Writers in Action: The Flea Theatre, New York (Performance)

April 24, 2017

New Dramatists
424 West 44th Street, NYC

The Flea Theater/Brown University MFA Project Residency 2017 featured brief excerpts from new works by Diane Exavier & Carlos Sirah followed by a meet & greet reception with the writers.

Presented by Brown University Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies in collaboration with The Flea Theater, New York (Artistic Director, Niegel Smith).

Diane Exavier ’17 MFA

Diane Exavier writes, makes, thinks a lot, and laughs even more. As a theater artist and educator, she creates performance events, public programs, and games that challenge the traditional role of the audience, inviting viewers to participate in the active realization of a theater that rejects passive reception. Her work has been presented at California State University: Northridge, New Urban Arts (Providence), West Chicago City Museum, and in New York: Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, Independent Curators International, Brick Theater, Medialia Gallery, The Invisible Dog, and more. Her fiction, poems, prose, and dreams appear in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, The Atlas Review, CUNJUH Magazine, and Daughter. Her nonfiction chapbook Teaches of Peaches will be published by TAR in Summer 2017. Exavier is a three-time recipient of the Roland Wood Fellowship for Theater Studies from Amherst College.

Good Blood
directed by Lilleth Glimcher

In an exploration of the power of intimacy and the promise of home, Good Blood follows the story of a Haitian family living in Brooklyn and their return to Haiti as they work to cure their history in the hopes of securing a future. From the journey of Caribbean immigrants as part of the African Diaspora to the arrival of a global epidemic in 1980s New York, Good Blood crosses language, time, and an ocean in a vulnerable attempt to question the contracts we make, the conditions we live under, and what it means to reach for a love that might outlive you.

Carlos Sirah ’17 MFA

Carlos Sirah is a performer, writer, and veteran. His work encounters exile, rupture, displacement in relation to institutions, local and beyond. His most recent theater pieces include: The Light Body and Planets Measured by Parallax. His work has been performed and/or shown at Poet’s House, Nuyorican Café, KGB, The Wild Project, Brown University, and the National Black Theatre Festival. Sirah has also performed on the main stage at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. He has developed work at Vermont Studio Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Warrior Writers in collaboration with William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, The Hambidge Center, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and The Blue Mountain Center. He is a facilitator and serves on the steering committee of Warrior Writers, a community of veterans who make art. Sirah also facilitates a weekly workshop at the Rhode Island State correctional facility. He previously worked as an organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War. Sirah is a Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat Fellow for 2017.

The Utterances
directed by Marina McClure

After a global, ecological disaster, and after the longest war (The War that Settles Dust) were-citizens, now refugees and fugitives, seek to rebuild, remember, and rename. The Utterances surveys a thousand years of future history. This utterance dives heart/headlong into the realms of Black Spectacular and Black Mysticism. An ensemble of willing participants is above all what is required. Those willing to stretch their bodies, minds, and spirits to understand this field of play; and the hope, of course, to also understand something about ourselves, our togetherness.

The Flea Theater / Brown University MFA Project Residency 2017

In their third year at Brown, students in the Writing for Performance program take up the third phase of their annual practicum. Action follows Articulation (first year, where writers engage with notation) and Atelier (second year, where the focus is on initial moves from text into live time and space through a rehearsal process). In Action, we build community, looking to develop conversations with a wider circle of collaborators (Providence, New York, and beyond), over a longer period of time (stretching out over the course of a year), by a range of means (readings, consultations, and an intensive workshop period that features an opportunity to engage with new audiences).

As a culmination of three years, the writers are asked to take their biggest textual risks, pressing at and beyond the most hopeful limit of what they know and believe their pages can do.

At the heart of Action is a fully reciprocal relationship between the The Flea Theater (NYC) and Brown University. Writers share a dynamic, creative, experimental, and professional space with a theater at the vanguard, while providing The Flea resident actors and directors with an opportunity to engage collaboratively with emerging voices in the world of theater, performance and activism.

The Action expands and cultivates our writers’ network, providing them with a year-long developmental process. Action offers opportunities to experiment with the spatial, temporal, corporeal, and public nature of their writing, encouraging them, with the support and guidance of Brown University and The Flea, to shape the environments in which they generate work, with the aim of igniting life-long artistic relationships.

The Flea Theater

The Flea Theater, one of New York’s leading Off-Off-Broadway companies, is delighted to be joining forces with the Brown University Writing For Performance Program. Under Artistic Director Niegel Smith and Producing Director Carol Ostrow, The Flea is known as a home for cutting edge productions and a haven for emerging artists. The Flea has presented close to 200 world premiere theater, music and dance productions since its inception in 1996 and is the winner of several Obie Awards, a Special Drama Desk Award for outstanding achievement and an Otto Award for political theater. Past productions include premieres by Steven Banks, Thomas Bradshaw, Erin Courtney, Bathsheba Doran, Will Eno, Karen Finley, Amy Freed, Sarah Gancher, Sean Graney, A.R. Gurney, Jennifer Haley, Hamish Linklater, Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio, Itamar Moses, Anne Nelson, Qui Nguyen, Adam Rapp, Jonathan Reynolds, Kate Robbins, Roger Rosenblatt, Elizabeth Swados, and Mac Wellman. Successes include The Guys as well as Drama Desk nominated She Kills Monsters, These Seven Sicknesses, Restoration Comedy, The Mysteries and ten World Premiere productions by A.R. Gurney. The Flea has just completed a $23M capital campaign and is poised to move into a new three theater performing arts complex in Tribeca this fall.

www.theflea.org

Brown University Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

The Brown University Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS) is the intellectual and artistic center at Brown for faculty and students interested in the aesthetic, historical, literary, practical, and theoretical explorations of performance in global perspective—theatre, dance, speech, performance art, and performative “roles” in everyday life.

In addition to the Undergraduate Program, the department offers a Doctoral Program in Theatre and Performance Studies, an MFA Program in Playwriting, and the Brown/Trinity MFA Programs in Acting and Directing. The department is a member of Brown University’s Engaged Scholarship Program and the newly-founded Brown Arts Initiative. Dedicated to diversity and inclusion and cutting edge theory and practice, TAPS produces innovative scholarship and creative work by faculty and students alike.