Gregory DeCandia has engaged the industry as an educator, performer, director, podcaster, and cultivator of new works in five different states and abroad. He is the Founder and current Executive Director of Ignition Arts. For the last four years he was the Head of the BA Theatre and Performance devising program at Oklahoma City University. Most recently Gregory was on stage as James Reston Jr in Frost/Nixon at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma. Last May marked his digital directorial debut with elevated, a devised film adaptation of the poetry graphic novel elevated thoughts: 100 shadormas from 9,000 ft. from Literati Press. His new play Animals received a reading at the National Winter Playwrights Retreat 2019 and a 2020 workshop with Ignition Arts. Gregory also tours his solo docudrama Silhouettes Of Service and has created four podcasts:Thank You 10, Fair Play, Devising, and The Brennan Book Blog Podcast. He is a proud graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill (MFA) and Emerson College (BFA) and a member of Actors’ Equity Association and the National Alliance of Acting Teachers.

Kate Brennan is an artist, creator and educator. Her teaching roster has included University of Virginia, Temple University, St. Joseph's University, Rosemont College, Montgomery County Community College, and Merion Mercy among others. Kate has also taught with Theatre Direct International's Broadway Classroom program, McCarter Theatre, HB Studio and out of her private studio.

Kate performed and taught for nearly a decade in Philadelphia before relocating to NYC a few years ago where Brennan Check-In was conceived. In Philadelphia she worked with companies including New Paradise Laboratories, Walnut Street Theatre, Luna Theatre Co., EgoPo Classic Theatre Co., Mauckingbird, Simpatico Theatre Project and Passage Theatre Co.

A member of AEA, some of Kate's credits include: Angels in America, Parts I & II (Harper, BCKSEET Productions), Fatebook (Zo Ex, New Paradise Laboratories), [title of show] (Susan, Mauckingbird Theatre Co., Philly Premiere), Bachelorette (Katie, Luna Theatre Co.), Tooth & Claw (Ana u/s, Arden Theatre Co., World Premiere), Roundelay (Sonya/Pilar, Passage Theatre Co.), Live Stream (Marcy, Bristol Riverside Theatre), Dead Man's Cell Phone (Jean, Simpatico Theatre Project), Hedda Gabler (Hedda, UVA MFA), & The Assassination of Jesse James (Charles Ford, EgoPo Classic Theatre).

Kate is the creator of Brennan Check-In. Drawing from a unique combination of Vinyasa yoga, Linklater Voicework, Thai Massage and Artistic Exercises, Check-In develops a creative habit that not only caters to the artist's performance skills, but serves the artist outside of the rehearsal hall. Check-In reinforces the resilience, stamina, resourcefulness, connection, initiative, positivity and health required to maintain a life in the arts.




Gregory DeCandia
[email protected]
Ignition Arts Founder/ Executive Director
Artist: gregorydecandia.com
Company: ignitionarts.org
Project: silhouettesofservice.com
Podcasts: ignitionarts.org/podcasts

Kate Brennan

The Person: www.katebrennan.org
The Method: www.brennancheckin.com
The Company: www.ignitionarts.org
The Podcast: brennan book blog podcast
The Blog: www.brennanbookblog.tumblr.com

Dan Scully is a writer, humorist, filmmaker, and script doctor who hails from South Philadelphia. After over a decade in the world of stand-up comedy, he moved into the worlds of writing and film — but typically with a comedic flair. He works as a film critic for MovieJawn.com, Phindie.com, and Cinema76.com.

He also hosts the film podcast, I Like to Movie Movie, and the free-form silliness podcast Hot Property. Currently, he is developing a horror anthology film to be produced and shot in Philadelphia in late 2021 — his segment in the anthology will be his directorial debut.



Podcast Links:


https://ilike2movie.libsyn.com/ - I Like to Movie Movie

https://open.spotify.com/show/6h429XCbEFthOdcoCBmgKI?si=lmehAOLJQw-aYYco2hSwiQ - Hot Property

Tonight on Into the Absurd we talked with Julia Levitina about her creative process as a sculptor and how learning to fly, competitive figure skating, making music, and Zen In the Art of Archery figure into her daily practice.
(http://www.julialevitina.com).

Julia Levitina was born and raised in Odessa, Ukraine. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, splitting her time between the United States and France. Levitina creates powerful and elegant figurative sculpture in bronze that aims to capture the extraordinary in the ordinary. Her work strives to entice the feeling of awe as its creator searches for wisdom by way of wonder.
Julia makes her own clay, molds, waxes, and does all subsequent casting and finishing of her bronzes, including melting and pouring metal, in her Philadelphia studio.


Julia has held solo exhibitions of sculpture and drawings in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia area, and has participated in numerous group shows in the tri-state region. Nationally, Levitina’s work has been exhibited at the Frederick Meijer Sculpture Gardens, the Noyes Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, among others. Internationally, she has shown at the City Hall in Odessa, Ukraine, St Jean des Arts in Normandy, France, La Maison Verte in Champagne-Ardenne, and at the Foundation Taylor in Paris. Levitina's bronzes can be found in various public and private collections in the US and in Europe, including Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, MI, Jewish Museum in Budapest, Hungary, Van Mieghem Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Flanders House in New York City. Her work is currently on view at the Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia and at Somerville-Manning Gallery in Wilmington, DE. Levitina has recently exhibited at the Hugo Galerie in Soho, Galerie de Buci in Paris and has held a solo show of her sculpture and drawings at I-Gallery in Paris.


She is a recipient of the prestigious Alex J. Ettl Grant from the National Sculpture Society. She has been awarded multiple prizes by the Foundation Taylor in Paris, including the Foundry Award in 2017. She has installed a ¾ life-size commissioned sculpture of St Joan of Arc clad in full armour at the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, MI, and completed a ¾ life-size nude commissioned for a private garden in Haverford, PA. In autumn 2017 Levitina completed and installed an over-life-size figurative commission in a prominent spot on Georgetown University’s Main Campus in Washington, D.C., dedicated in Autumn 2018.
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Dr. Marcia Ferguson, actor, director and educator, has worked as a theatre artist in Philadelphia regional theatre and with various arts organizations, including the Wilma Theatre, the Painted Bride, Act II Playhouse, Irish Heritage, Paper Doll Ensemble, the Mediums, Juniper productions, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Arthur Ross Gallery, the Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, and many others. She has trained with Meredith Monk, Pig Iron, and the London International School of Performing Arts, and has co-created, performed in and/or directed seven original productions for Edinburgh and Philadelphia Fringe festivals. She has acted and directed in theatre and film in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, and Tokyo. In addition to her interest in directing site-specific and traditional productions of canonical and experimental plays (Beckett, Ionesco, Aeschylus, Ruhl, Synge, Churchill, Mee, and others), she is dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to theatre-making, co-creating original performances, and facilitating multi-disciplinary work. She teaches theatre at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs undergraduate productions, and serves on the boards of several Philadelphia arts organizations. She has published two books and several articles on theatre and other subjects.

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#MarciaFerguson #Acting #Directing #UniversityofPennsylvania
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Our guest at the table tonight on Into the Absurd was visual artist, poet and founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics, Theodore A. Harris (https://theodoreharris.weebly.com/).

Theodore A. Harris – born in 1966 in New York City and raised in Philadelphia, where his art practice is based. Harris is a collagist, poet, curator, and essayist on the intersection of art and politics. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums such as The Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia Pennsylvania; NeMe in Limassol, Cyprus; The University of Chicago Center in Paris, France; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Hammonds House Museum and Resource Center of African American Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Harmony House Stanford University, Stanford, California.

His work is in private and public collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, La Salle University Art Museum, Center for Africana Studies University of Pennsylvania, Saint Louis University Museum of Art, Du Bois College House University of Pennsylvania, and Lincoln University. He has held residences at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center (New Orleans); 40th Street A-I-R (Philadelphia); Hammonds House Museum and Resource Center of African American Art (Atlanta, GA); International Festival of Arts and Ideas (New Haven, CT).

He has co-authored books with Amiri Baraka, Our Flesh of Flames (Anvil Arts Press); Malcolm X as Ideology, and with Fred Moten: i ran from it and was still in it (Cusp Books). His current book is from the series by the same name Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism. He is the founding director of The Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics.

Our guest at the table tonight was screenwriter, playwright, performance artist, director and Fulbright Scholar Jeffrey Stanley. We talked about his recent research in India on early 20th century Bengali film and theatre and their impact on India’s nascent independence movement.
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Jeffrey Stanley is a 2018-19 Fulbright Scholar conducting research in India on early 20th century Bengali film and theatre and their impact on India’s nascent independence movement. He is currently writing a book based on his research.
Jeff has won numerous screenwriting awards and has optioned or been hired to write scripts for Peter Farrelly & Charles B. Wessler, GreeneStreet Films, Barbara Kopple's Cabin Creek Films, Andrew Lauren Productions, and others. He is presently developing a TV series with producer Matthew Myers. His award-winning short film "Lady in a Box" starring Sarita Choudhury has been licensed numerous times for international broadcast and distribution, and he has worked as a script consultant for UK-based Initialize Films and an analyst and judge for the Script Savvy Screenplay Contest.
Stanley's stage play Tesla's Letters (Samuel French, 2000) premiered to rave reviews Off Broadway in 1999 and went on to national and international productions including the Edinburgh Fringe. He is a past president of the board of directors of the New York Neo-Futurists experimental theatre ensemble, he has been a fellow at Yaddo, a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, and a guest screenwriting lecturer at the Imaginary Academy summer film and theatre workshop in Croatia sponsored by the Soros Foundation.
Jeff was one of 24 writers chosen from over 16,000 entrants for the first Amtrak Writers Residency in 2014-15, and served as a residency judge for the 2015-16 competition. Stanley has appeared as a guest writer in the Washington Post, New York Times, Time Out New York, New York Press and Brooklyn Rail, and he was a senior editorial advisor to Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies' book on apocalypse movements The End That Does (Equinox Books, 2006). He is a member playwright of the invitation-only International Theatre Initiative (ITI), a UNESCO-sponsored world theatre education program.
Jeff holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University Tisch School of the Arts where he studied under playwrights David Ives and Tony Kushner, and a BFA from Tisch in Film & Television Production. He also teaches screenwriting at Drexel University and has taught a course he created, Theatre History for Actors, at the Lee Strasberg Institute.

Michael P. Toner has been acting, directing, dialect coaching and specializing in Irish theatre for over 49 years. His recent roles include doing Phil Hogan in O’Neill’s MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN for Walnut Street Theatre (with national tour). Other WST credits include SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER, PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!, CONVERSATIONS WITH MY FATHER, 1776, SOMEONE WHO’LL WATCH OVER ME, and THE CARETAKER. Other Brian Friel plays include VOLUNTEERS, DANCING AT LUGHNASA, ARISTOCRATS, TRANSLATIONS and his one-man play based on Friel’s works, THE HUMOURS OF BALLYBEG. Recent roles include Knacker Woods in Marie Jones’s ROCK DOVES, Vladimir in Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT and the one-man play CROSSING THE THRESHOLD INTO THE HOUSE OF BACH by David Simpson for Amaryllis Theatre.

His one-person plays include BEGINNING TO END and NOHOW ON, based upon Beckett’s writings, AN EVENING WITH MISTER DOOLEY, drawn from Finley Peter Dunne’s writings, his own EVER YOURS, SCOTT FITZGERALD. Mr. Toner has performed for the Villanova Shakespeare Festival, the Carnegie-Mellon University Beckett Festival, the New York W.B. Yeats Society, the International James Joyce Symposium, the NYC “A Dublin Evening, the NYC Gotham Book Mart Bloomsday, the Meadowlands Irish Festival, the American Shaw Festival, and he is a founding reader for the Rosenbach Museum & Library Bloomsday Festival.

Michael and Patrick worked together most recently on a virtual project titled Eternal Warrior: a Theatre-Based Workshop Virtual Performance Over Zoom, Veterans' Day 2020.
This virtual production was created for both Veterans and a general audience. It was created under the aegis of Kimberly "Max" Brown and staff from the Philadelphia VA Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania Classics Dept. and the University of Pennsylvania Archeology Dept., who formed the Eternal Soldier group.

Eternal Soldier is archaeologists, classicists, historians, clinicians and veterans working together to present ancient material on war, warriors, and combat re-purposed for modern Veterans. We are a volunteer collaborative based at the Penn Museum working with Veterans from conflicts in Vietnam, Eastern Europe (Bosnia), Africa (Somalia, OND) and Southwest Asia (Desert Storm, OEF/OIF). We point out the uniqueness of contemporary Veteran experience, but simultaneously, we place that experience on a continuum. Our goal is to empower Veterans, and help them see that their experiences may differ in detail and technological features, but their emotional, spiritual and psychological experiences have a timelessness that unites all warriors.
Patrick Devine is a Disabled Veteran. He was born in Dublin, (Rep of Ireland) Eire, and immigrated to the United States in 1986, settling in the greater Philadelphia area until enlisting in the US Army in 1990 as a 12B Combat Engineer, and serving with the 10Th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum NY. Patrick also had a tour as an Army Recruiter and following, returned to the regular army where he changed his MOS Military Occupational Specialty to 38B Civil Affairs Specialist with USACAPOC United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command.

Patrick served in the Irish defense forces for a short time prior to coming to America. As soldiering was his calling, he joined the US Army, serving for 17 plus years, being deployed several times to combat zones and peace keeping missions throughout the world. Patrick medically retired in 2007. He now lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children.

Our guest at the table tonight is Emily Brewton Schilling, artist, writer, and daughter of Philadelphia avant-garde artist and Pataphysician James E. Brewton (https://www.artandhonor.com/emily-bre...​).

Emily is an artist, writer, and daughter of Philadelphia avant-garde artist and Pataphysician James E. Brewton (1930-1967). Brewton shot himself on May 11, 1967, three days before the opening of a show he organized with Jim McWilliams, The Society for the Commemoration of Festivals and Fetishes at Socrates Perakis Gallery in Philadelphia. “Artist’s Suicide Gives Tragic Overtone to Exhibit,” was the headline of Dorothy Grafly’s review in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. By the time he died, Brewton had “had several one-man shows, and museum curators were beginning to exhibit interest,” as Nessa Forman wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “There was an artist,” Forman continued, “who was ahead of his time, who was brilliant, sensitive and nonviolent, who loved his art and just wanted to paint.”

Two posthumous exhibitions were held, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fina Arts (PAFA) in 1968 and Kenmore Galleries in 1971, after which most of Brewton’s work was scattered and sunk out of sight. Although devastated by the loss of her father, Emily was raised in ignorance of his life and work. In 2008, while living in Florida, Emily came across Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ’Pataphysics (Yale University Press, 2007) by Michael R. Taylor. Amazed that other Philadelphia artists were interested in ’Pataphysics in the 1960s, she contacted Taylor, then curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Taylor encouraged Emily to begin looking for her father’s artwork.

Beginning with knowledge of only 16 works’ whereabouts, Emily dedicated herself to the quest and has since found hundreds of artworks. In 2014, Emily and Patricia Weingrad—who co-curated the Brewton memorial in 1971—curated Brewton’s first solo exhibition in 43 years, Graffiti Pataphysic, For All Mankind, at Slought, Philadelphia. The show was part of “Philadelphia à la Pataphysique,” a celebration organized at the University of Pennsylvania. The 2014 celebration led to the creation of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium (PASC), as well as a forthcoming book, Pataphysics Unrolled, edited by Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor (Penn State Press, Spring 2022), which includes a chapter by Taylor about Brewton.

Emily grew up in the Philadelphia area, and began her career working at WMMR radio station in the early 1980s and writing weekly art reviews for The South Street Star. She served as public relations and program director at The Philadelphia Art Alliance in the late 1980s, and later worked as a corporate employee communications writer for many years. Now living in New York, Emily has edited several books, fiction and nonfiction, and compiled a catalogue raisonne of Jim Brewton’s artworks. She is a founding director of the James E. Brewton Foundation, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit, and is finishing a memoir about the hunt for her father’s work. Emily is delighted to join Tina Brock at the virtual table on “Into the Absurd: An Existential Dinner Conversation.”

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We'll explore in 50-minutes what it means to create and to think about art during this time. Join us for this weekly virtually existential gathering until we can share stories on the stage again.

If you're on the IRC's mailing list, look for an email each Wednesday detailing the upcoming week’s guest on Into the Absurd, with links to websites and information. To keep up with who’s on deck, join the IRC mailing list: https://www.idiopathicridiculopathyco...​.

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We dined virtually tonight with artist Liz Goldberg and filmmaker Warren Bass, who talked about their artistic collaborations, including Cuban Queens (https://vimeo.com/279495510​).

Cuban Queens is an experimental animated collaboration by Warren Bass (direction, animation, music), Liz Goldberg (original graphics), and Lowell Boston (animation). The film deconstructs and explores ninety-nine evolving images of Havana’s street divas. Cuban Queens is a rhythmic study of subliminal hand-drawn portraits that evolve through s
hifting, transient relationships of image-to-image and image-to-sound.

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Warren Bass is an independent filmmaker and former Chair of Film & Media Arts at Temple University where he teaches directing, cinematography, and advanced workshops in documentary, fiction and animation as a full professor. He was trained at the Yale School of Drama in directing (with Honors) and at Columbia University in film as their School of the Arts Scholar. He has taught at Yale, NYU, the State University of California, and the American Film Institute, has chaired university departments in Film, Television, and Theater in New England, served as trustee of the University Film Study Center housed at Harvard/MIT, Vice President of the University Film and Video Association, guest editor of The Journal of Film and Video, and for extended periods as Director of Temple University’s graduate program in Film. His essays on visual style have been published in English, Polish, Chinese and Turkish. His textbook on camcorders is published in seven countries. His art work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, the National Academy of Design and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has directed theater at Lincoln Center, off-Broadway and in regional professional theater in six cities. His film and video productions have been aired on PBS, syndicated television and cable in the U.S. and on European, Asian and Australian Television. His work has received over 100 regional, national and international awards. Professor Bass is a recipient of both the Great Teacher Award and the Creative Achievement Award from Temple University.

Liz Goldberg has taught Fashion Illustration at Pratt and Drexel University for the past 11 years. Her work is an exploration of the theme of the “diva” – the flamboyantly uninhibited female and the personal and political empowerment she represents.

As a painter, graphic artist, and animator, Liz has been inspired by puppets and absurdist theatre, influenced by puppet–like characters reminiscent of Alfred Jarry’s forerunner of absurdist theater, Ubu-Roi, the buffoons of modernist playwright Michel de Ghelderode, the existentialist mime plays of Samuel Beckett, and the symbolist and political figures of European puppet theater.

Liz has developed these “diva” and puppet-inspired works into experimental animated films in collaboration with filmmaker Warren Bass, broadcast on American Public Television and cable, receiving awards and juried recognition in over 20 countries. The works use animation as an analog to painting, dance and poetry, and are intended to re-define the paradigm of what an animation can be. The process of animation has, in turn, influenced her full-scale paintings and works-on-paper producing diptychs, triptychs, and serial prints with progressive deviations.

In 2018, Liz and Warren produced “Vogueing and Other Pleasures” shown at the Film Festival at the Barnes in conjunction with the Musee de Paris. In 2018, the film was also shown as part of “Contextualizing Fashion” at Pratt. A full room installation was created at Joan Shepp where Liz was a resident artist for 3 years 2017- 2020, installing the entire space with 1,750 hand-drawn cells from the animation, as well as paintings and prints.

Our guest at the table tonight was Dr. Rosemary Malague, director of the Theatre Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method” (https://www.routledge.com/.../Malague/p/book/9780415681575), the first book to conduct a feminist examination of American, Stanislavsky-based, actor training traditions. We talked about women in theater, Stanislavsky, American acting training programs, auditioning, and #metoo​ in the theater.



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In addition to her scholarship, Rose is also an actor and director, and regularly stages student productions at Penn. She holds a doctorate in theatre from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a master’s degree from Villanova University, where she was an acting scholar. She received actor training at Circle-in-the Square Theatre School, HB Studio, and is a member of Actors’ Equity Association.

Courses regularly taught by Dr. Malague include: Provocative Performance; The Play: Structure, Style, Meaning; Theatre in Philadelphia; and all levels of acting.

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