New Frameworks for Performance—Now and Beyond with Playwrights' Center on Tues 27 April 2021
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2021-04-28

Playwrights' Center presents ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION: New Frameworks for Performance—Now and Beyond with Candrice Jones, Heather Raffo, and Tamilla Woodard livestreaming on the global, common-based, peer produced HowlRound TV network on Tuesday 27 April 2021 at 5 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 7 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 8 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4).

Join us for an exciting conversation on creating performance for today and beyond. Artists are exploring work in new ways, re-defining what theater can be for this unique moment and the future. From web-based interactive narratives to live participatory online experiences to VR new plays, what are we learning from new theatrical expressions? And how does it change our relationship with audiences?

Playwright, poet, and educator Candrice Jones has been honored to have been a fellow at Callaloo for poetry at Brown University and in London. She has also been a VONA Playwriting Fellow and a CalArts MFA Critical Studies recipient. Candrice's primary goal as a writer is to write love letters for and to women of the American South. She is the author of the full-length plays Crackbaby (2010 Wasserstein Prize Nomination) and FLEX (developed at the 2020 Humana Festival of New American Plays). She has been a resident fellow at Ground Floor housed by the Berkeley Rep, the Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, MacDowell’s Colony of the Arts, and a resident playwright at Djerassi’s Colony of the Arts. Candrice was a 2019-20 Many Voices Fellows and is a 2020-21 Jerome Fellow at Playwrights' Center.

Heather Raffo is an award-winning playwright and actress whose work has taken her from the Kennedy Center to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar, and from the State Department to classrooms across the country and across the world. An American with Iraqi roots, Raffo’s plays have been hailed by The New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world”. She is the author and performer of NOURA (Weissberger and Helen Hayes awards) which premiered in D.C. before moving to Abu Dhabi, Cairo, NYC and theaters across the nation, and 9 Parts of Desire (Lucielle Lortel award, Blackburn commendation, Helen Hayes, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nomination) which ran Off-Broadway for nine months and has played across the U.S. and internationally for over a decade. 9 Parts of Desire was the first play in the English language to center an Iraqi protagonist and its commercial success helped birth a new genre of Middle Eastern American theater. Raffo’s libretto for the opera FALLUJAH, the first opera about the Iraq war, was part of Kennedy Center’s International Theater Festival, received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera and opened at NYC Opera in 2016 accompanied by a documentary titled Fallujah: Art, Healing and PTSD. Her new anthology, The Things That Can’t Be Said, was published in 2021. It brings together Raffo’s groundbreaking contribution to the rarely examined traumas shaping cultural and national identity for both Americans and Iraqis since the events of 9/11.

Tamilla Woodard has been appointed to a five-year term as chair of the Acting Department at Yale School of Drama and resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre, effective July 1. She is currently the co-artistic director of Working Theater and previously served as associate artistic director of WP Theater, and is co-founder of PopUP Theatrics, which creates large-scale immersive theatrical works. She received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Yale School of Drama, where she has taught as a lecturer in Acting for the last two years. She also served as the associate artistic director of the Broadway company of Hadestown. Tamilla has directed at theaters nationally and internationally including Working Theater, WP Theater, Baltimore Center Stage, American Conservatory Theater, The Atlantic Theatre Company, The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts with TheaterWorksUSA, Classical Theater of Harlem, New Georges, The Culture Project, Salt Lake Acting Company, The Kitchen Theater, and The Cleveland Public Theatre among others. Her work has also been recognized with an Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Family Show and Lucille Lortel Nomination. Recently named one of 50 Women To Watch on Broadway, Tamilla is also the recipient of The Josephine Abady Award from The League of Professional Theatre Women and The Charles Bowden Award from New Dramatists.



https://howlround.com/happenings/livestreaming-artists-conversation-new-frameworks-performance-now-and-beyond