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Following up The Glassblock’s recent partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, Recital will continue the tradition of publishing a preview, a review, and a video in partnership with the five performances in the 2017–18 season of the New Hazlett Theater’s CSA Performance Series. Now in its fifth year, the series offers viewers the chance to become a “shareholder” in supporting five evening-length performances by new and emerging Pittsburgh creatives — that is, choreographers, musicians, playwrights, and performance artists. Applicants who make it through the competitive selection process are given a stipend, funds to be used for technical assistance from a pre-selected pool of stage, lighting, and sound designers, and an equipment budget. The series represents an opportunity for the audience to directly contribute to new art while the artists have a platform to experiment and stretch beyond their previous efforts.

Throughout the season, Recital will be meeting with each of the artists and bringing you a brief profile of them and their work in the days before their opening performance. We will publish a considered review or a post-show discussion with the artists for each performance, developed from post-show discussions with a consistent panel of local experts in related disciplines. Additionally, Recital will slowly build a feature-length documentary investigating the CSA’s history and this current season’s performances.

We hope you’ll enjoy this series, and without further word count, buy a share here, watch a video clip, and read about Clare Drobot and Nathan Zoob’s Between Us and Grace, a character-driven play that kicks off the 2017–18 season.

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By Mark Skalski, Pittsburgh in the Round

Theater is essential for its immediate nature, and for its ability to exist suddenly and without warning by people left out of pop-cultural conversations. For a few of my friends, the theater is something different, a fun but limited part of their media diet; for the rest, the theater is that place where they do Hamlet over and over again, so why bother?The New Hazlett Theater’s CSA (Community Supported Art) program, in many ways, is a rebuttal to that interpretation of the form. Their upcoming season, which begins on October 26th, contains the 5 most disparate shows I’ve seen performed at a single theater. All of them play with expectation, and all of them feature stories you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else. It is, in other words, a very active space.

“The thing I most enjoy about this program is that it isn’t static. We don’t believe that it can be,” says Bill Rodgers, CSA’s Director of Programming. “The CSA can give artists a launch pad of sorts. It can provide an opportunity for seasoned individuals to experiment.”

In other words, this is a program in which fresh voices are given an opportunity and a budget to bring their work to life, and artists with known-work under their belts are able to take risks and push boundaries. It’s a breeding ground for new thoughts.

Read the full article on Pittsburgh in the Round

As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, they are presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is their review of Kalopsia by Monteze Freeland, a collaborative response from editor Adam Shuck, arts and culture editor David Bernabo, and guest panelists Julius Boatwright and Adil Mansoor. And read their preview of the performance here.

In our pre-performance conversation with Monteze Freeland, the playwright and director of Kalopsia, which was staged at the New Hazlett on June 1 and 2, 2017, he explained the meaning behind the word made from a mash-up of two ancient Greek roots. Described as the delusion of seeing things as more beautiful than they are, the concept of kalopsia encapsulates a bittersweet duality: finding yourself enthralled but, ultimately, lost within what’s really an illusion.

re>Byrd, the protagonist of Kalopsia portrayed by Randyn Fullard, is a young, vivacious character. As the play opens, he and a coterie of singers welcome the audience with a funky musical number. “Byrd’s the boss,” they intone, and with a limber choreography and flashy costuming, Byrd asserts himself confidently. Purchase cheap generic Cialis online http://www.noc2healthcare.com/cialis/ for ED treatment.

But, really, Byrd isn’t the boss. At the close of the opening musical number, we learn he’s an employee of a Pittsburgh hotel, and his boss, Mr. Whitman, played with boorish gusto by Victor Aponte, shows his disrespect for Byrd, stopping off at a urinal and then, to groans of disgust from the audience, wiping his hands on his employee. Larry, Byrd’s co-worker and friend portrayed by Sam Lothard, looks out for Byrd. Byrd is hoping for a promotion, and he therefore has to suffer Mr. Whitman’s abuse. “Let me see you walk like a boss,” Larry coaches Byrd, urging him to take on a more masculine gait—which is played for laughs—speaking to something deeper, a layer of difficulty that Byrd has with fitting into the world around him.

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As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, they will be presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Follow along here.

It’s a “weird word,” actor and playwright Monteze Freeland admits, exotic and foreign, the kind that requires a pause before you attempt to sound it out: Kalopsia. A combination of two Ancient Greek roots, “kalopsia” refers to the experience of seeing something as more beautiful than it actually is. That tension between objective truth and subjective experience is a rich artistic field to mine, especially fitting for musicals, in which protagonists and their supporting cast suddenly burst out into song in a temporary heightened reality. By playing with that rupture that a musical number may bring to an otherwise realistic story line, musicals enhance our appreciation of how a character may be feeling.
But despite being an enticing state of mind—who wouldn’t want to see beauty in the muck?—kalopsia is also a delusion, the inherent obverse, the agonizing edge of the double-edged sword. And it’s the perfect name for a musical about someone with his head in the clouds: “Sometimes,” Freeland says, “there’s a down side to having a lot of big dreams. It’s fun to escape, but the drive back is not always great,” Freeland says.

In Kalopsia, which Monteze Freeland and collaborators wrote and which he’s preparing to direct as the closing performance of the New Hazlett’s CSA Series, we witness protagonist Bird, over the course of a few weeks, stuck in a state of delusion. An actor living in Pittsburgh and working in a hotel, Bird’s life is slowly falling apart—though he’s blissfully unaware of it. The people in his life, however, like his boyfriend who must stage a confrontation, or his family, who urge him to find religion, are acutely attuned to Bird’s delusion. When things in his life get tough, Bird retreats to a place of fantasy. As the severity of his reality grow, his dreams become all the more troublingly fantastic.

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on The As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, The Glassblock is presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is their review of Over Exposed by Lindsay Fisher, a collaborative response from arts and culture editor David Bernabo, guest panelist Johanna Lasner, and a secret guest reviewer. Read Lasner’s bio below, and read our preview of the performance here.

Afigure cloaked in light on an otherwise dark stage kneels front stage right, folding her hair into a ballet bun. “I have been evaluated on my appearance since I was a child,” a disembodied voice announces. “My first memory of criticism regarding my body was when I was 15.”

Lindsay Fisher, a Butler native, has returned to the area after building a career in the often cutthroat New York dance scene. She has worked with celebrated dance companies—Helen Simoneau Danse, Nathan Trice/RITUALS, Carolyn Dorman Dance Company—and performed works by famed choreographers like Twyla Tharp, Jiri Kylian, and Ton Simons. Her decision to work as a freelance dancer instead of with a company afforded her this variety of experiences, but that decision was also accompanied with a lifetime of judgment, especially as directed toward her physical appearance. Where to buy Propecia cheap in US learn more at http://www.trendingdownward.com/propecia-finasteride/ and get generic Propecia quality.

With Over Exposed, the April 6, 2017 performance at the New Hazlett Theater, choreographer and dancer Lindsay Fisher aims to reveal previously hidden layers of herself by letting the audience peer behind her curated, public image. In coping with the ever-present external judgement, Fisher learned to turn inward, hiding her insecurities. Now, Fisher promises the audience her “uncensored story.”

Read the full review on The Glassblock

As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, they will be presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Follow along here.

When she was four years old, Lindsay Fisher began taking dance lessons at a small studio in her hometown of Butler, Pennsylvania. Ten years later—thanks to her mother’s insistence, she concedes—Fisher had stuck with it. By high school, she was spending every night practicing until 11:00 p.m. “It became really obvious to me that this is what I wanted to do with my life,” she shared.
Inspired by another dancer who had attender her local studio, Fisher applied for Juilliard, where she was wait-listed. “I was a little heartbroken,” Fisher said, “but I generally believe that you end up where you’re meant to be.” So she studied modern dance at the North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem, where she was surrounded by faculty who were inspiring and driven, if not at times difficult to work with. After graduation, she headed to New York City. Buy Propecia no prescription fast delivery from http://www.trendingdownward.com/propecia-finasteride/ with visa and mastercard.

Starting out with a small dance company, Fisher learned that performing one person’s work for a long period of time wasn’t for her. She dabbled in commercial work—she appears in the 2007 feature film Across the Universe, a musical romance based on the Beatles catalogue, and she’s performed for several music videos—but the bulk of her time was spent as a freelance dancer.

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As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, they are presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is part of their review of A Love Supreme by Anqwenique Wingfield and Julie Mallis, a collaborative response from editor Adam Shuck, arts and culture editor David Bernabo, and guest panelist Anna Elder. Read Elder’s bio below, and read the preview of the performance here.

Meeting at her home in Garfield some weeks ago, Pittsburgh vocalist, musician, and composer Anqwenique Wingfield told us how her classical operatic training often entailed a rigidity that disregarded her love for funk, R&B, and jazz. “The truth is,” Wingfield explained, “it’s all in me.”

Divided into three acts and interspersed with visual projections from her collaborator Julie Mallis, A Love Supreme, which premiered at the New Hazlett Theater on February 16, 2017, is multi-layered, genre-blending personal proof and a woven composite of Wingfield as artist and budding composer.

 

Stage right, a pair of wooden doors with glass panes are stacked perpendicularly, adorned by a pair of boxing gloves, candle sticks, flashes of red and gold. Stage left, three small tables are cloaked in soft white fabric with glass bowls and water. And center stage, a patch of earth is ringed by potted plants, a light wooden trellis, dried flowers and herbs. As A Love Supreme begins, bathed in white light, Julie Mallis enters from stage right, gingerly and joyfully dropping little bits of folded paper like flowers around the set and then retreating. Enter Anqwenique Wingfield, approaching a music stand atop a carpet of sheet music.

 

From the outset, A Love Supreme’s subject matter is naturalistic in theme. “To fling my arms wide / In some place of the sun, / To whirl and to dance / ‘Til the white day is done. / Then rest at cool evening / Beneath a tall tree / While night comes on gently, / Dark like me,” she sings, a selection from Dorothy Rudd Moore’s 1976 song cycle Sonnets on Love, Rosebuds & Death that has adapted Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations.”

READ THE FULL REVIEW ON THE GLASSBLOCK

 

As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, they will be presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Follow along here, and learn more about how you can experience this season’s CSA here.

Soprano Anqwenique Wingfield excelled in her classical education, landing lead operatic roles, traveling abroad, and graduating with a degree in voice performance. But with a deep appreciation for funk, R&B, and jazz—she’s the daughter of a jazz musician—Wingfield chafed at the rigidity that sometimes underlined the training. “You have to pick one,” she was told, forced to decide between what was presented as two distinct fields. “What do you like more? What are you really into?” So she rebelled: She chose both.

“The truth is, it’s all in me,” Wingfield said during a recent visit to her home in the arts district along Penn Avenue. As the founder of the cross-discipline collective Groove Aesthetic, studio manager at BOOM Concepts, education director at the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, and more, Wingfield has carved out a creative space that not so much resists the strictures of her classical training as cultivates it into an original creation.

She and video artist Julie Mallis, BOOM Concepts’ creative director, are putting the finishing touches on A Love Supreme, the latest performance taking place at the New Hazlett Theater as part of its CSA series, and the two artists, who’ve collaborated for the past five years, share that urge to reimagine, experiment, and, above all, blend toward the avant-garde—not unlike John Coltrane’s landmark 1965 album, in part an inspiration and the performance’s namesake, which blended hard bop and modal jazz.

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As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, they are presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Below is a portion of their review of Redemption: Sons by Drs. Tameka Cage Conley and Jason Mendez, a collaborative response from editor Adam Shuck, arts and culture editor David Bernabo, and guest panelists Yona Harvey and Felicia Lane Savage. Read the full article here, and the preview of the performance here.

In the summer of 2015, Dr. Tameka Cage Conley and Dr. Jason Mendez kindled a friendship around a late night campfire deep in Ohio Amish Country. As part of their participation in Penn Avenue Creative, a 12-week initiative from the Kelly Strayhorn Theater aimed at fostering leadership in Pittsburgh’s creative arts community, Conley, who was a workshop facilitator, and Mendez, who was a program fellow, took part in a three-day retreat that ended up changing the course of both of their lives—and which brought them to the New Hazlett Theater, where on December 8th, 2016 they performed their Redemption: Sons to a packed house.

Redemption: Sons, which weaves personal stories from childhood to present, touching on memory, loss, pain, and joy, is strikingly intimate and simultaneously rich and spare. “So everyone’s just gone to bed?” Conley asks Mendez to open the performance, as she pours herself a drink and approaches him as he’s writing fireside, and we feel transported to the strange hush that’s left after the excitement of a crowd of people has dissipated. Purchase Viagra 100mg from https://www.rmhc-richmond.org/buy-viagra-100/ and cheap Viagra online without prescription. Crunching leaves barefoot, with a faint whistle of birds in the distance, Redemption: Sons places us in those woods with Conley and Mendez, around that small fire that illuminates a soft space in the larger expanse of darkness. This simple, direct staging communicates an intimacy, signaling to the audience a cue to lean in. Listen.

Throughout their conversation, first a bit stilted and then increasingly warmer as they get to know each other, Conley and Mendez exchange bits of influential writing and details about their personal lives—Conley recites Lucille Clifton’s succinct poem won’t you celebrate with me; Mendez tells of the birth of his son Cairen—and, little by little, Conley and Mendez realize the similarities they share in both.

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As part of The Glassblock’s sponsored partnership with the New Hazlett Theater, The Glassblock will be presenting a series of editorially-independent previews and reviews of the 2016-2017 Community Supported Art (CSA) Performance Series. Follow along here, and learn more about how you can experience this season’s CSA here.

 

On the second floor of the Carnegie Library Homewood branch one recent morning, we met with Dr. Jason Mendez, a professor with a background in urban and social foundation education, cultural studies, and Latino studies, and, FaceTiming from Iowa City, Iowa, where she’s currently a fellow at the celebrated Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dr. Tameka Cage Conley, a literary artist who works in poetry, fiction, essays, and plays. Though they’ve known each other for less than two years, Drs. Mendez and Conley have formed a close friendship that has turned into artistic collaboration. Accepted into the New Hazlett Theater’s CSA Series, Mendez and Conley are in the final days of preparing Redemption: Sons, a duologue based on shared experience of loss and trauma that in purposeful ways has condensed their relationship and correspondence into what aims to be a confessional, therapeutic performance.

In our discussion in advance of their December 8th debut, we touched on a number of topics, including the themes and stage development of Redemption: Sons, identity and family, and the experience of transitioning from the role of academic to one of an artist-activist. Below is a lightly edited transcript in advance of their December 8th debut.

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