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Rhonda talks about her journey through the year, the healing and motivating power of memory lane, and so much more.  A gift for the listener this holiday season.

Thank you for listening to Past The Blue Mailbox Season 2.  Make sure you follow us where you get your podcasts, so you'll be notified when Season 3 is on its way.

Talk soon!

Rhonda out.

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Adrian & Rhonda talk about collaboration and time management, salons, line dancing dreams, accessibility of technology, purpose, the power of a supportive audience, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Adrian Prendergast (they/them) is a Seattle-based director, actor, and playwright.

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Deena & Rhonda talk about dancing, teaching, living without regrets, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Deena Burke has coached dialects, voice, speech, and text for theatres including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Old Globe Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Intiman Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre DC, Center Stage, and the McCarter Theatre.

She developed the Voice and Speech component of the MFA program at the Old Globe/University of San Diego, served as Head of Voice and Speech at the Cornish College of the Arts for 14 years and has taught at the California Institute of the Arts, University of California-San Diego, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the University of Washington. For 15 years Deena was a faculty member of the University of Delaware Professional Theatre Training Program where she taught voice, speech, text, dialects and coached and directed productions for the gradate students as well as teaching undergraduate non majors.

In private practice Deena has worked with actors, lawyers, business people and other public speakers. She has published articles on voice, speech, text and teaching pedagogy in The Voice and Speech Review, The Complete Voice and Speech Workout and the VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainer’s Association) Newsletter. She has presented workshops in cities around
the country and in London, Scotland, Thailand, Japan and The Dominican Republic. In addition to working in Theatre Deena has also coached dialects for film and television.

Deena’s acting credits include major roles at the Old Globe, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, A Contemporary Theatre, and the Resident Ensemble Players (REP). At the REP, Deena played the roles of Ivy in Osage Orange county, Susan in Wait Until Dark, Dorine in Tartuffe, Brooke in Noises Off, Slippy Helen in The Cripple of Inishmaan, Liz Morder in Our Country’s Good, Polly
Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, Sam in the world premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s Fever, and Miss Casewell in The Mousetrap among others. You can hear her voice on ads for Alaska Airlines, Washington Mutual Bank, The Bon-Marche (Macy’s), Nordstrom and many others as well as on many CD Rom games.

Deena is a graduate of The Juilliard School and loves to dance. While she has studied some ballet, tap and modern her true passion lies in social dance (not to be confused with Ballroom dancing). She has traveled the country and the world to study, dance and occasionally perform the Argentine Tango as well as salsa, bachata and Kizomba.

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Chloe & Rhonda talk about letting go of the push for 'success', the healing powers of animals, liminal phases of a creative life, riding the wave, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Albuquerque-based solo artist Dandelioness is known for her radioactive falsetto and visceral, hypnotizing stage presence.

Though she was raised on americana and mentored by folk greats Carrie Newcomer and Krista Detor, Dandelioness spent the first half of her life in India. In her writing, the echoes of droning ragas from her years in New Delhi well up under simple folk structures, resulting in an anomalous, otherworldly fusion of disparate cultural lilts and progressions. The sound is further mutated with infectious pop riffs, drips of her mother’s hand-me-down southern drawl, glittering with autotuned vocoder and underscored by spiraling patterns of fingerstyle guitar.

Growling, crooning, generally in an outrageous getup, Dandelioness gives a vulnerable and playful show that tilts in the direction of burlesque- in her words, 'reading pages of my diary up here in front of everyone'- and often, inviting the audience to join in. 

The result is turning dive bars into listening rooms across the country.

Her debut album, titled “Scorpio Ballads” out via Three of Swords Records, charts the tumultuous journey of a first love torn in half by long distance. Recorded in London, England, each track on the album contributes to the overall emotional landscape. Whether it’s the mascara-stained visions of the underworld or the apocalyptic American West, Dandelioness invites listeners to explore these dark, whimsical landscapes.

A musical vagabond, Dandelioness is a bohemian goth who has at various times called New Delhi, India, London, England, Taos, New Mexico, and now Albuquerque home.

Since landing in New Mexico several years back, she has shared the stage or the bill with Concepto Tambor and Desert Records artist Betty Benedeadly (Sheverb), among others.

Photo Credit: Kirk Stauffer

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Robin & Rhonda talk about utilizing the work of others as artistic inspiration, the beauty of parking garages, leaving your mark, carving out time for the work, looking forward to a winter residency in Maine, the power of dance, the magic that can come from cardboard and a glue gun, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

ROBIN CROOKALL

My work is a blend of sculpture and photography. The subjects of my images are assembled sets of exteriors and interiors. With a collage of elements, my work creates scenes consisting of part fact and part aspect. I construct architectural models which I photograph, and print. For these models, I primarily use cardboard, tape, and hot glue; unsophisticated materials that retain a certain cogency and drabness when captured in a photo. Focusing on subjects like the corner of a room or the facade of a house, the images showcase environments that are at once familiar and safe, underwhelming and routine. What the audience sets out to experience in the photograph changes in perspective from visualizing the subject as an actual photographed place as opposed to seeing what is really its scale-model counterpart. The experience results in the viewer questioning the preexisting notions of time, memory, and place. The photograph is the ideal pedestal for these concepts, for its singular capacity for both depiction and deception. If you can’t trust your own eyes, then you can’t trust your own definition of place. And where are you supposed to exist at the plane of the image if all that grounds you, is slowly dissolving away?

The pursuit of the uncanny drives me to accentuate the absurdities inherent to representation. By building and photographing models, this further creates the disorientation of space, time and scale, to create a particular kind of illusion. Not the big flashy kind, where an elephant disappears right before your eyes, but the subtlety of the card-counter, the sleight of hand, and unnoticeable graceful dance of the pickpocket. I am not a wizard, there is no real magic here. The best tricks are the ones we don’t even see.

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Zenaida & Rhonda talk about seizing opportunities, market pressure, "powderpuff" football, redefining the holidays, the power of editing, old school Seattle, a passion for bringing back the light, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Zenaida Rose Smith is a freelance actor, director, and producer.  She is a theatre artist with a passion for producing, directing, acting, and casting, compelled by collaboration with artists of all walks. She has a rigorous work ethic and insatiable curiosity. She seeks stories that highlight marginalized experiences and mixed identities, particularly through the lenses of horror, speculative fiction, and comedy.  Zenaida is an MFA Directing student at UCLA, anticipated graduation in 2028.  As a Producer and Director, she specializes in new work development. As a human, she likes food, puzzles, film, furry animals, and beautiful colors.

www.zenaidarose.com

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Sheila & Rhonda talk about being moved by art as a child, freelance directing, following instincts, the value of community, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Sheila Daniels is a multi-disciplinary theater artist  based in Seattle since 1994. As a Director, her work has been seen in Seattle at Seattle Rep, INTIMAN, ACT, Strawberry Theatre Workshop, Seattle Shakespeare Company, Seattle Children’s Theater, New Century Theater Company, CHAC and other wonderful companies. Nationally she has worked in Minneapolis, Austin, Albuquerque, NYC and Athens, Ohio. She has self-produced multiple devised works, and worked as a devisor in collaboration with groups such as UMO Ensemble and at the Tacoma Museum of Glass. She is currently working on a multi-year process of creating a documentary exposing the stereotyping and shaming of femme bodies in American Theatre. Sheila is a proud faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University, where she also co-produces the Theater Department’s New Works Festival. She lives in a sweet little house in West Seattle with Jason & Basho and gets her hands into dirt whenever possible. 

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Nadia & Rhonda talk about clown camp, practical applications of clown work, community arts facilitation, the incarceration of time, the gods, how cold it is in Ottowa, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Since 2002 Nadia has facilitated well over 2000 international events, workshops, and trainings. She is known for her ability to clarify and simplify complex concepts, her ability to work with participant resistance and challenging dynamics, as well as her creative and bold arts-based designs. She is also known for her powerful diversity, inclusion and participatory practices.  She loves to bring meaningful play to groups that are interested in creating powerful outcomes.  She is a professional poet, performer and lyricist with a strong interest in musical improvisation, automatic drawing and authentic movement.  She brings these all to her training and facilitation practices in an authentic and magnetic style, rich with imagination and humour.

She holds a Master’s degree in Education, with a focus on Imaginative Education and the use of metaphor in group leadership, and well as a diploma in Dialogue and Negotiation, and an advanced post-grad certificate in Expressive Art Therapy. Her current research is in Time and Temporality in group process. She has been fortunate to study and work alongside some of the world’s most cutting edge teachers, professors, trainers, artists and facilitators.

She is a queer, first generation, middle class, cis-gendered woman of Indian descent. She acknowledges that Canada sits on the ancestral and unfairly colonized territories of many Indigenous nations, who are the traditional stewards of its land and resources.  She is a grateful settler and visitor there.

[Photo Credit: Kimura Byol]

NADIA CHANEY

Facilitation, Training, Mediation, Process Design

www.nadiachaney.com

TOOLSI: ON-DEMAND FACILITATION TRAINING

A training app for community facilitators. All levels welcome.

https://facilitate.toolsi.ca

GALLERY OF PAINTINGS

To view and purchase prints

www.pictorem.com/gallery/Nadia.Chaney

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Bret & Rhonda talk about fairy tales, playwriting in collaboration, committing to the life you love rather than the life you expected, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Bret Fetzer writes plays and original fairy tales, has dabbled in film (his one feature is 'My Last Year with the Nuns', available on Prime and Fandango), and is working on some fantasy novels.  If you live in Seattle, he does storytelling on an irregular basis with two other playwrights/storytellers, Scot Augustson and Kelleen Conway Blanchard; our next show is coming up in March at Seattle Open Arts Place (SOAP).  He's written for a handful of newspapers and journals and had some stories published in literary magazines.  He aspires to have a website some day, with recordings of his fairy tales.

Photo credit: Kelly O.

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Gary & Rhonda talk about moving to NY later than the cliché expects, our first instruments, entrepreneurship, paying attention to the light, and so much more.  Please take a moment to share Past the Blue Mailbox with your friends, and be sure to follow on your favorite streaming service to be notified of new episodes!

Gary Grundei is a NYC-based award-winning musician and teacher. He is the founder of golden lotus studio, an online community for songwriters. He is most known for his work with the band High Fiction, for original compositions for theatre, film, podcasts, and the concert stage, and for coaching and producing other artists.

Recent projects include: sound design and original music for the 10-episode podcast on the secret origin story of Title IX called Feminist Files, starring Jodie Foster, Samira Wiley, Amy Hill, Leigh Fondakowski, and others; Bloody Mary Brunch, single with High Fiction; and Musical Direction for the Caregiver Cabaret GALA for the Parent Artist Advocacy League at A.R.T./New York Theatres.

Gary has written music for NPR, MTV, New York Stage and Film, The Kennedy Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Magic Theatre, GALA Choruses, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He has worked on projects with Meredith Monk, Bill Pullman, Leigh Fondakowski, Caitlyn FitzGerald, Barbara Dilley, and the Denver Broncos. He’s performed on stages from Carnegie Hall to Boettcher Concert Hall to Hollywood’s Hotel Cafe.

Gary has taught at Naropa University, Occidental College, University of Denver, Whitman College, The Ohio State University, and online through goldenlotusstudio.com.

High Fiction’s debut album to: whom it may concern has been described as “a collection of songs that are simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking, confident and vulnerable, ornate and airy.” The album, co-produced with David Wilton (A Boy + His Kite), features Ron Miles on trumpet, Janet Feder on guitar, and Matt Berninger of the National on guest vocals.

He has studied with Richard Toensing, Thomas Wells, Phil DeGreg, Hank Marr, Natalie Goldberg, Barbara Dilley, and Steve Reich.