updates connected to the book Idylls for a Bare Stage
& to performances of the Idylls
& other initiatives related to the Art of the Poetic Monologue
2011-2016

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Performance Documentation, second half of 2013

The second half of 2013 brought with it a number of Idylls-related performances, with most of the focus being towards Murder on the Bare Stage at CapFringe and beyond.  Below, you'll find a variety of pics and vids. 

But first, please note the forthcoming Happenings at the Harman performance
Save the Date:  Wednesday, January 29th at noon, 2014
Murder on the Bare Stage

Sidney Harman Hall Forum
610 F. Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20004 

This is an encore performance, in case you missed the show at CapFringe
or during The Day of the Dead weekend in Baltimore and New York
and - it's Free!




Meanwhile, some documentation of the Day of the Dead weekend:
Saturday night in New York     11/2/2013
Here is Stephen Mead doing Murder for "Pop-Up Theater" @ Page 2, thanks to our hosts Tony Torn and Lee Ann Brown.

Stephen Mead

Friday night in Baltimore 11/1/2013
Litmore's Day of the Dead Poets Society Soiree  at the new Litmore Literary Arts Center, thanks to Julie Fisher, Christophe Casamassima, Douglas Mowbray hosts... photos by Douglas Mowbray.


refraction of the imaginative realm captured by Mowbray's camera




Mead's shape-shifting rage

here I am, taking it in



From earlier in the evening, here's the always-daring and hilarious Barbara DeCesare, triumphant 

"Babs" with her play,  The Great Beyond



In early August, in New York, Genna Davidson and I participated
in Boog City 7 Poetry, Music, and Theater Festival, for its Poets Theater Event.
A video of the whole Poets Theater evening, plus Major Matt Mason USA, is here:


Genna does the Antigone Idyll about 69 minutes into the video 
Note: I also appear, as an actor in Jesse Glass' play, about 103 minutes into it.


Okay, here's another angle on the Glass play
titled Poetic Fictions: A New Age Dawns At Longshoreman’s Hall, San Francisco, June 11, 1964!  


I'm Lew Welch
and the play exemplifies poets theater as poetics theater - aligned with its mytho-historic content! - in celebration of a quintessentially American breakthrough-moment (and ongoing ontological practice) in contemporary poetry. 

You'll have a chance to hear Adam Tobin as Gary Snyder say, "Well, ever since I realized you don't have to write like an Oxford don to be a poet..."
And I get to say, "This logomorphic resident / Intent on drawing National nourishment from National Buzz," as well as, "Hearse drivers like my hearse poems a lot."







The videos below are from CapFringe, July 2013, in the venue at Caos on F in D.C.
Stephen Mead doing his thing: these are clips from the bandit Idyll and the old soldier Idyll, along with his dramatic recitation of W.S. Gilbert's "Gentle Alice Brown."

Of course, these clips from Murder, and the footage of Genna Davidson's Antigone above, capture neither the intent nor the aimed for effect of the Idyll approach:  to do something only live theater can do these days... deeply connect with the audience, and indeed, create a shared imaginative space with artist and audience together, mind to mind, human to human.  The videos don't record the mental and imaginative layers of performance so central to the concept of the Idyll form. Still, perhaps there's something suggestive here of what goes on within the theatrical "magic circle" of an Idylls performance - and certainly, both with Genna and Stephen, you'll get a sense of their professional polish, their talents, skills, and intensity. 


 Bandit

Gentle Alice Brown

Whitman's Old Soldier



 Don't miss the next - free! - showing of
Murder on the Bare Stage
lunchtime (12 noon) - I mention lunchtime, because you can actually bring your lunch
on Wednesday, January 29th, 2014
Happenings at the Harman
Sidney Harman Hall Forum
610 F. Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20004 






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