PEP | Performers Exchange Project

About a year and a half ago, Jennifer Tidwell and Sian Richards of PEP invited all the artists they knew to a monthly gathering at the Bridge called ASSEMBLY. The purpose was to create a forum whereby all types of artists in Charlottesville could socialize, present works in progress, request help on projects, and seek collaborators.

It remains our belief that more unity and collaboration among individual artists in our town will lead to a more vibrant and mutually supportive arts scene in Charlottesville, and might yield a voice to speak to local government and funding organizations.

Originally the group was a word-of-mouth, by-invitation sort of thing, but now PEP is opening up ASSEMBLY to anyone interested in the Charlottesville area. It happens the 2nd Sunday of every month, from 8:00 to 10:00. Here are the remaining dates in 2010. Mark your calendars and check it out!

• September 12
• October 10
• November 14
• December 12

Yesterday, Sian, Jennifer and I headed to Roanoke for an afternoon of experimentation with Hollins U’s MFA Playwright candidates.  They were very game – took their shoes off, threw themselves (unrehearsed) into some Chairman Mao exercises and basically did whatever we told them.  Suckas.

Seriously, it was fantabulous to see so many playwrights with experience as actors, directors, theatre technicians – and all interested in the collaborative process of building performance to boot!  They created short individual performance etudes, wrote short bits of text (natch) and used these elements, in groups of three, to create super short performances.  Of course, they had some random inspiration to contend with: tarot cards and other source material around Gypsy history, folklore and fortune telling.  This source material just happened along, and since we PEPsters are in love with the value of randomness, well we just took the ball and ran with it.

Anyhooters, it was gangs of fun and the playwrights concocted some impressive stuff, so here’s a shout-out to all our willing and very able MFA students for participating in our experiment.  And many thanks to Todd Ristau, our host.

Just as an FYI, we’ll be in Roanoke on Monday evening, July 5, at the Taubman Art Museum for a “talk” about our performance history, how we got started, how we work and other unbelievably earth-shattering information.  Don’t worry peeps!  Even though it’s a “talk,” we promise it will be lots more fun than the usual variety (think disgruntled parents, principals, significant others).

If you’re curious about our lovely mistress Process, and wonder when you too might meet her, just jingle us up or email us, (or whatever you 21^st century peeps do) we’d love to work with you…

Martha

PEP will be heading over to McGuffey Art Center tomorrow June 3rd to participate in Women in the Arts!

Piedmont Council of the Arts is holding it’s Women in the Arts Preview Party and we will be performing an excerpt from Our American Ann Sisters.

We are really looking forward to giving some new people a peek at the work we have been doing and to check out all the photographers work featuring some of the women in our local arts community. Click the party link above for ticket information. The party will be going from 5:30 till 7:30.

We hope to see you there!

PEP

Dearest Friends- You helped us reach our goal (and then some!). THANK YOU! We just spent last week preparing the show for touring. Stay here for more updates…love, PEP

Hi New and Old Friends of PEP, won’t you give a lil something to help us take our newest work to other places? We set up a KICKSTARTER project to make it easy. Give as little as $5. Giving more gets you some cool PEPpy gifts…

We begin our tour of our newest original play Our American Ann Sisters with a two-day run at The Hamner Theater in Nelson County on Thursday, March 25th, and Friday, March 26th. Both shows are at 7:30. Tickets are $10. Call The Hamner for information and ticket reservations at (434) 361-1999.

video by Brian Wimer

We feel so honored to receive all this lovely praise from people who saw Our American Ann Sisters:

“I never go to the theater. Perhaps once a year I’ll see a play (perhaps not). I came to yours because I thought that it would be fun to see what you and your colleagues had created. I was completely blown away. Of course it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but I was captivated.”

“Don’t miss this one…”

“Ok, so I would really spend two hours watching you fold laundry, because your sense of your physicality is absurdly compelling. Fortunately, I got to watch you embrace a broad spectrum of characters with other equally irresistible actresses tonight. Thank you all for creating such a rich theatrical experience!”

“I’m too tired to wax as rhapsodical as I’d like this evening, but I did want to say how much I loved the whole thing, and especially that Sophia’s play was the cat’s pajamas. Wearable fainting couch! “

“you were amazzzzing. the play was so shockingly, rockingly fantastic. brava!”

“It was touching, hilarious, and thought-provoking and I thought you were all brilliant and lovely….I sincerely hope this isn’t the last time Ann Sisters hits the stage. “

“What an awesome evening of entertainment.I laughed so hard during the finale dance as Jude struggled with the enormous paper screen. The costumes were just magnificent, Kay’s MC bustier, Sian’s fainting couch, Kay as the old man of the woods, Jen as Hawthorne. Wonderful! The consummation of Hawthorne and Sophia’s love under the skirts ala Gunther Grass’ Tin Drum was perfect! A tour de force. Thank you Thank you Thank you.”

“soo good…an amazing show…”

“Fabulous!”

“LOOOOVed the show, cant remember when i’ve laughed so hard! Victorian gal my fav. thanks!  “

“you guys were awesome! LOVED the show…congrats on a job well done – hope to catch it again.”

From Clare Aukofer at The Daily Progress:

And now for something completely different. No, it’s not Monty Python. It’s “Our American Ann Sisters,” which had its world premiere Friday in the Live Arts Upstage.

This is performance, but not a play. It’s theater in its purest sense, performance with text (and context, and even subtext) but no script, a story informed by performance rather than the other way around. It’s women gone wild, aided and abetted by men in lesser roles or entirely offstage.

Though the show is in the Live Arts space, it’s a product of the Performers Exchange Project. The group as such came to be in 2005, but its founders and members (Martha Mendenhall, Sian Richards, Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, Kara McLane Burke and Doreen Bechtol) are area theatre veterans, sometimes in more conventional work, sometimes with other unconventional groups, including Foolery and the Zen Monkey Project.

According to the program, this show began conceptually more than a year ago, with the idea of staging a “historical re-visitation of the ideas and philosophical writings of the Transcendental thinkers.”

As time, work and creativity transcended that idea, it morphed into a focus on the “19th-, 20th- and 21st-century experience of growing up female.” And that led the group to three American sisters – Mary, Sophia and Elizabeth Peabody, women who all made significant impact on the America of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and who certainly transcended the expected roles of women of the time.

Don’t worry. It’s still really funny, because one thing women have learned over the years is to laugh at our lives, even when they seem least laughable.

There’s no way to know whether the sisters would have laughed at these very liberal interpretations of their lives, but they certainly would have supported something – almost anything – different from the status quo of the society into which they were born.

The show defies description, but is structured into three segments, each focusing on one of the sisters. They all have their moments, but a favorite is the second of the three, focusing on on artist and semi-invalid Sophia Peabody (Sian Richards) just before she weds Nathaniel Hawthorne (yes, that Nathanial Hawthorne) – and influenced by, among others, Phyllis Diller and Frida Kahlo.

One of its funniest elements is her costume – or is it the set? What makes it work so well is that Richards remains in character, though the character is admittedly a little wacky. In fact, a strength of the show is that most of the performers play the ridiculous completely straight, without unneeded accessories.

An exception might be Kay Ferguson, who’s not a regular member of PEP but who participated in this project. Her bio notes that she’s studied clowning, so she acts as sort of a ringmaster for this circus of ideas. Jude Silveira takes his role as the Beautiful Assistant quite seriously, so he’s very funny.

This is creative theatre at its finest, with a whole host of creative minds to credit. Kara McLane Burke is listed in the program as the person who “cajoled and maintained” the director and performers, while Mendenhall conceived and directed the show and Bechtol, Ferguson, Tidwell and Richards created and performed it. John Paul Scheidler’s set couldn’t be better, nor could Jenny McNee’s costumes, especially when one of them marries part of the set, making for laughs and a good point.

It’s all good, they’re all good and this is a really funny show that remembers the audience while not neglecting creative integrity for its creators. In short, it’s really good theater.”

Thank you to everyone who made this run possible: Live Arts, our Donors, our Production Team, and our Audience. Onward to the next phase. Stay tuned…

Due to snow, our final performance has been cancelled. Apologies to all who couldn’t see the show. We plan to keep working on it, so there is always hope!

Tonight is the world premiere of our original play Our American Ann Sisters at Live Arts’ UpStage Theater. We are so excited to show you the fruits of our labor over the past 18 months, and grateful for all the community support throughout our process. When we sent out our last email about our $5,000 budget shortfall, you responded immediately and we are now just $1,300 short. If you haven’t given yet, would you consider a small donation? You can do it quickly online!

StudioVirginia, a regional NPR show, interviewed us about the making of Our American Ann Sisters. The show aired for the first time yesterday, and will re-broadcast this weekend. You can also listen online.

Please note our showtimes and get your tickets before the shows sell out:

Friday, Dec 4, 2009 at 8:00 pm [SOLD OUT]
Saturday, Dec 5, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Wednesday, Dec 9, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Thursday, Dec 10, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Friday, Dec 11, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Saturday, Dec 12, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Sunday, Dec 13, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Wednesday, Dec 16, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Thursday, Dec 17, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Friday, Dec 18, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Saturday, Dec 19, 2009 at 8:00 pm