A whole new kind of thing. Plus, BBQ.

Hey, friends and fans of Nebunele!

Nebunele's next project is something unlike anything we've done before. I want to tell you about it, and then I want to tell you about the awesome, chill fundraiser we're holding on Father's day. If you get bored of this blog post (I do tend to go on), go look at our special website about it! http://shameproject.org. There's a gallery page there with pretty pictures of what we're making. And for the impatient who like to party and want to skip to that part, here's the BBQ announcement.

The Shame Project grew out of a personal project I've conducted for a few years at Burning Man. I wear light-colored clothes and carry sharpies, and I walk around at the festival asking people to give me some of their shame. They'll write it on my clothing, and then at the end of the week, the shame-covered clothes are burned in the temple, one of the big cathartic burns at the end of the festival.

The project has led to some fascinating conversations about human insufficiency. Nearly everyone has something to contribute--a failing, a weakness. One woman told me about her dying father, how she didn’t want to visit him, and was ashamed that she wasn’t taking advantage of her last chance to know him. Others have told me about their downward spirals or battles with drugs; cheating on their partners; their failures when others were counting on them; their insecurities about not being as good or as smart or as beautiful as they could. Needless to say, the project has a way of opening up astonishingly vulnerable pathways to what makes us feel bad. And as the same things came up over and over, and as people thanked me for the chance to have this conversation and be accepted, and as people's eyes widened when they read the scores of collected shame already displayed on my garment (the same ones often repeated over and over), I started to feel like this is a deep thing we all have in common that we ought to acknowledge more.

So this year, the project is bigger. A team of 35 or so of us are collecting shame at Burning Man this summer. And we're building a temple of our own, a place to come to view the collected shame, see it on a grander scale, come to terms with the fact that we're all sinners even though we're trying our hardest, and we all still deserve love.

This is Nebunele Theatre's first foray into interactive performance art, and *certainly* our first large artwork installation. I'm excited about the morphing form. The thing that theatre has always done brilliantly, to me, is to bring our flaws to the surface, to help us deal with them in deeply personal ways. This format is even more direct, and I'm interested in hearing from any of you what you think about this kind of art. And if any of you go to burning man, I would love to hear from Nebunele fans what you think of the evolution of this project.

And of course: building huge temples in the desert costs money, and I am seeking donations, as always. If this project is at all interesting to you, please, please come to our fundraiser or drop a few bucks into our donation button on the website at http://shameproject.org. We're running this with all-volunteer labor, but materials and transport are expensive and we could sure use the help.

Speaking of that fundraiser! Here's the story:

The Father's Day BBQ  and Silent Auction Fundraiser for Temple of Shame

The Father's Day BBQ will be a shimmering day of chillness and family love. You know those relaxed afternoons you spent as a kid when your parents took you to the nearby craft fair, and there was a lawn with other kids to play with, and music, and yummy food and nothing to do except traipse around and love the summer? People stand around practicing juggling and eating meat on sticks and smiling because there is nothing more important to be doing at that moment?

Our barbeque, a fundraiser for the Temple of Shame, attempts to recreate those days of glory.

When: Sunday, June 19, 11am-2pm
Where: 910 17th Ave E, Seattle, WA 98112
Cost: $20 suggested donation at the door. Bring a check book for silent auction items!

More info below and at shameproject.org.

Father’s Day BBQ Playlist by The Temple of Shame
Release Party: June 19th, 2011 at AND
1.     Hungry Freaks, Daddy………………………………….FOOD
2.     Sugar Daddy ……………………………………………DESSERTS
3.     Father’s Drinking Up Our Christmas …………………DRINKS
4.     Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar………………………..MUSIC
5.     Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag………………………….SILENT AUCTION
6.     Daddy’s Little Girl ……………………………………….KID’S CRAFT AREA

Delicious BBQ food! Beer! Silent auction! Craft room for the kids!

Join us for a marvelously chill afternoon of delicious BBQ food, beer and cocktails, and a silent auction full of cool and unusual items like: a beginning home cheesemaking class, a guided alpine climb for 2, graphic design work, and a framed Diego Rivera print! While you eat and drink and listen to music, we’ll turn your kids loose on glitter and glue. A $20 suggested donation at the door helps send us to the playa in style.

Thanks for reading! Love to you all!
Yours in the constant quest for authentic interaction,
--
Alissa Mortenson
Artistic Director
Nebunele Theatre

Yay Theatrepoems!

Theatrepoems went down last night to much hilarity. We had a super good time, performed our gut-created work to an enthusiastic audience, and went home exhausted (after two days of teching, an afternoon dress rehearsal, to back-to-back performances, and strike. Everything about this project happened fast.)

One thing I missed, because I was so busy buzzing around getting stuff ready and then cleaning up, were conversations about each piece. In the last day, I've heard from lots of people with really interesting thoughts about each of the pieces they saw in Theatrepoems, and I decided to try another experiment. Part of the point of this whole shebang was to provoke conversation about collaboration, how things get made, and the results of that process.

Did you come see Theatrepoems? Did you work on it? Did you donate to help make it happen? Visit our discussion page and throw in your two cents! Check out the link "Theatrepoems Chatter" in the navigation bar above; it's just below "In the Pressure Cooker." There's a discussion for each piece and for theatrepoems in general. What do you think about it all?

So, so much gratitude to all the artists who took a chance on this odd little experiment, the folks who decided to buy a ticket and check it out, and the people who generously supported our Kickstarter campaign to make it go. It was a huge success, and we may well do this again next year--let us know if you want us to!

Love & delight,

Alissa Mortenson

Artistic Director

Nebunele

Some recommendations

For those of you in Seattle, I need to go nuts for a second about brand-new Seattle company Fathom's first big show: The Castle, an adaptation of the Kafka novel and a seriously well-crafted immersive world. http://www.fathomperformance.org/?p=61

From the moment you walk in the door, you are implicated in the play. The show is tight, disturbing, funny, gorgeously lit, and beautifully adapted. Plus, drink service during the show (bring cash!) I'm super excited to see this company inaugurate themselves with a mature, impressive work. It's THIS WEEKEND ONLY, Thurs, Fri, Sat, at the Satori Loft in the 619 Western building in Pioneer Square. And it's only ten bucks. Go go go. You won't regret it.

For those of you anywhere who like getting their butts kicked in hardcore physical training programs, might I suggest Double Edge Theatre's 3-week summer training intensive in Ashfield, MA? http://www.doubleedgetheatre.org/intensive.php I attended this in 2007, and it blew my mind, rocked my body, and changed my whole philosophy about what it means to be an artist. If you're looking for a life-altering kick in the pants, consider this. Ping me and I'm happy to go on about it at length.

And finally, if you do want to get your butt kicked for three weeks in June but you don't want to leave Seattle, our own Robyn Hunt and Steve Pearson are returning to Seattle this June for a revisit of the Pacific Performance Project (first time back in Seattle since they left!) Suzuki, slow-tempo, and movement dynamics work for grounded, powerful actors. This has been another life- and art-changing training experience for me, and I'll be there this year for sure. http://www.p3east.com/workshop.html

Love and motion!

Alissa

Toys & Bodies

Last weekend, 3/5 and 3/6, was fun. Leah's piece, News Roulette, recieved an awesome gift in the form of an amazing news story. Leah had decided to take the top story from the CNN portal on her phone at the moment rehearsal began, and use that as a jumping-off point for the work. The story that was on top was a human interest story about a doctor who saved his wife's life by giving her an emergency tracheotomy at home--which is to say, he STABBED HER IN THE NECK WITHOUT ANESTHETIC while she was having an aneurism.

This visceral moment made an excellent hook to organize the day around. After reading the story out loud and getting appropriately excited, the team (Kristina Thalen, Sarah Rose Nottingham, Carmen Cook, and Jonathan Coyne) dumped out their goody bags. Leah had asked everybody to bring a random assortment of props, not knowing what the day would look like, and they had obliged--the fairy wand that lit up and made a noise and the football-like nerf brain were my favorites. (sadly, I don't think either of those ended up in the final piece.)

What emerged from that was hours of play. What they ended up with is a very physical retelling of a crazy story with life 'n death stakes. Fun!

Allegra Lebel and her team, Laurence Hughes, Jenni Taggart, Sarah Rose Nottingham, Kristina Thalen, and Brittney Williams, talked to their bodies last Sunday. Or rather, their bodies talked to them. They spent the day as physical interpreters, listening and examining with a magnifying glass every particle of their bodies, and uncovering anxiety, joy, curiosity and desire. What we get is a sweet yearning journey through bits of ourselves, plus the first theatrepoem to use multimedia elements. Awesome!

You guys I am so lucky I get to watch all this!

Alissa

Buncha Goofballs

Cecelia Frye and her team, Marchette DuBois, Lyam White, Keira McDonald, Cathy Madden, Xan Scott, and Luke Saylor, are a bunch of awesome goofballs. What I expected to be a serious, meditative piece with fans and stones and breathing and stillness turned out to be a hilariously earnest group exploration of self-expression and relationship.

"Instead of shooting arrows at someone else's target, which I've never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bull's eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre." - Brian Eno

Making a Theatrepoem turns out to be an exercise in discovering what's already there. There ain't time for anything else. My experience of observing the process of this theatrepoem was: I watched a group of professional goofballs play around for a while, and then suddenly I was watching a piece that made me gasp, giggle and awww.

There is still this puzzle of editing in such a short timeframe. Maybe it's impossible. So far, every piece has ended up near ten minutes, while directors are mostly shooting for five. Maybe five minutes is too short. Maybe editing just has to get done the next day. We'll see how these pieces essentialize around tech.

Can't wait till y'all see these things on April 2nd!

If you need something to keep you occupied in Seattle while you wait for Theatrepoems, GO SEE Hearts Are Monsters at Theatre Off Jackson this month. I saw it in its last incarnation and it's a wonderful thing--if you like completely unapologetic performance, heightened desperation and throbbingly pathetic humanity, if you liked, say, Napoleon Dynamite, this may be your favorite play of the year. Srsly. Here's the ticket link: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/154504 Go.

Love & Goof!

Alissa