You've come to the right place to grab a festival pass for (re)FOCUS Fest 2018. That's right, one ticket gets you into four shows! The theme this year is (re)CLAIM.
(re)FOCUS Fest 2018
For (re)FOCUS Fest 2018, four theatre makers focus on the theme "reclaim" and through shared performance.
Through poetic dialogue, immersive soundscapes, and lyrical movement, Kaleid Theatre, Pratima Agrawal, Alma's Engine, and TS Hawkins mediate on gender, race, sexuality, class, and everything in between, while exploring power, identity, narrative, history, and what it means to claim and, even reclaim, each.
(re)FOCUS Fest is a chance to (re)focus on themes that are all around us, but difficult to see, explore, and discuss. It is a celebration of our ability to confront ourselves, learn from each other, and rejoice in the myriad of experiences that make us who we are.
Show Descriptions:
Titles are for Little Witches: The Salem Bitch Trials
The bitches are coming. Tall bitches, crazy bitches, bitchin’ bitches, frigid bitches. We hear them as their broomsticks rustle the air and their legs slap in the wind. We rush to close shutters, lock doors, and clear porn out of our search histories. Still they come for us. Rippling up through our blood, tingling up over our skin, bursting out of our own throats.
They invite us – tempt us – compel us to look at the tweets that twisted them, the hearts that sustained them, the politics that rewrote them, the families that made them. Here are the tests we devised for them, the judgements we passed out, and the way the dangling ropes could never be final.
We look at them like we look in the mirror, and fumble towards honoring ourselves. With them, we ask: what is power? Where does it live in us? How do we reclaim it?
Voided
Pratima Agrawal
Voided is a solo theatre performance inspired by the true story of Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian female astronaut in space who died in the 2003 Columbia accident. Through the lens of racial representation and feminism, Pratima explores her struggle to “fit in” on her own terms as a performer in the City of Brotherly Love. What is it to exist in the world yet not exist in a community, what is it to be marginalized when seeking out unique roles or only find stereotypes, and what does it mean for our histories to become invisible after we’re gone?
Publik Private
A physical and poetic exploration of the inner lives of the Publik Universal Friend y la Monja Alferez and the conviction that these two unique historical figures had to their authentic genders.
Cartons of Ultrasounds
Written by TS Hawkins, Directed by Cheyenne Barboza
The societal machine churns embryos, girls, and womyn, into seclusion; waterboarding their freedom and manufacturing their wombs with assembly-line legislature. Prisoners to their gender, society has become the parasitic conjoined twin of the dogmatic cycle extending life sentences of female identified invalidation. With scantily clad images, pejorative song lyrics, and abusive homes heightening the maltreatment of the female form, we teach womyn to be the missing, the raped, and the forgotten.
Festival Schedule:
April 5 at 7:30 pm Titles are for Little Witches: The Salem Bitch Trials and Cartons of Ultrasounds
April 6 at 7:30 pm Voided and Publik Private
April 7 at 3:00 pm Voided and Publik Private
April 7 at 7:30 pm Titles are for Little Witches: The Salem Bitch Trials and Cartons of Ultrasounds
April 8 at 3:00 pm Titles are for Little Witches: The Salem Bitch Trials and Cartons of Ultrasounds
April 8 at 7:30 pm Voided and Publik Private