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Poster for Live Arts performances
check it on out- designed by Matt Thomas
new donors
We’d like to sincerely thank the following for their donations since our last appeal:
Frans and Dalal Preidel
Bobbye Goldstein
Ingrid Berger and Mark McLane
Cate Andrews
Bob Hoyt
John Conover
Jude Silveira
Kevin Wood
B Stanley
Patrick Dooley
Steve Taylor
Judy Mendenhall
Terry and Jim McLane
Framestone Solutions
Nora Brookfield
John Mendenhall
MC Jones
Betsy Noble
Marisa Vrooman
BG Hays
Miller Susen
Lang & Latham Murray
Michael Lundblad
Max Fenton
Mary Catron
Ft Lauderdale Insurance Services
Sandra Higgins
Susan Nuss
Angela Richards
Richard and Judith Warner
Sandy Mendenhall
Elvira Tate
Rob Calvert
Meri Jane Smith
$2,191.03 and Counting!
We put out the call and you are responding! Thanks to all who have contributed in the last few days since we let you know we were $5,000 short of our budget for our upcoming world premiere of Our American Ann Sisters. If you haven’t given anything yet, would you consider something small? Anything at all? Change from your sofa cushions? You can do it conveniently online by clicking this link.
Love,
PEP
One Month to Go and PEP Needs Your Help!
In addition to the substantial individual contributions PEP has received thus far, we were fortunate to receive two foundation grants, from the SHEA Collaborative and the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation. However, we find ourselves with a budget shortfall of $5,000 and just four weeks left to go before Our American Ann Sisters premieres at Live Arts on December 4th. We are so proud of the progress we’ve made:
- We have raised 95% of the $63,270 budget we established to take us through the premiere at Live Arts in December.
- We now have a finished script we’re working with.
- We redesigned our website and have been documenting our process on a blog with multimedia samples.
- We completed the two playwriting workshops with the community.
- We are underway with our collaboration with Shannon Worrell, a local musician who’s created original music, designers Mark Schuyler, Jenny McNee, John Scheidler, Thadd McQuade, and filmmaker Billy Hunt.
- We will be conducting a FREE workshop for performers interested in our process at Live Arts November 17-19.
We believe our work is setting an important precedent in our community. We believe Charlottesville is capable of supporting a groundbreaking professional company of theatre artists, but we need the investment of community members such as as yourself to pull this off. Can you help us reach our goal? Any amount is appreciated!
You can contribute through PayPal or by mail:
Performers Exchange Project
c/o Kara Burke
3311 Ridge Road
Charlottesville, VA 22901
We sincerely appreciate your time and consideration.
Love,
Martha, Kara, Jennifer, Sian and Doreen
Part Three
Oct 3&4 -We read through Jennifer’s draft of the third and final part of our play. On the floor, Martha worked with the performers on vocal dynamics, and continued etude work from Parts One and Two.
We are thrilled to be in cohoots with some talented designers for our piece: Mark Schuyler on lights, Jenny McNee on costumes, and JP Scheidler on set. Shannon Worrell is contributing original music and Josef Beery is designing original book props. Ain’t we lucky??
Sign up by Nov 9th for our performance workshop!
Developing Original Material for Performance: A workshop for actors. An opportunity for interested Charlottesville area performers to participate in some of the elements used by PEP in their process of developing original performance. Participants will develop their own etudes (short scores of physical action). Depending on interests of Performer and PEP, participants could be invited to join the Ann Sisters cast as a part of the Live Arts run of the show. This workshop will be a three day intensive running Nov 17, 18 and 19 from 7pm till 9pm. This event is free and open to anyone 18 years or older. Participants must register with Ronda Hewitt at Live Arts (434-977-4177 x 100) by Nov 9nd. If you have any questions please contact Sian Richards at pepcville@gmail.com
Part Two
Pressing forward into the world of text development, we PEPsters began staging the skeleton of Part II during our last rehearsal weekend. Part II focuses on the dilemma of artist vs. wife and centers on Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne with appearances from Frida Kahlo and Phyllis Diller – our American and Central American “Ann Sisters”.
Martha asked us to create a new etude for Part II, which literally had Sian tied up in knots. The etude also reclaimed some material/ideas about wacky medicinal techniques from the nineteenth century that we discussed much earlier in the rehearsal process. It’s interesting how ideas from conversations discussed over a year ago are finding their way into the world of play. Sometimes it feels like an idea crops up in the moment, only to be discovered that it was actually a notion from our early rehearsals – the product of a yearlong rehearsal (or sketchy memory).
In other news, our designers are also moving forward with the set and costumes – and notions of the Victorian-era-meets-the-modern-age theme are developing throughout the architecture and clothing. As Sian said in the last blog, it’s exciting to collaborate with designers on this project, and especially interesting to hear them articulate their ideas based on reading the script and listening to our description of characters and action. Yet another layer to add to the mix…
Doreen
Part One
After a brief summer hiatus, we Pepsters got back in the water in August. We had in our hot little hands the text for act one, and we set out to put together our physical material and text for the first act over the course of our working weekend. Martha took bits and pieces from etudes we had made and edited them together. We applied the text to this material and poof! We had an outline of the scenes in Part One. After over a year of work, it felt good to have the bones of the first section of the show in place. There is much to add to what we have done and a lot more show for us to put together but we have a hint now of where we are heading. It seems to involve some talking wild life. That’s all I will say about that.
In other news, Martha, Sian, Doreen, John Paul, and Mark S. all got together for a production meeting. It was the first opportunity for our designers to get in the same place and talk over all the ideas floating around about the set and lights. This is an exciting experience for PEP. We have certainly made set and lights happen before, but we have never collaborated at this level, in fact we have never had a costume designer at all, other than ourselves. I think we are now in a moment of inhale. Starting this month things pick up and we will start running faster and faster towards our performances at Live Arts.
S.
Where we are after one year
Well, we’ve made it. Exactly one year ago, Kara, Doreen, Sian, Jennifer, Kay and I sat down in Sian’s teeny little apartment and decided to take a risk — to experiment with the longest development process I’ve ever engaged in and create an original performance based on the lives of Americans who were a part of the 19th century movement in literature, thought and religion called: The Newness. Newness for real!
As the work has developed, we’ve narrowed our source material down a bit from The Newness. We’re investigating the lives and loves of the Peabody sisters, three women whose contributions to American education, literature and women’s suffrage movement lasted nearly the whole of the 19th century. Along the way, we’ve mixed in an interest in some female icons from our own youth – Phyllis Diller, Frida Kahlo and the ubiquitous Brady sisters. It’s PEP’s collage approach to creating theatre! When we come back together to work in August, Our American Ann Sisters will continue to mix it up– developing moments of stand-up/sketch comedy routines and a smorgasbord of dance/ vocal musical numbers – a vaudeville extravaganza! Now if we just had a sword swallower to stir into the pot…
As for rehearsals, we’ll be on summer hiatus until the middle of August, but until then you can plot your very own strategy for infiltrating and influencing our process! We are encouraging, daring and soliciting any and all interested parties to help us write our script….Are we shameless or what?! Please check out the past blog entries for more information on participating. Or, if writing isn’t your bag, join us in the Fall for our Directors’ Roundtable or participate in our Performers Workshop. You could even find yourself onstage as a member of the Ann Sisters ensemble, so brush up your magic tricks! All of these community events are being offered FREE of CHARGE and are open to the general public. Contact company member Sian Richards (siancookie at gmail dot com) for more details or use this form.
It’s a funny thing I notice about creating theatre. No matter how short or long the process itself is, those moments in time that mark the end of one phase of work and the beginning of the next are always very clear. Right now, as we conclude a full year of development of material and source research, the playmaking gremlins that live in my head are screaming out for a script. And they’re pretty loud. So, help us please! Write something! If the assignments that we have posted don’t cry out to you, contact Jennifer and get yourself a different one…Only don’t tell her that I told you to.
Stay tuned…
Martha
Your Chance to Write Something for Our Script
The original play we are working on, Our American Ann Sisters, is an exciting experiment in community collaboration. Our script, which we’re writing in parallel with the development of the actors’ physical score, is part of this experiment. Some of the text for the script has been written by PEP members, some has been stolen from other dead and living writers (under Fair Use, of course) and some will come from YOU. This month, we are commissioning original material from the writing public at large and through Live Arts’ Playwrights Lab to include in our script.
On Monday, June 15, at the Playwrights Lab at Live Arts (6:30-10:00), anyone can come and in three hours write a scene for our show based on an assignment we’ll give out.
