Category — Festivals

Talking with the team behind Spring Fling

When you ask six playwrights to write short plays on the theme “the morning after,” what do you get? A stage full of mermaids, Amish teenagers, soccer dads, women’s libbers, dirty dishes, and broken hearts.

I was lucky enough to be included as one of the playwrights in F*It Club’s 3rd annual Spring Fling, a short play festival that runs through Sunday at the Medicine Show on West 52nd Street. Since creating the festival was such a wild ride, I sat down with my collaborators to discuss the challenges and joys of mounting a fast-paced DIY production.

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Secret Theatre’s short play festival serves a smorgasbord of art

Welcome to Borough Play, our exclusive series on theatre in Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond

Short play festivals allow viewers to test the limits of their taste buds. The beauty of such a theatre smorgasbord is that if a particular piece doesn’t whet your palate, all you have to do is wait 10 or 15 minutes for another offering. Ultimately, even the pickiest and most discerning audience members will probably find something they like, and they may even be surprised to discover a style of theatre they haven’t experienced before.

The Secret Theatre in Queens is presenting just such a bonanza this month through. Its LIC One Act Play Festival runs through April 27, and in the spirit of radical audience engagement, viewers get to vote on which plays, directors, and actors they like the most.

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Lotteries and luck create a unique artistic vision

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Artistically speaking, the FRIGID New York Festival—which runs through March 3 at the The Kraine, the Red Room, and Under St. Marks—is often about the value of losing control.

Every year, the festival features 30 shows and hundreds of artists, but it finds them through chance, luck, and random drawings. Even though FRIGID is produced by the team at Horse Trade Theater Group, their tastes and opinions have  no bearing on what gets on stage.

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Inside the Focus 2013 Dance Festival

To kick off 2013, New York City will once again turn its full attention to the performing arts. The annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference joins hundreds of performing artists with presenters from all over the world in hopes of forging connections and fostering plans for future engagements. It’s like a giant shopping expo of performances, peppered with seminars, meetings, and parties.

But you don’t have to be a professional artist to enjoy what’s happening at APAP. Anyone can buy a ticket to the theatre and dance pieces on display.

Dance takes center stage from January 8-14. That’s when the Focus 2013 dance festival will appear at the Joyce Theater, Ailey Citigroup Theater, the NYU Skirball Center, and New York City Center.

The mission of this multi-part, multi-venue showcase is to highlight American dance with an eye toward international touring. With 30 dance companies performing on three stages over one week, both casual and passionate dance fans can find something satisfying.

For its part of the festival, the Joyce will feature eight companies, including NYC-based Camille Brown and Dancers. Ms. Brown has been nurtured and featured by the Gotham Arts Exchange, the founding body of Focus, so the relationship here between presenter and artist is one of longstanding partnership and growth.

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Inside this year’s festival of cutting-edge theatre

How do you prefer your cutting-edge theatre? As a 30-minute Hamlet adaptation in Farsi? As an 11-hour exploration of an ordinary life? Or how about as a Belarussian riff on the radical novelist Kathy Acker?
Whatever your experimental taste, the Public Theater will once again feel like home for 12 days in January.

That’s when the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference will bring more than 3,500 cultural tastemakers to New York, and the Under the Radar festival will once again ply these men and women with an intensely curated cornucopia of international theatre.

Longtime Under the Radar attendees—this is its ninth year—will recognize several of the groups that the Director of The Public’s Under the Radar festival, Mark Russell,  has invited back.

“This edition does sort of show the maturity of the festival, in that we have a lot of people who needed to be here again,” Russell says. “But it needs to be balanced, and I think we’ve done that this year with some new voices.”

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