SLC Performance Lab

The SLC Performance Lab is produced by ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program. Each month we interview visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Grad Lab, one of the core classes of the program where grads work with guest artists and develop group generated performance pieces monthly.

In our second podcast of the 20/21 season, Chanel Blanchett (SLC21) and Andrew Del Vecchio (SCL22) interview the director and designer Carlos Soto.

Carlos Soto is a director and designer based in New York City, where he studied Art History and Literature at the Pratt Institute. His GIRLMACHINE premiered at Performa 09 and was subsequently presented in Paris by the American University of Paris. Pig Pig Pig (2010) was developed in residency at Le Point Éphémère, Paris, and performed at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. In 2011, he was featured in an evening of works curated by Robert Wilson for Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum. In September 2013, Pace Gallery, NY, exhibited video work created in residency at Willem de Kooning’s studio in Springs, NY. Soto has presented work at the Triennale di Milano, Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Istanbul Biennial, among others. He has been artist-in-residence at The Watermill Center (2009 & 2015), Kampnagel Hamburg, Schauspielhaus Wien, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Live Arts, among others.

Photo © Carlos Soto

Welcome to the 2nd Season of the SLC Performance lab Podcast. Produced by ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program, the SLC Performance lab interviews visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Grad Lab, one of the core classes of the program where grads work with guest artists and develop group generated performance pieces monthly.

Maiko Kikuchi is a multidisciplinary artist working in illustration, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, animation and puppetry/ performance. Her object theatre pieces include DAYDREAM TUTORIAL(Work in Progress) as part of Under The Radar Festival 2020 (INCOMING! Program) at The Public Theatre, LaMaMa and FiveMyles Gallery, PINK BUNNY at Japan Society and St.Ann’s Warehouse, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENSE at Dixon Place, NO NEED FOR A NIGHT LIGHT ON A LIGHT NIGHT LIKE TONIGHT at LaMaMa, DAYDREAM ANTHOLOGY at St. Ann’s Warehouse. She is currently in artist residency program at HERE collaborating with Spencer Lott and also one third of the curator members at a puppetry residency program Object Movement Festival at The Center at West Park in NYC.

Interviewed by Karen Movilla (SLC 21)and Amanda Card (SLC 21)

Produced by ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program, the SLC Performance lab interviews visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Grad Lab, one of the core classes of the program where grads work with guest artists and develop group generated performance pieces monthly.

Beth Pickens Consultant for artists and arts organizations Beth Pickens is a Los Angeles-based consultant for artists and arts organizations. She is the author of the book Your Art Will Save Your Life (Feminist Press, 2018) and the pamphlets Making Art During Fascism and On Artists and Hopelessness. She provides career consultation, grant writing, fundraising, and financial, project, and strategic planning services for clients throughout the US. Before relocating to Los Angeles in 2014, she was based in San Francisco where she served as Senior Program Manager at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Managing Director of both RADAR Productions and the Queer Cultural Center. She specializes in supporting queer and trans artists, women, and artists of color.

Produced by ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program, the SLC Performance lab interviews visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Grad Lab, one of the core classes of the program where grads work with guest artists and develop group generated performance pieces monthly.

Broadway: Violet (Tony nomination); Chinglish; Well. Off-Broadway: American Hero (2ST); Kung Fu (Signature Theatre); The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence (Playwrights Horizons); The Call (Playwrights Horizons); The Madrid (MTC); Golden Child (Signature Theatre); No Place to Go (Public Theater; Two River Theatre); In the Wake (Center Theatre Group/Berkeley Repertory Theatre and The Public Theater, Obie Award, Lortel nomination); Go Back to Where You Are (Playwrights Horizons, Obie Award); From Up Here (MTC, Drama Desk nomination); Yellow Face (Center Theatre Group/The Public Theater); Coraline (MCC/True Love); Blue Door (Playwrights Horizons); Well (The Public Theater; Huntington Theatre; ACT); Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (Second Stage Theatre). Recent regional: The Heidi Chronicles (The Guthrie); American Hero (WTF); Chinglish (Goodman Theater, Jeff nomination; West Coast/Hong Kong tour).

Jillian Walker writes and often performs contemporary sacred texts

for the now times. Her work creates space for healing and liberation; embodying remembrance for our ancestors and legacies. Often taking the form of plays, musicals, sacred lecture-sermon-concert gatherings, and self-reflective space, Jillian’s work pushes what we think of as genre and blurs the perceived boundaries between performer, audience and self. She draws deeply on her training as a dramaturg (MFA Columbia), Black Spiritual wisdom, and the ongoing work of black feminist thinkers to bring process-driven performance to life.

Some of her works include: Sarah’s Salt. (developed at MCC Theater, Roundabout Theater Company; Honorable Mention for the Relentless Award; finalist for the 2019 Bay Area Playwrights Festival). Songs of Speculation, presented at JACK; and “Blue Ink: A Night with Jillian Walker” performed at Joe’s Pub. Her ancestor-revering work, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (co-presented by The Bushwick Starr and National Black Theatre) was a NY Times Critics’ Pick. Some of her collaborations and dramaturgical works include: co-writing for Common’s 2019 international tour, “Let Love Tour”, dramaturgy for the award-winning musical, Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of The Future and dramaturgy for Dave Malloy’s Moby-Dick, directed by Rachel Chavkin.

She is currently developing work with the High Line, The TEAM, Musical Theater Factory (MTF Makers), Ars Nova (Makers Lab), and Soho Rep., where she is the 2020-21 Tow Playwright-in-Residence.

Edited and Produced by Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Edited and Produced by Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Edited and Produced by Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Edited and Produced by Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Edited and Produced by Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Interviewed by Karen Loewy Movilla and Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Photo Cred: De’Lon Grant Photography

Emily Ritger is a director, playwright, performer and choreographer based in Chicago. As a teacher and director developing new work, she has worked for American Theatre Company, Redmoon, Cleveland Public Theatre, Northlight Theatre, ChiArts, The New Harmony Project and The National High School Institute.

While Ritger’s focus is in ensemble based work, her diverse training includes Viola Spolin Theatre Games, Viewpoints, Puppetry, Contact Improv, experimental methods of writing and various forms of music, creating work that is saturated in movement, music and play. Her work draws from her experience of growing up in small town Wisconsin. It celebrates rural america - its voice, land, dialect, sense of community and the people who carry on the traditions and way of life inherent to living off the land. With the agrarian landscape as her cornerstone, her work explores the philosophy and religion inherent in nature and living off the land, and the cyclical birth and death inherent in life on a farm.

Her current projects include her solo show, "Crud", part documentary style theatre, part fantastical music and shadow puppetry, examining a day her family never talks about. "Behaymas", a collaboration with playwright Aliza Bartfield, three humans and one animal blur the lines of domesticity and societal constructions of family. And her play "The Day Krissy LeDuke Fell Through the Ice", is a moment in time and its arrayed vectors of tragedy told through free verse and music.

She has studied with theater artists Dan Hurlin, David Neumann, Sibyl Kempson, Tina Landau, Brett Bailey, Claudia Castellucci, Aretha Sills, Shirley Kaplan, Cassandra Medley, Stuart Spencer and Tom Lee, and received her MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College and a BS in Theatre and Philosophy from the University of Evansville.

Edited and Produced by Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Interviewed by Anne Bakan (SLC20) and Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)

Produced by ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program, the SLC Performance Lab interviews visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program’s Grad Lab, one of the core classes of the program where grads work with guest artists and develop group generated performance pieces monthly.

Kate Bornstein was interviewed by Dan Hurlin and SLC Students on Zoom.

Since 1989, trans trailblazer Kate Bornstein has—with humor and spunk—ushered us into a world of limitless possibility through a daring re-envisionment of the gender system as we know it. Today, Kate identifies as nonbinary: not a man, and not a woman—and she’s been writing about nonbinary gender identity for nearly thirty years.

Currently, you can see Kate onscreen as Joan, the church lady, in the film, Saturday Church. In 2016, she was a regular cast member of the second season of E! TV’s “I Am Cait,” with Caitlyn Jenner. Kate is the subject of Sam Feder’s award-winning documentary, “Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger.” Kate’s work on suicide prevention, and her advocacy for marginalized and at-risk youth has earned her two citations of outstanding citizenship from the New York City Council.

Holly Hughes interviewed by Brynn Hambley (SLC20) & Stephen (SLC20) Earnhart

Holly Hughes is an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work maps the troubled fault lines of identity. Her combination of poetic imagery and political satire has earned her wide attention and placed her work at the center of America’s culture wars.

Sarah DeLappe interviewed by Amelia Bethel (SLC21) Karen Loewy Movilla (SLC21)

Sarah DeLappe's play The Wolves premiered Off-Broadway at The Playwrights Realm, following an engagement at New York Stage and Film, and development at Clubbed Thumb and Great Plains Theatre Conference. The Wolves received the American Playwriting Foundation's inaugural Relentless Award, and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Yale Drama Series Prize. DeLappe is the Page One Playwright for The Playwrights Realm and has been a resident artist at the Sitka Fellows Program and SPACE on Ryder Farm. Past affiliations: Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers' Group, New Georges Audrey Residency. Current: Ars Nova's Play Group, Resident Playwright at LCT3. MFA in process at Brooklyn College.

Donna Dennis Interviewed by Joanna Eisenberg (SLC20) and Sarah Sterling (SLC21)

Dennis is one of a small group of groundbreaking women—including Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara and Mary Miss—who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture in the early 1970s. Deborah Everett writes in Sculpture Magazine “When Donna Dennis created her earnest, plain-spoken Tourist Cabins at the outset of her career, they had the impact of cultural icons.” Drawing from overlooked fragments of rural and urban vernacular American architecture, her sculptures—tourist cabins, hotels, subway stations, roller coasters—have represented stopping places on the journey through life.

Dennis has received solo exhibitions at The Brooklyn Museum, the Neuberger Museum, the Sculpture Center, and Holly Solomon Gallery, among others. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennal, the National Academy Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walker Art Center, MOMA P.S. 1, Tate Gallery, ICA London, and Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kunst, among others. A frequent collaborator, Dennis has worked with poets Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, Daniel Wolff and Ted Berrigan and with performance artist/puppeteer Dan Hurlin.

Edited and Produced by Kyrie Ellison (SLC21)