Blog
Announcing the 2019-20 Continuation Grant
Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) is pleased to award the $10,000 NET/TEN Continuation Grant for 2020 to TeAda Productions (Los Angeles, CA), T-Shirt Theatre (Honolulu, HI), ʻInamona Theatre Company (Honolulu, HI), and Ka Hālau Hanakeaka (Honolulu, HI).
NET/TEN Shareback: Touchstone Theatre and Pregones/PRTT - Five Insights (with one Bonus) Towards a More Effective Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Touchstone Theatre (Bethlehem, PA) and Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (Bronx, NY) engaged in a yearlong intercultural and intergenerational exchange centering on strategies for art-centered community engagement. Working in English and Spanish, the project engaged a diverse group of Anglo, Latinx, and other participants in ensemble-based playmaking, leading to a headline performance in the October 4-13 Festival UnBound in Bethlehem, PA.
NET/TEN Shareback: Guardians of the Flame Maroon Society & Deidre CreativeSoul - Experimental Installation as Container for Multiple Voices and Modes of Expression
Storytellers, singers, and musicians from Guardians of the Flame Maroon Society (New Orleans, LA) and poet, playwright, and performer Deidre R. Gantt (Washington, DC) created a performance inspired by 2019 (the 400th year since African slavery began in America), New Orleans' indigenous and Mardi Gras Indian culture, and the experience of being American in different parts of the African diaspora.
NET/TEN Shareback: Ninth Planet and Michael O'Bryan - Community Arts and Public Health: A Report
Ninth Planet (Philadelphia, PA) consulted with cultural strategist and youth advocate Michael O’Bryan (Philadelphia, PA) to design a new model of community responsive programming. Using Homeworld, a performance experience for 3-to-18-month-old babies and their caregivers, they reimagined their work to extend beyond a singular artistic experience and create potential for long-lasting community building opportunities.
Anti-Racism Resources
As the May 2020 uprising in support of black lives has sparked national reckoning on ways white supremacy culture has perpetuated violence in our society and our theaters, we are sharing some of the resources that have been assembled in the field to provoke awareness and action towards justice. These are in no way meant to be comprehensive; more of a few starting points that may be of particular relevance to our community.
NET/TEN Shareback: Sandglass Theater and Linda Parris-Bailey-Close Encounters
Eric Bass of Sandglass Theater (Putney, VT) and Linda Parris-Bailey (Knoxville, TN) shared and learned each other's approaches to writing, dramaturgy, puppetry, and song; they will examine how both artists stand in the moment of passing the legacy of their theaters into younger hands, while continuing to be creators of theater. The resulting project addresses both an exchange of creative practices and the act of leadership succession.
Announcing the 2019-20 NET/TEN Exchange Grant Recipients
NET is pleased to announce the 2019-20 NET/TEN Exchange Grant Recipients!
Artist's Laboratory Theatre (Rogers, AR) and Mateo Ozelotzin (Los Angeles, CA) will exchange theatre devising techniques and other methodology used to generate new work. Both collaborators come from different backgrounds of performance training, and offer each other a myriad of theatre making methods.
NET/TEN Shareback: TAPIT/new works, St. Mary's Care Center, & Verona School District - Sample Lesson Plans
TAPIT/new works (Madison, WI) engaged in a series of theater and movement workshops with St. Mary’s Care Center (Madison, WI) and Verona School District’s 18-21 Year Old Transition Program (Madison, WI) in order to create a multimedia theater work titled Our Stories, Our Process. This process refined and expanded TAPIT/new works’ model for community-based artmaking with social services partnersSt. Mary’s Care Center. The work concluded with a performance featuring an inter-generational cast of participants, including skilled nursing facility residents and youth with disabilities.
NET/TEN Shareback: Swim Pony Performing Arts & Toasterlab - Storytrails Immersive Storytelling Guide
Swim Pony Performing Arts (Philadelphia, PA) collaborated with Toasterlab (North Hollywood, CA), tech specialists in location-triggered performance, to develop Philadelphia Story Trails. Together the companies prototyped a unique mobile app that invokes the experience of immersive theater through a real-time drama delivered to audiences at specific points as they travel along the Philadelphia Circuit Trail system.
NET/TEN Shareback: Albany Park Theater Project & Third Rail Projects - Building an Immersive, Site-specific Production with Youth Ensemble
Albany Park Theater Project (Chicago, IL) partnered with Third Rail Projects (Brooklyn, NY) to continue the exchange of methodologies and collaborative creation process that previously resulted in the 2016 world premiere of Learning Curve. During Summer 2018, APTP and TRP will came together in Chicago for the first stage of devising a new, immersive, site-specific production that was created with and performed by APTP’s youth ensemble.
NET/TEN Shareback: Cleveland Public Theatre - Showing Core Values as a Host
Raymond Bobgan, Executive Artistic Director of Cleveland Public Theatre (Cleveland, OH) visited Mondo Bizarro (New Orleans, LA) to foster a deeper and reciprocal relationship, gain knowledge about Mondo Bizarro’s artistic creation techniques, and lead a week-long workshop. Bobgan was joined by Faye Hargate, CPT’s Director of Community Ensembles and a member of the Cleveland Core Ensemble (a resident ensemble company at CPT).
NET/TEN Shareback: Under the Table - Hosting a Fruitful Work-In-Progress Showing
Under the Table (Brooklyn, NY/Oakland, CA) traveled to the University of Idaho (Moscow, ID) to work with Professor Matt Foss on a new physical comedy inspired by heists, both real-life and fictional. Foss shared his expertise in creating simple yet innovative visual moments and worlds.
NET/TEN Shareback: Lucky Plush Productions - Tips on Touring in Cuba
Julia Rhoads, Artistic Director of Lucky Plush Productions (Chicago, IL), traveled to Cuba for the second phase of a creative exchange with Danza Teatro Retazos(Havana) to deepen her practice-based research and approaches to the intersection of movement and dialogue. The research and foundational material developed informed the company’s next feature-length work, Rooming House.
NET/TEN Shareback: Radical Evolution & El Teatro Campesino - 5 Things To Consider When You’re Hosting
For our NET Exchange Grant, Radical Evolution hosted ensemble members from El Teatro Campesino, our friends and creative partners, for a week long residency in New York City to continue working on a new performance piece inspired by the legend and history of Los San Patricios. This has been an exciting collaboration as we continue to create our production together. While we share similar artistic passions and interests, we operate in very different environments - El Teatro Campesino is located in rural Northern California in a small town called San Juan Bautista (approx. population 2,000) and Radical Evolution lives and works in New York City (approx. population 8,500,000). As you can imagine, the differences are clear. As a grassroots ensemble hosting another ensemble from out of town, we learned a lot about what to think through and how to be sure our guests had the best experience. We thought it would be valuable for other ensembles to know what worked best for us during this exchange.
NET/TEN Shareback: Dandelion Dancetheater's Bandelion Ensemble, Theater Grottesco & Paufve|Dance - Ensemble Collaboration Agreement
2014-15 Exchange Grant Recipients
Dandelion Dancetheater's Bandelion Ensemble (Oakland, CA), Theater Grottesco(Santa Fe, NW) and Paufve|Dance (Berkeley, CA) continued their ongoing exploration to collaboratively create a new performance piece, Blessed Unrest, a lively, interdisciplinary performance that will go into bars and nightclubs.
NET/TEN Shareback: Junebug Productions, 651 ARTS, and CAC - Soundtrack '63 Takeaways
Junebug Productions (New Orleans), 651 Arts (Brooklyn, NY) and the Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans) developed and presented Soundtrack '63 in New Orleans. Soundtrack '63 is a live documentary focusing on the civil rights movement in 1963 featuring stories and artists from New Orleans.
NET/TEN Shareback: Ping Chong + Company - 2 Day Workshop Outline
Sara Zatz, Ryan Conarro, and Bruce Allardice of Ping Chong + Company were invited by La Casa Mandarina, an anti-violence NGO based in Mexico City, to offer theater trainings to a group of local participants, both theater artists and social workers, in order to lay the groundwork for a future Secret Survivors production in Mexico City. The production will use theater to explore the experiences of survivors of sexual violence in Mexico.
NET/TEN Shareback: Hartbeat Ensemble - Postcards from India & International Travel Tips
HartBeat Ensemble (Hartford, CT) traveled to Bangalore, India to meet with The Indian Ensemble. The ensembles explored a new way of working together on an intercultural project that investigates the cultural phenomenon of offshore outsourcing.
NET/TEN Shareback: New World Performance Laboratory - From an actor’s journal: Notes on the process of constructing a solo performance
On Friday, January 22nd, NET hosted a Community Forum: Beginning to Heal Through Connection. We heard from a group of our Spring 2020 NET/TEN Remote Connection Mini-Grants recipients about the activities they embarked on last year and then opened up the discussion to dialogue with one another.
