The Tribeca Film Institute has started a program called Tribeca All Access Open Stage, that is meant to provide exposure for playwrights of color to the national theater community. Submissions are accepted until July 16th.
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Sorry for not updating for awhile. Things have been crazy busy and the Culturebot team of trusty interns is still getting oriented.

So, while we try and come up with more exciting content for you here’s a few newsy tidbits:

The Imagine04 website is live. This is a huge festival of arts & ideas that will run concurrently with the Republican National Convention. There will be tons and tons of arts and cultural programming going on in every corner of the city. What’d I tell ya?August: it’s the new September.

This year’s Ice Factory Festival starts July 7th and runs through August 7th. It looks great. A few of the shows:

• Les Freres Corbusier’s The Franklin Thesis
• Deep Ellum Ensemble‘s Doctor Tedrow’s Last Breath
• Josh Fox‘s Expense of Spirit

There’s also the HOWL! Festival in August. Which should be interesting.

So there you go. You’re set for the summer.

(If I’m forgetting anything, feel free to post your festival in the comments section)
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Sherry Vine was born in Los Angeles in 1991, lived in NYC until 2001 and now resides in Berlin. Sherry has starred in the smash theatrical productions of The Bad Weed ’73 (in NYC, LA and Provincetown) e.s.p – Eyes of a Supermodel Psychic, The Final Feast of Lucrezia Borgia, her one woman/ten character hit Kitty Killer, the completely sold out mega hit Charlie!, the off Broadway transfer of Tell-Tale, at the Cherry Lane Theatre and more recently in Doll. All shows were produced by Theatre Couture, of which Sherry is artistic director. She will be returning to NYC this fall for the long-awaited Theatre Couture production of Carrie. Never one to do anything in moderation, she answered not five, but twenty questions!
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Culturebot usually focuses on arts & culture, but I just got back from seeing Michael Moore‘s new film Fahrenheit 9/11 and so I’m going to get a little political on your a**.

Go. See. This. Movie.

As a long-standing member of the liberal left and a sometime denizen of the way-the-hell-off-the-charts left, I’m admittedly biased against George Bush and the Corporate-Government-Military Complex. But for those of you who, like myself, have been lulled into a stupor or lost focus, go see this film. Really, actually, everyone should go see it. Its really powerful, moving and mostly infuriating. If even 1/8 of what Moore talks about is true, Dubya is not just a deeply indifferent, callous and foolhardy individual (not to mention a complete and total spoiled frat-boy jag-off) but he is also guilty of near-criminal collusion with industry and foreign nations whose interests are opposed to our nation’s. It’s his best film to date. He cuts way back on the snarky comments, cuts back on the fancy editing and really lets the camera linger on some deeply profound and heart-wrenching moments. It is still a Michael Moore film – in a good way – there’s a lot of humor and very clever commentary and surprising footage; but mostly you get the sense that he felt so strongly about this that he actually kept his enormous ego in check to better serve the story.

You really, really should see it.

And then get ready for this summer when the RNC comes to town so we can mobilize to make sure they feel unwelcome in NYC. Start planning on how to take back America.

Some resources:

Theaters Against War
Regime Change Guide
Counterconvention.org
RNC Not Welcome

And those are really just a few of many sites. There are lots more and there’s a lot planned all summer long. So we’ll see you in the theater and then we’ll see you in the streets!

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So we’ve been really busy. So busy, in fact, that we forgot to post an announcment about the WYSIWYG Talent Show we had tonight. It was for Gay Pride and was called That’s So Gay: Tales of Extremely Gay Gayness.

It rocked. Sold out crowd. Great Stories and two fantastic musical acts.
And the prize for first person to blog about the all-blogger reading and performance series goes to the lovely & talented Ultrasparky, who is not only a great writer and engaging performer, but also designed Culturebot!

If you missed it – dont’ worry. We’re taking July off but will be back in August with a political thing and then will be going all of next year with a new event every month!

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Taylor Mac (actor/Playwright/Performance Artist) is author and performer of the solo-shows, “The Face of Liberalism,” “Okay,” and “Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam.” He has performed in a variety of venues including PS 122, Joe’s Pub, FEZ, CBGB’s, and the San Francisco Opera House. Recently he headlined the 8th annual Queer at Here Festival, appeared in Karen Finley’s “Make Love,” opened for music icon Nina Hagen, and played his first Martian opposite C. Thomas Howell in the Sci-Fi Channel original feature, “Graveland.” His plays/work have been published by Vintage, Smith and Kraus and Lodestar Quarterly. He is the recipient of the Ensemble Studio Theater’s New Voices Fellowship in playwrighting and is currently working on a new piece, commissioned by Dixon Placed, entitled “Tarred and Feathered.” Every Friday Taylor host a weekly party called “DoppleBanger” at the now infamous Slide bar. This summer, as part of the “Imagine Festival,” Taylor will be hosting, performing, and curating a performance art response to the Republican Convention entitled, “Live Patriot Acts, Patriot’s Gone Wiiiiiild,” at PS 122. You can catch him in boy-drag this fall when he plays the title role in “Orpheus,” a new rock musical produced by HERE.
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It’s been a year since Jenny Seastone Stern started her bi-monthly (which means every other month, not twice a month, for all you idiots like me out there) emerging artist dance/performance series. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that this one, Catch 6 (as in the 6th one), was the first one I’ve been to. Housed in the Williamsburg institution, Galapagos, whose sunken pool entryway impressed me to no end when I was taken there fresh off the boat in 1998 by some very with-it Nebraskans, the work up for viewing mirrored the defining feature of the space: a little bit hip, a little bit shallow, a little bit unexpected, and massively reflective.
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During a visit to my hometown in Ohio, a friend invited me to Kent State University’s production of Blind Ness The Irresistible Light of Encounter. The show is a multi-disciplinary theater work that uses movement, puppetry and projections to explore Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the late 19th century acquisition of the Congo as a personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, the exploitation of the Congolese people and the human rights movement that arose as a result of the Belgian abuses. Blind Ness was produced as part of a seven week residency at Kent State’s drama department with world renowned writer, director and theater artist Ping Chong, and his collaborator Michael Rohd and opens in New York June 18.
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“I don’t know,” my associate replied apologetically when I broached the topic over lunch. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do tonight.” He chewed his asparagus thoughtfully. “And karaoke and poetry; those are two things that really scare me.”
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Here at Culturebot we see lots of shows. Sometimes we go out of devotion to an artist, sometimes we go because we’ve heard good things through the grapevine, and sometimes we go just because we’re curious – which is why I attended Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s Night Sings Its Songs at The Culture Project last Monday. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see the US premiere of a writer who has been called “Norway’s biggest cultural export since Ibsen?” Apparently Fosse has been produced on the major stages of every country in Europe and is huge in Japan. It sounded like this could be history-making stuff and I was itching to find out more.
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