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
Showing posts with label Poe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poe. Show all posts

Monday, June 17, 2013

Murder on the Bare Stage tickets now on sale

Tickets went on sale this morning for the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival.  Click here for more information about the Festival, including its full listings of shows...

The webpage specifically for Murder on the Bare Stage is now live, and tickets are available here:

or call 866-811-4111

 
Plus, you can follow our show on Facebook at Guilt Bleeds


Saturday, June 1, 2013

Murder on the Bare Stage coming to Capital Fringe (July 11 - 28)

Coming this July to CapFringe 2013: Murder on the Bare Stage, the show we debuted at Bloombars last fall (see October 2012 entry), combining Stephen Mead's expertise in "Dramatic Recitation" of Victorian-era authors - here, violent nerve-wracking scenes from Poe and Dickens and more - with three of my idylls relevant to the overall theme of murder.


This hour-long version will have a run of seven performances during the festival.

The Capital Fringe organization does a great job at helping artists and producers organize, prepare, and promote their shows - xclnt professional training.  Both through and since our great time in March with the Happenings at the Harman Idylls showcase, we've been taking this process step by step.

Thus, some artwork for what CapFringe calls "promotional collateral" (Festival Guide, postcards, posters, etc.)...






And a 10-word headline for our page on the CapFringe website (coming soon)...
What's Hidden Bleeds - How Can a Crime Be Concealed?

And a 40-word blurb for the website and Festival Guide...
Nail-biting and Nerve-wracking: actor Stephen Mead (London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-trained) combines his specialty in dramatic recitations of Poe and Dickens with poet Magus Magnus’ approach to theater of the imagination, for classic and avant-garde thrills and chills.     

Although going forward maybe I'd switch "classic and avant-garde" to "classic and new," in recurrent consideration of the term "avant-garde" and its applicability;  the contours of the show overall keep everything on edge, and the Idylls form - as theater of the shared imagining, in re-conception of an ancient form - is offbeat and radical (root-pulling) in its approach to contemporary theater and acting, even as the individual pieces retain narrative arcs...  getting to the root of what theater can do, or even tries to do, these days.  So yes, "avant-garde"; and yet, "Old-New" might express more precisely the dedication to innovative working against temporocentrism: in the Now, pushing to the verge where past, present, and future intersect in timelessness - the juncture for a real avant-garde practice (with true classics ever there/here to indicate the breach). Logos/Kairos.

our Facebook page:facebook.com/GuiltBleeds

Stephen Mead will be tweeting:  

twitter.com/StephenMMead   #MurderontheBareStage    #capfringe13 #CapFringeSoldOut
          

And Heeeeeer'es Stephen....



And you can get all the details for the show from our Press Release, template provided by the Capital Fringe Organization...


  Magus Magnus’ SiGiLPAL presents
Murder on the Bare Stage
a part of the 8th  Annual Capital Fringe Festival July 11 - 28, 2013

A Program of Masterful Literary-Poetic Suspense

What:         Murder on the Bare Stage
featuring classically-trained actor Stephen Mead
                    devised by Stephen Mead and poet Magus Magnus
         
Where:       Caos on F
                   923 F St. NW, Washington DC, 20004
Between 9th and 10th streets on F, Gallery Place and Metro Center Metro stops.

When:        Showtimes
July 12th, 10:15pm
July 17th, 9:30 pm
July 20th, 2:30 pm
July 21st, 8:45 pm
July 24th, 10:15 pm
July 25th, 7:00 pm
July 27th, 8:00 pm

Tickets & Passes: On Sale June 17th at CapitalFringe.org or by calling 866-811-4111.




About Murder on the Bare Stage

          Scary, spine-tingling, and entertaining, this program combines actor Stephen Mead’s expertise in dramatic recitation of authors such as Poe and Dickens with poet Magus Magnus’ approach to the “Idyll” form (theater of the imagination), for classic and avant-garde thrills and chills on the theme of violent crime.  Audiences enter into the mindscapes of killers, maniacs, the guilt-ridden, and the ruthlessly ambitious.  Suspenseful, intriguing.



About Stephen Mead and Magus Magnus

          Stephen Mead trained as an actor at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Stephen has worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Arts Collection Fund, the National Trust (UK), Richmond Adult College, Missenden Abbey Buckinghamshire, among many other venues. He has appeared on the bill of the world-famous Player’s Theatre in London singing Victorian music-hall. Stephen had the honor of being invited to perform his one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the Dickens Festival in Dickens’ home town Rochester, Kent, in the historic Guildhall three years in a row. He also performed a tour of Switzerland under the auspices of the Anglo-Swiss society. His appearances in the Washington DC area include All's Well that Ends Well for the Maryland Shakespeare Festival, Romeo and Juliet for Vpstart Crow Theatre Company, and Medieval StoryLand, a hit at the 2012 Capital Fringe Festival;  he is also as an entertainer at local hotels, and has performed programs of his Dickens recitations including his one man show version of A Christmas Carol to acclaim at venues in DC and Virginia. 

          Magus Magnus is the author of The Re-echoes, Idylls for a Bare Stage, Heraclitean Pride, and Verb Sap.  As artistic director of SiGiLPAL (Sui Generis Literary Performing Arts Lab), he explores, develops, and showcases a variety of approaches to performing the written word. 



About Capital Fringe: Capital Fringe is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 2005 with the purpose of connecting exploratory artists with adventurous audiences by creating outlets and spaces for creative, cutting-edge, and contemporary performance in the District. Capital Fringe’s vital programs ensure the growth and continued health of the local and regional performing arts community by helping artists become independent producers while stimulating the vibrant cultural landscape in our city.

# # #   



This production is presented as a part of the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival, a program of the Washington, DC non-profit Capital Fringe.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

"Dramatic Recitation" and the Idylls form

This Friday, the collaborative and juxtaposing Murder on the Bare Stage (subject of my entry earlier this month) - in addition to providing chills and thrills, entertainment and suspense, for the weekend before Halloween - has the capability to demonstrate, highlight, and edge defining contours to the Idylls form, through comparison of similar and complementary approaches.

The show is a collaboration with actor Stephen Mead (profiled elsewhere on this blog), combining his specialty in "Dramatic Recitation" of Victorian-era authors - here, violent nerve-wracking scenes from Poe and Dickens and more - with three of my idylls relevant to the overall theme of murder.

Both approaches - "Dramatic Recitation" and the Idyll form - conceive of the verbal element as essential to what live theater still has to offer uniquely, the tingly pleasure of hearing words well-spoken, fantastically-spoken, virtuosity in the delivery of charged language, towards the release in real-time of the power of words.


Murder on the Bare Stage
8pm Friday, October 26th 

at



3222 11th Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20010


And yet, even with emphasis on the verbal as a mutual starting point for the collaboration, there's variety and illuminating contrasts between "dramatic recitation" and the "shared imagining" approach to the Idyll, as between prose and poetry, and indeed, as between storytelling and poet's theater - or a mixture of it all, contrasts, and combinations.

Here's what to expect for Friday's show, contours highlighted by what's place side by side.


 Murder on the Bare Stage

ACT I: Verse and Blood

3 Victorian Era poets
    W.S. Gilbert "Gentle Alice Brown"
    Lewis Carroll "The Walrus and the Carpenter"
    Edward Lear  5 Limericks

Idyll - "An Old Soldier Cleans his Rifle for the Last Time" 
(vide Walt Whitman)  

"The Murder of Nancy" from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.  As adapted for dramatic recitation by Dickens himself, and further adapted by Stephen Mead.
 


ACT II: How Can a Crime Be Concealed?

Idyll - "A Bandit Plots a Murder by the Road"

Macbeth/Lady Macbeth

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

Idyll - "A Reveler Walks Home to his Family by Moonlight"