WHAT'S GOING ON? (from Brecht's Good Person of Szechuan), Generic Ensemble Company at the Salvage Vanguard, May 3 - 11, 2013

Generic Ensemble Company in conjunction with the Lucky Chaos Theatre Project presents

What’s Goin’ On? (Workshop)

Friday-Saturday May 3-4; 10-11, 8 pm

Salvage Vanguard Theatre (2803 Manor Rd, Austin, TX 78722 - click for map).




 








 
What’s Goin’ On is a an ensemble-based, original performance reinterpreting Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, The Good Person of Szechwan, exploring binary notions of Good/Evil, Male/Female, Wealth/Poverty, Coercion/Consent and Artifice/Authenticity. Simultaneously critiquing Brecht’s treatment of gender, sexuality and orientalism in Szechwan while also drawing inspiration from it, this show examines the question: What does it mean to be virtuous in our current historical moment, when societal pressures and inequality continue to marginalize our bodies and lives?
Created from scratch by the performance ensemble, What’s Goin’ On? employs new text created by ensemble members layered with activist aesthetics, choreographed movement, indeterminate games, quotidian rituals made extraordinary, and simultaneous conflicting actions to present a dense and complex collage. Drawing material relevant to ensemble members’ daily lives, What’s Goin’ On? reflects the individual identities and personalities of each collaborator, while also reflecting The Generic Ensemble Company’s continued commitment to make the invisible visible through bold, socially relevant, body-centered theatre that showcases mostly-queer identified, mostly-people of color who are mostly women-identified.
This piece is an in-progress performance featuring: Morgan Robyn Collado, Kimberly Curette, Kirsche Dickson, Ashley Hicks, Anna McConnell, James McMaster, Julie Moore, Julián Padilla, Saray de Jesus Rosales, Wendy Vastine, Leng Wong, and kt shorb with support from Kimberly Alidio, Margaux Binder, Paige Binder, and Laura Khalil.
Tickets are sliding scale $5-10.
What’s Goin’ On? is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division.
 
(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Upcoming: The Experiment, staged reading by Generic Ensemble Company at theVortex Repertory, August 11

Found on-line:

Generic Ensemble Company

presents

The Experiment

an in-progress reading of the work

written by Ana-Maurine Lara and kt shorb

featuring: Krysta Gonzales, Saray De Jesus Rosales, and Julianna Wright

Thursday, August 11 at 7 p.m.

at The Vortex Repertory Company, 2307 Manor Rd. (click for map)

What does it mean to be human? The imaginations and desires of Dolly the Cyborg and Lucy the Mutant come together in a laboratory ruled over by Dora the Attendant. The Experiment explores historical legacies of colonialism, world's fairs, and scientific inquiry by drawing from personalized stories of queer and racialized resistance. This staged reading will showcase an in-progress script written by co-founders of the critically acclaimed Stamp Lab, Ana-Maurine Lara and kt shorb.

Donations encouraged, but none turned away for lack of funds.

Upcoming: Before This Was Texas, Generic Ensemble Company at Cohen New Works Festival, March 28

Received directly:

presents

Before This Was Texas

an in-progress showing
with kt shorb, Saray de Jesus Rosales, Krysta Gonzales, and Carole Metellus
With poetry by Kimberly Alidio
Monday, 2/28 at 8:15; Kayim Atrium (Trinity Street entrance to the Visual Arts Center in the Art Building on University of Texas at Austin campus)


Part of the Engaging Research component of The Cohen New Works Festival presented by the University Co-op.

Stuck on GeeDot, Generic Ensemble Company, January 22 - 30

Their choice of a company name offers a hint of the deadpan drollery of their approach to art and to the audience. In a town that whelps new theatre companies as if it were a puppy mill, these young women label themselves the "generic ensemble company."

Generic as in "common" and "absolutely typical" or as in "no longer under patent" or, reaching a bit, as in "an embodiment of an abstract ideal." And generic as in "gender," for their credo states in part, ". . . we strive to promote, foster, and engage performance, writing and ideas of/with people of color, queers, gender queers, women, working class people, immigrants and youth."

There's a bit of swagger in that but no arrogance toward the audience. Unless you count the moments when the two young actresses in their bowler hats and nondescript (generic) costumes peered at me with close-up, polite curiosity from several angles and pronounced themselves puzzled. "It must be a piece of modern art."

This thoughtful and creative re-interpretation of Beckett's Waiting for Godot takes place in a frame house on a dark street in east Austin near the intersection of Pleasant Valley and Webberville Road. The company painted the house number on a banner and hung it in the front yard so we wouldn't miss them completely in the darkness.

The public space was the living/dining room area and part of the kitchen space. Walls, windows, beams and bar were draped with blank, white sheets. As the 10 or so of us gathered, a woman wearing a bowler hat was sitting slumped forward in the middle of the playing space, for all the world like a Bolivian market woman who had forgotten her traditional costume. She re-animated as another, more alert and taller young woman, also in a bowler hat, joined her. We learned quickly that the shorter of the two was "Gohgoh"; the more animated was "DeeDee." The names directly mirror the nicknames given by Beckett to their prototypes Estragon and Vladimir.

Read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .