The 15th Annual
Out On the Edge Queer Theater Festival
Thank you for your interest in the
2006 Out On the Edge Festival
download a pdf of our press release
For all press please contact:
Joanne Barett
Joanne Barett Public Relations
617.547.2265
jbpr@comcast.net
Please check out some of the articles written up about our shows and visit our artists bios:
"Los Big Names"www.margagomez.com
Award-winning new york comedienne, Marga Gomez, has returned to the bay area to perform the west coast premier of her autobiographical solo show, “Los Big Names”. In it, she takes you back to New York in the 60’s growing up with her cuban belly-dancing mother and comedian father and their world of latino show business. And then she transports us to Hollywood in the 90’s and the start of her own show business career. She hilariously recants the many problems that were encountered along the way, and plays all of the characters. It’s loaded with laughs, well written, beautifully staged with clever visuals and sound effects, and superbly performed by one of the most talented andhardest working standup comediennes in the business. “Los Big Names” starring Marga Gomez, is now playing at the magic theatre thru August 21st.
For KGO Entertainment, I’m Jerry Friedman.
July 14, 2004
“Marga Gomez is absolutely amazing! Excellent work!”
“Overall, Los Big Names provides a vivacious, voyeuristic, and vicarious evening of poignant theatre. One-woman comedy (and drama) doesn’t get much better than Marga Gomez.”
-Tom W. Kelly, San Francisco Bay Times
“Marga Gomez and family make an enchanting show , a tribute to her showbiz familia, with consummate wit and grace by a born performer.”
“Gomez’s generous and irrepressible personality is at its sardonic best throughout a consistently entertaining 90 minutes.”
-Robert Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian
“The explosive Marga Gomez returns to the Bay Area in her Latino family saga Los Big Names.”
“Marga has a dynamic high energy that keeps the audience laughing…and she does wonderful impersonations of her parents and other uproarious characterizations.”
“She is a wonderful storyteller and has amazing wild energy when telling these stories.”
- Richard Connema, talkinbroadway.com
www.paulzaloom.com
WHAT? A mutation of the traditional Middle Eastern Karagoz shadow puppet play (famous in Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Syria) about the consequences of being on the fringes of society…EVERY society. Periodically the show is interrupted by cantastoria, or picture performance, an age-old story telling technique; employing his weird and amusing drawings, Zaloom recounts the U.S. Marines repeated efforts to recruit him (he's sorta old for the Marines: 54. He's also gay…etc.) It’s all comedy, needless to say.
HUNH? The shadow show tells the twisted story of an Arab, secular humanist/Quaker/Buddhist/agnostic/political refugee/immigrant/queer/artist/weirdo’s adventures while being comically pursued by various enemies: Syrian Secret Service, Israeli border guards, Al Qaeda, Homeland Security, the Statue of Liberty, Christian “Ex Gay” activists, and U.S. immigration vigilantes the Minutemen. The idiot savant Karagoz foils their evil plans, dispatching them one by one with subterfuge, obfuscation, and cheap puppet gimmicks. They all fail; he triumphs. Zaloom jiggles his puppets, recounts absurd emails with Marine recruiters, creates the entire soundscape with his voice, and uses drawings to illuminate the perverse workings of our “civilization” with a frontal comic assault.
WHO? LA artist Paul Zaloom started with Bread and Puppet in ‘71, and went on to create 12 solo puppet shows, including Fruit of Zaloom and Zaloominations. Guggenheim Fellowship, OBIE, BESSIE, LA Weekly Theater Award, NEA grants, etc. Played Beakman on TV science show, Beakman’s World for 91 episodes and much acclaim. Zaloom is currently working on the toy theater, high def, feature length puppet film of Dante’s Inferno starring James Cromwell and Dermot Mulroney. www.dantefilm.com/
QUOTE? “One of the most original and talented political satirists working in the theater.” Stephen Holden, New York Times.
"Beakman in Person!" www.paulzaloom.com
WHAT IS BEAKMAN IN PERSON!? Based on the Emmy winning children’s science TV show Beakman’s World, Beakman in Person! features a series of fun science demonstrations with plenty of audience participation and the trademark Beakman goofy humor. Paul Zaloom, as the eccentric scientist Beakman, dazzles and amazes his fellow humans with a series of perception defying and belief suspending demonstrations of intriguing scientific principles.
WHAT HAPPENS? Watch Beakman make a flying bat materialize in thin air! Marvel as Beakman breaks the sound barrier in front of your very eyes! Behold as Beakman challenges audience members to correctly handle a rubber chicken! Beakman also demonstrates the center of gravity and some very cool optical illusions!
WHO IS ZALOOM? Paul Zaloom is an Obie-winning performance artist, puppeteer, and political satirist who has written, designed and performed 11 solo shows, including Fruit of Zaloom, Sick But True, and his current Mighty Nice. He’s performed his work on 9 tours to Europe and in 40 of the states, including shows at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Walker Arts Center, UCLA Performing Arts Series, and King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut. Zaloom has received four National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work. For 91 episodes, broadcast all over the world, he has played the loony scientist Beakman, as well as touring the live show nationally.
“As Beakman, Mr. Zaloom practices a decidedly cool brand of science.” NEW YORK TIMES
“Fact: 90% of the scientists who ever lived are alive today. Fact: the lively host of Beakman’s World may be funnier and more informative than any of them.” WASHINGTON POST
“The irreverent Beakman can satisfy nearly anyone’s curiosity with an answer that is always right on, and can be wry, energetic, sarcastic, engaging, funny, and loud.” LOS ANGELES TIMES
"Nut/Cracked"THE BOSTON PHOENIX
(Boston, MA)
January 13-19, 2006
After-dinner nuts
David Parker at Concord Academy
By Marcia B. Siegel
The Christmas season careered to a finish January 5 at Concord Academy with yet another Nutcracker, sort of, the first complete Boston performance of David Parker’s Nut/Cracked. Parker and the Bang Group showed sections of the work-in-progress two years ago at Summer Stages, and it’s now evolved into an hour-long extravaganza of dance diversions and visual one-liners with a distant relationship to the perennial ballet.
Parker dispenses with the ballet’s plot and characters, retaining only trace images of its most cliché’d devices. What does touch off his imagination is Tchaikovsky’s music, or rather a few iconic portions played and replayed via soupy choral arrangements, Ellington, bebop, clickety-clack percussion, and handbells, as well as the symphonic real deal. Anyone saturated with the standard Nutcracker can visualize the dancing Sugar Plum, the Grand Pas de Deux, and the exotic divertissements as the Bang Group are dismantling them.
In a version of the Waltz of the Flowers played by the Glenn Miller band, Kate Digby unrolls a scatter rug of bubble wrap and then skirts its edges for a while, letting the audience savor the possibilities. Finally she throws herself onto it for one satisfying explosion, then goes on to slam and stomp the life out of every bubble with a satisfying orchestration of pops. The same music, played straight, recurs for an ensemble dance, with bouquets handed around and sneezes augmenting the musical climaxes.
Each of the 22 numbers comes with an incongruous prop or costume detail to start a trail of dancing jokes. Three women try to do a Chinese dance but are soon overshadowed by Parker, who appears with a take-out box and a long strand of spaghetti in his mouth. I can’t tell you what the women did, but Parker managed to inhale the last of the spaghetti just as the music ended, and he walked off chewing it. Later, he upstaged the entire company, who were doing a finger-pointing, hip-swiveling dance to the Reed Flutes (Marzipan) music, by teetering across behind them on pointe. They continued dancing but switched their focus en masse, from brazen audience-beguiling smiles to inward gazes.
I think Parker’s point here, and in the whole piece, is to demystify the conventions of ballet. The corps de ballet’s job includes not only negotiating a set of carefully plotted steps but being able to fade into the background when the star appears. In the Grand Pas de Deux, Parker and Jeffrey Kazin parody the kinky mechanics that ballet partners try to conceal as they maneuver into graceful turns and poses, with an orgy of lascivious thumbsucking.
What comes through Parker’s antics is a deep affection for dancers and what they have to go through. The Bang bunch get choreographed into tricky positions and can’t untangle themselves in time, so they dance gallantly on into the music like toads. They wrench into bizarre but artistic group formations. They forget which way to face but they keep doing the steps and hope they don’t collide with anyone.
Kazin and Parker maintain a perpetual rivalry and attraction. Whenever they meet, they begin a co-dependent dance. It could be a side-by-side shuffling tap routine, or a Cubist nightmare of interlocking shapes, or a turf war over a wine glass that ends in a falsetto chorale to the Snowflakes tune. They may need each other, but they’re an uneasy match: Parker, the primo, vain and lordly, capable of making a classically pure attitude pose among his klutzy pointe bourrées; Kazin, the second banana who nevertheless gets to show off his speedy pirouettes and windmill turns at every opportunity.
When the whole troupe finally come out to fling themselves into a series of bows, the audience is in love with them all, Parker, Kazin, Digby, and Cristina Aguirre, Marissa Palley, Nic Petry, Amber Sloan, Emily Tschiffely, Zack Winokur, and Anne Zuemer. On the last note of the coda, they toss celebratory fistfuls of snow into the air.
"Queer Theory"
Queer Theory pokes fun at the academic idea of a 'queer body' that is theorized beyond all recognition, traveling across time and geography to discover queer people running the gamut of American history and in all of its various cultures. The work is inspired by the rise in postmodern theory that considers everything as a "text" that can be "read" and discussed, seemingly without reference to everyday experiences of lesbi, gay, bi, trans people. What happens when a group of academics try to promote an emerging field to a general audience?
Thomas DeFrantz holds degrees from Yale, the City University of New York, and he earned his PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He has taught theater at Stanford, NYU, and at MIT, where he is Associate Professor and holds the Class of 1948 Career Development Professorship. A director and choreographer, he staged Pure PolyEsther for the Theater Offensive, choreographed Tom Stoppard's Rough Crossing for the Geva Theater in Rochester, NY, and directed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf for the MIT Dramashop. He is an active member of the Drama League of New York. He provided movement to Daniel Alexander Jones’ Bel Canto at the TTO, and directed and choreographed Of Thee I Sing for Emerson Stage. He recently founded the MIT Dance Theater Ensemble, and SlippagePerformance Interventions in Culture and Technology, both in residence at MIT.
His research centers on African American performance. His current book projects include Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance and Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture. A working director and choreographer, DeFrantz has affiliations with the Drama League of New York and the International Association of Blacks in Dance. He is the faculty advisor to the Dance Theater Ensemble at MIT.
Classes Taught:
a) Foundations of Theater Practice, 21M.611
b) African-American Performance, 21M.712
c) Selected Studies in Theater, 21M.713
d) Dance Theory and Composition, 21M.675
e ) Dance Production, 21M.880, 21M.88)
f) Hip Hop, 21M.775
Links:
a) Alvin Ailey
b) Drama League of New York
c) Society of Dance History Scholars
d) The Theater Offensive
"DeFrantz's study...is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape."--Village Voice
"Alvin Ailey was a warm and generous mentor and friend. He was also an artistic genius of the dance. Dancing Revelations is a valuable resource for everyone who has enjoyed a performance by the Alvin Ailey Aemerican Dance Theater."--Sylvia Waters, Artistic Director, Ailey II
"Alvin Ailey founded America's most famous dance company and created in Revelations its best known dance composition. Our wish for an appraisal of Ailey the artist and for a probing analysis of his choreography has been brilliantly answered by Thomas DeFrantz in this richly textured exploration of the Ailey legacy. The scholarship is impeccable, the analysis profound. Dancing Revelations is superb. Bravo!"--Richard A. Long, author, The Black Tradition in American Dance
"Surely Alvin Ailey's Choreographic Legacy deserves serious scrutiny. Finally, Thomas DeFrantz offers a complete analysis of Ailey's dances and their meaning. An important volume for anyone interested in the history of dance, African American culture, and how modern dance is viewed around the world today."--Donald Byrd, choreographer and Artistic Director, Spectrum Dance Theater
"Surely Alvin Ailey's Choreographic Legacy deserves serious scrutiny. Finally, Thomas DeFrantz offers a complete analysis of Ailey's dances and their meaning. An important volume for anyone interested in the history of dance, African American culture, and how modern dance is viewed around the world today."--Donald Byrd, choreographer and Artistic Director, Spectrum Dance Theater
About the Author(s) : Thomas DeFrantz earned degrees from Yale, the City University of New York, and the Performance Studies Department of New York University. He organized the dance history program at the Ailey School, and is editor of Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. His writings have appeared in the Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, and the Village Voice. Also a performer and choreographer, DeFrantz has taught at NYU and Stanford University. He is currently Associate Professor of Theater Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.