River of Gruel, Pile of Pigs: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach
Photo by Jenny Larson
” … a playwright of terrifying gifts … frighteningly in command of devastating linguistic weapons.”
Time Out New York
A collaboration between the representatives of four Austin, TX theater companies (Physical Plant, Rubber Rep, Rude Mechs, and Salvage Vanguard Theater) and the playwright Sibyl Kempson, for the purpose of making a new theater piece. It is one of five New Dramatists/Full Stage USA Commissions for new work at different regional venues across the country. The group has been gathering together four times a year (once a season) in both New York and Austin, since March 2010, in a chaotic work format known as a Pig Pile. This grunting and confused conglomeration of squirming and squealing and snorting, with no discernible leader or centralized structure – neither of narrative nor of process – began to blindly assemble an unwieldy and highly associative collection of seemingly unrelated imagery, geography and aromas, that over time and layers of work begins to reveal an emerging, intimately connected web of enfolded and implicate mythology. The piece will premiere at the Fusebox Festival in Austin in April/May 2014. Since not all of the Austin collaborators (with the exception of composer Graham Reynolds) are able to make it to PRELUDE, we welcome an astonishing group of representatives of the New York tribes and clans to stand in their places for this evening’s presentation.
Artists involved: Jack Frederick, David French (video and projection), Johnny Gasper, Frank Hentschker, Todd London, Natalie Ann Mack, Erin Mallon, Emily Morse, Antje Oegel, Gavin Price, Graham Reynolds, Samantha Seerman, Tory Vazquez, Eva von Schweinitz (film and projection), John Steber, Michael Wiener, Sarah Benson.
Lead artist: SIBYL KEMPSON lives and makes theater plays in NYC and the Pocono Mountains. She is a member of New Dramatists, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and a founding member of the playwrights’ groups Joyce Cho and Machiqq. She is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program taught by Mac Wellman. Plays include Crime or Emergency, Potatoes of August, Restless Eye (in collaboration with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group), The Secret Death of Puppets, and others. Current projects include the Big Dance Theater production of her play Ich, KürbisGeist (an olde-tyme agricultural vengeance play for Hallowe’en) at the Chocolate Factory this very month of October 2012, Fondly, Collette Richland, a collaboration with Elevator Repair Service to premiere at New York Theater Workshop in Spring 2014, and an as-yet unknown collaboration with New York City Players at the Abrons Arts Center in the Fall of 2014.
The Full Stage USA initiative, conceived by New Dramatists and underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, addresses the field-critical issues of new works “stalling” in development with no resulting full production and the special challenge of securing subsequent productions after a world premiere. FULL STAGE has established five institutional collaborations between an eclectic mix of producing organizations from across the country. Each partnership provides a $25,000 commission to a writer; supports two years of enhanced writer-driven development in New Dramatists’ Playwrights Lab; and culminates in the full production staged by the partner theater.
Upcoming: In April of 2014 the piece will premiere in completed form at the Fusebox Festival in Austin with work-in-progress version shown at Fusebox 2013.