who collaboratively write a serial play; then recruit a producing team to make it happen simultaneously in various locations.

Playwright Deneen Reynolds-Knott and dramaturg-archivist Arminda Thomas will design collection and exhibition processes for Our (Re)collection: A Show & Tell of Memories and Mementos (working title), a community-sourced archival installation that will invite its audience to contribute their own ancestral legacies.

Playwright Jeana Scotti and director Tara Elliott will develop Furball—a new play about an STD derived from nonconsensual (cat) petting that explores our (failing) gynecological healthcare system and asks what sex on stage might look like if we detach it from naturalism and embrace it as farce.

Writer/designer Normandy Sherwood and choreographer Nikki Calonge will develop The Mushroom. It is a radial play with spokes pointing outward. Or an explosion of spores in the form of an evening at the theater. It is a pageant that gives a micro view of the forest floor. It has to do with awe and decadence and the question: “What knows it’s alive?”