Residency #135
JUNE 29 – JULY 19
Application deadline: March 6, 2009
PROJECT RESIDENCY
HEATHER WOODBURY, playwriting/performance
 Heather Woodbury is an award-winning performer and writer known for her ground-breaking “performance novels”- expansive, multi-character works which combine the immediacy of performance art with a novel’s length and scope. Her 10-hour, 100-character solo performance, “What Ever: An American Odyssey in Eight Acts” (published by Faber/Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) was hailed as a “Whitmanesque vision of America” [Chicago Sun-Times] and cited by the NY Times as ‘”a masterwork of the solo form.”
The critically acclaimed epic (8-part) performance began as an underground serial in the back of an East Village bar and went on to tour the U.S and Europe - from Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago to London’s Royal Festival Hall. It was later adapted as a radio play hosted by Ira Glass. Woodbury has received multiple awards, grants and fellowships for her subsequent works.
Tale of 2Cities: An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks (published by Semiotexte/MIT Press) was developed in a series of solo performances as playwright-in residence at the Public Theatre with a 2001 Playwriting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. The premiere production of this 6-act, multi-generational saga, featuring a multi-racial cast, won a 2007 OBIE (Off-Broadway Award for excellence) for ensemble performance. In 2006 she was awarded the Spalding Gray Award honoring writer/performers who are “fearless innovators."
Her current solo work, The Last Days of Desmond ‘Nani’ Reese: A Stripper’s History of the World, was commissioned for development by The City of Los Angeles, which awarded her a C.O.L.A. – 2007 Performing Artist’s Fellowship.
Heather developed her style of solo performance and writing in New York City’s East Village during the early 80s performance art scene. During this time, she wrote a dozen solo pieces, two plays, and one screenplay, refining a method of generating material via last-minute writing and semi-improvised solo performance. She is currently touring Last Days and starting work on a new “multi-medium” novel - for publication, performance, and web-cast.
Residency Statement
I am looking to navigate an Atlantic Center for the Arts mentor-ship and residency with these sorts of artists at sail: literary-performing artists and performing-literary artists and affiliated genre-expanders and mixers (i.e. those with fingers in film/video, internet dissemination, situationist/agit prop street theatre) who utilize a fusion of disciplines to heighten the cultural relevance of their creative communications. In other words, artists whose compasses point them toward re-inventing and re-imagining the mediums/venues for story, performance and literature in modes which speak to our current age and social reality.
I will invite group discussions, make myself available to consult/percolate one-on-one and in small groups on what each individual is presently engaged with in their work, and suggest forms of communal interaction while allowing plenty of room for each person to be the totalitarian dictator of his/her own vision and trajectory.
Avenues of exploration might include generating material to be shared/performed on-line during the residency, thematic jam sessions with master artists Mark Applebaum and Carole Kim and their associates, ruminations on the overall situation of the residency itself and how that pertains to larger political/social/cultural structure in which we live and strive to express ourselves, how the medium/venue of Atlantic Center for the Arts could be innovatively tweaked for maximum creative communication. We’ll ask the question: How can we use our imaginations and talents, our many forms of language, including the language of new technologies, to cut through the fog of consumerism while handily avoiding the rocky reefs of art-elitism?
Specifically welcome applications: performance artists, actor-writers, and film-makers, video artists, playwrights, comics or poets with strong proclivities toward exploring the performative and story-telling aspects of these forms. Cross-disciplinary artists, artists who overuse hyphens when describing what they do, are strongly encouraged to apply.
Application Materials
Work samples
- Ten pages total from one or two manuscripts and/or
- Between five to ten minutes of film/video (DVD) or audio (CD). Alternately, can be in foolproof digital format on-line (but please include very explicit, detailed instructions of how to access your sample on-line!)
- A few sentences providing context for the sample.
References
One written reference or up to 3 reviews of your work.
Written Materials
- A brief bio
- Resume
- A short paragraph on the most fun you’ve ever had as an artist.
- A short paragraph on why you are drawn to this residency, and what potential you see in it for yourself.
Optional
* For more information on Heather Woodbury please visit http://www.heatherwoodbury.com |
