CLAUDIA ALICK | LACRESHA BERRY | PAMELA CAPALAD | ALISON DE LA CRUZ | DYALEKT | DEBÓRAH ELIEZER | ZAC JAFFEE | YVONNE MONTOYA | PRATIK MOTWANI | DANIEL PARK | ZAHYDÉ PIETRI | JULIUS REA | AMY SMITH | JERRY SOTO | KRISTINA WONG
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 2020 – FoolsFURY Theater Company is proud to announce the program for its national convening of ensemble theater makers to be livestreamed Saturday and Sunday, September 12 – 13, 2020, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. PT both days. BUILD from Here: the future of ensemble theater is a call to action, featuring artists and activists in conversations and workshops about labor ethics and project finance reform, design and technology, education, accessibility, and equity and diversity from story selection and development to casting. Registration, free to all participants, opens mid-August at foolsFURY.org/BUILD.
Among the invited guests is Kristina Wong, a performance artist, comedian and writer. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Wong currently resides in Los Angeles where she serves as the elected representative of Wilshire Center Koreatown Sub-District 5 Neighborhood Council. A frequent guest on late night talk shows on Comedy Central and FX, and an actor in film and TV, Wong has earned praise for her “off-color” humor about “the ways race plays out in America today” (The New York Times). She’s created viral web series like How Not to Pick Up Asian Chicks, and she just launched the second season of the award-winning Radical Cram School. Wong will give BUILD’s keynote speech on the 12th at 10 a.m.
Pamela Capalad, a CPA and co-founder of Brunch & Budget in Brooklyn, NY, will join Amy Smith, former executive director of Headlong Dance Theatre in Philadelphia and currently a financial well-being trainer, and Daniel Park, co-founder of the worker-cooperative Obvious Agency and the Project Coordinator with the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. They will participate in a panel exploring concrete ways to break the “nonprofit industrial complex,” sharing history, new models and ways to work within organizations to open doors to new ideas.
Capalad will join her Brunch & Budget co-founder Dyalekt aka Brian Kushner, in a workshop titled “The New Common Sense” exploring the intersection of art, media and the racial wealth divide. With a background in theater and the law, Dyalekt has earned wide recognition as both a rapper and an educator. He has performed on the stage of the Bowery Ballroom and Oregon Shakespeare Festival as well as classrooms from Harlem to St. Croix.
One of foolsFURY’s producing partners in BUILD is the Network of Ensemble Theatres (NET), a national advocacy organization for ensemble theater makers. NET Board Member Alison De La Cruz will host a conversation about the value of aesthetic equity in ensemble theater – “the foundation is racial justice.” How will aesthetic equity practices affect casting, ensembles, boards, how artists tell stories and with whom?
Additional conversations will be hosted by Theatre Bay Area’s Theaters Advancing Social Change antiracist cohort, the Middle Eastern Theater Makers Alliance, and a group of artists who had originally been scheduled to participate in the 2020 FURY Factory Festival, canceled due to the global pandemic.
Sprinkled throughout the schedule will be several short excerpts of live performance. Invited artists include Lacresha Berry, based in Queens, NY, performing an excerpt from Tubman, a play about the American abolitionist and political activist reimagined as a young woman in today’s Harlem. Dyalekt will present a passage from The Museum of Dead Words, an interactive hip hop experience that analyzes the comments sections of various online articles circa 2016.
Zac Jaffee, Zahydé Pietro and Jerry Soto are members of Téatro Theatre Group in New York. They will present an excerpt from their play Mission San Raphael (Casa Manaña) about a talkative Airbnb guest who conjures ghosts from the Old West, as well as Puerto Rico and Italy. Yvonne Montoya is the founding director of Safos Dance Theatre based in Tucson, AZ. Her Stories from Home centers Latinx bodies, aesthetics and experiences from the American Southwest, taking inspiration from oral histories collected from Montoya’s older female family members.
Pratik Motwani, originally from Mumbai, India, currently teaches at the Dell’Arte International School in Blue Lake, CA. He combines puppetry, movement and storytelling in an excerpt from The Long Way, a work about immigration, assimilation and belonging. And San Francisco-based playwright Julius Rea will show an excerpt from Turning Point about an interracial queer couple who are looking to adopt.
“Ensemble theater is a particularly resilient and innovative wing of the American theater,” said foolsFURY Co-Artistic Director Debórah Eliezer. “It’s up to us to use our tremendous ingenuity and talent to reconstruct a more equitable world for Black artists and all artists of color in the theater we make, in the world in which we want to live and to hold each other accountable for our actions. How do we create safer environments based on aesthetic equity and racial justice? How will technology play a role in theatrical liveness? How and where will theater occur? I’m excited to see how we answer these questions and what we’ll build together.”
“In crisis comes opportunity,” said Claudia Alick, executive producer of Calling Up Justice and BUILD’s guest festival director. “We are in the midst of a pandemic, climate crisis and an inspiring uprising for racial justice. Our theater field has been fundamentally shaken, economically and logistically. The ways we connect, communicate and collaborate must change. How will we share physical space with safety? How do we build a new foundation for our field built on justice? We do this by gathering and allowing the artists to script the new future we will create in.”