Available light [theatre]

Posting videos isn't often what you should expect from Available light, but this one is a clear exception.

We are proud to announce that next week begins The Columbus Hip-Hop | Theatre Project at the Arts Impact Middle School.

We've been in the planning stages with the Davis Youth Programs (Geoff Martin! Steven Anderson!) for many months, and it's finally here. A group of kids will spend a number of weeks in after-school classes incorporating hip-hop themes and elements into theatre, writing, and ViewPoints actor training. The result will be a hip-hop flavored show about their lives, their stories, and their points of view. They'll be dancing, acting, rhyming and rapping their way into a collaboration they won't soon forget.

We have special guests planned for the kids, and weeks worth of activities and projects that will help them to speak with confidence, think critically, and to relate to hip-hop culture at its best.

Watch this space for more, and then tune into the soon be launched HH|T website for weekly updates.

UPDATE: The website is now live. Click here or on the image above.

We have a new shirt shop. It's from Spreadshirt.com and it's much better than the old one. Check it out.

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Pardon our absence too, we were getting married and things like that. However ....

We are more than pleased to announce that the next Al[t] performance is only two weeks away. The Absurdity of Writing Poetry returns for a one-night only engagement in Cincinnati on Sunday, October 1, as part of InkTank's Writer's Weekend. Get your click on for more info. The show will be free, though any donations will be accepted afer the show.

Also in town for the Writer's Weekend is Ira Glass, host of NPR's This American Life. Tickets for Ira Glass's keynote address are only $10 and they're on-sale here.

So get down to Cincy for writer's weekend and spend some quality time with Al[t], Ira Glass, and the good people of InkTank. You will thank yourself for it.

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Get ready. We're about to get started with rehearsals for our next original show, Tomorrow is the Question. So, keep checking back and we'll be posting excerpts from the script and videos from rehearsal for your perusal.

Stay tuned!

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The Available Light 01 Festival
July 13-15 8pm
July 16 2pm
Columbus Performing Arts Center
549 Franklin Ave.
http://one.avltheatre.info

Available light [theatre] presents the first annual 01 Festival of solo performance July 13-16 at the Columbus Performing Arts Center. Each evening (and one afternoon) of entertainment features 3 one-person shows, created by artists from Columbus, Cincinnati, and New York.

Sean Christopher Lewis's I Will Make You Orphans (A One Man, One Mic, Hip-Hop Drama) is currently touring the U.S. and Canada and has already made stops in Victoria, Austin, Iowa City, Minneapolis, Albany, and Brooklyn. A genre-bending tale told entirely in rhyme, Orphans is the story of Sean Boogie - a confused white boy in upstate NY who believes he's "blacker" than his African American poetry professor. When his girlfriend becomes pregnant and his teacher questions his reality, Boogie is left questioning not only who he is but who he wants to be. Ken Webster of the Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, TX wrote, 'A brilliant writer and performer ... powerful, funny, and hugely entertaining. The performance, the writing, and the superb direction knocked me out."

In Jen Spillane's VIRTUE: did she fall or was she pushed?, deftly crafted characters share their passion, fear, and yearning between poetic bursts questioning modern virtue. As Spillane puts it, ?In what some are calling "post-feminist" America, the conversation about sexuality has been subverted into a backroom tug-of-war between our puritanical past and the Be-Young-Sexy-Hot present.? A show for men and women, VIRTUE rejects easy answers, acknowledging the dissonance the of advice (Girls can do Anything! Girls are Pretty! Be a Gentleman! Be a Lady!) lobbed our way. Roger Pille wrote in City Beat, ?This is the kind of theater that whirls around you while you're seated comfortably in the audience, but then it envelopes and consumes you when you leave. Easy? No. Fun? At times. Well executed? Always.?

Last, but not least, will be Available light's The Absurdity of Writing Poetry, which debuted in June at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. The play, about an artist who tries to give up his creative habits, received rave reviews in Cincy, including an ?A+? from City Beat, and a page 4 editorial that placed the show at the center of a manifesto for ?young Cincinnati.? Rick Pender called it "a stirring ode to creativity."

Each evening of the 01 Festival of solo performance lasts three hours, including two intermissions.
Tickets are $15 for adults, $8 for students and seniors. More information, including photos, reviews, videos, and tickets can be found at http://one.avltheatre.info.

This message was recently sent out to members of our Emailist. If you're not a member, be sure to visit http://avltheatre.info/emailist.html and input your name AND email address. Thank you.

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This is a repeat of something I posted on the Cincy Fringe blog. I'm re-posting it here, because it's just THAT important.

From the transcript of a speech given two nights ago by Eduardo Machado at the ART/NY event at the American Airlines Theater.
(Eduardo Machado is artistic director of INTAR Theater, head of the Columbia University playwriting program and a frequently produced American playwright.)

I have seen the theatre change so much... Just since the early 90's... from the feeling of being delinquents of society and feeling proud of that. To this farce where we believe we are all entitled to talent and success. No one is entitled to that. All we can hope for is the joy in the work, the joy of expression, the joy of creativity.

We are the theatre ... We're not supposed to be proper. We're not supposed to be corporate. We need only love creation. Finding value in true talent. In harsh criticism. In hard work.

We're supposed to belong to each other.

I hope you still feel this. This sense of community.

I feel it less and less. Maybe after years of being called difficult I have made myself invisible. Yet I still want to be a part. I want to scream with all of you. ... In this theatre.

But I will risk that inclusion. Because as Ms. Hansberry says, "The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

Let's forget about budgets and grants and is the audience happy. Let's create. Let's find that part of us that got us here in the first place. The part that does not feel like the rest of the world. The part that wants to rebel.

That part is on the other side of the wall.

And if we can prove that it's worth the struggle of climbing over, the theater ... will again be something to reckon with.

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From Scrappy Jack's World-Wide Theatricals and Dime Museum ...

1. Did you choose the stage for vanity?
2. Did you think it was a place to hide?
3. What makes you think people have time to sit and quietly admire your beautiful work of art?
4. What makes you think you have time to sit and carefully craft your beautiful work of art?
5. When Artaud called for no more masterpieces, did you see some sort of exception that applied to you?
6. Why spend your time saying dead men's words, whispering bedtime stories to a bored and sullen elite, when you can speak your own words, shouting terror, joy and revolution in front of enemies and friends?
7. If you're not entertaining an audience, what exactly are you doing out there?

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I am at the Humana Festival this week. But if you wanna read about that you gotta go here.

Good Festival so far. Looking forward to the SITI Co. tonight.

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