PQ&A - USITT at the 2019 PQ

USITT
  • 5.0 (1)
  • ARTS
  • DAILY SERIES
PQ&A - USITT at the 2019 PQ

PQ&A is USITT’s companion podcast to the US Exhibition at the 2019 Prague Quadrennial. It is hosted by Ian Garrett, lead curator for the exhibition. On PQ&A Ian talks with the featured designers in the US Exhibition about their background, inspirations, and what gives them their unique world view. In the exhibition for 2019 we wanted to recognize that the United States is a nation of immigrants, and celebrate our diversity... most people in the US can identify immigrant roots. Those immigrant roots, together with the people that can trace their ancestry back to more than 500 Native American tribes, we refer to as this the cultural DNA of the artists who create the work in our communities. This rich cultural diversity and wisdom contributes to the creativity, ingenuity, and knowledge that we find inspirational. So, iIn addition to the selected work, the exhibition incorporates the oral history of the designers, positioning them in relationship to the field and their own work. For this podcast, I talk to the designers about their background, their connection to performance design, their mentors and influencers, who they have mentored and influenced, and how these factors have affected their approach to design and scenography.

  1. 06/05/2019

    Daniel Conway

    Recent projects include: Born Yesterday for Ford’s Theatre; MacBeth for Chicago Shakespeare Theatre; Penn and Teller on Broadway, directed by John Rando; the premiere of Queens for a Year, directed by Lucie Tiberghien for Hartford Stage; The Tempest for American Repertory Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare, and South Coast Repertory theatres directed by long time collaborators, Aaron Posner and Teller. The Scottsboro Boys directed by Joe Calarco for The Signature Theatre. At Wit’s End, Love in Afghanistan, Vanya, Sonia, Masha and Spike for Arena Stage; the premiere of American Song, directed by Mark Clements for Milwaukee Rep; The Games Afoot for the Cleveland Playhouse; Company, Hairspray, Chess, and Sunset Boulevard for The Signature Theatre directed by Eric Schaeffer; Sabrina Fair for The Ford’s Theatre and The Merry Wives of Windsor for The Shakespeare Theater; Hand to God, directed by Joanie Schultz for The Studio Theatre; Jelly’s Last Jam for Signature Theatre, directed by Matt Gardiner; District Merchant for South Coast Repertory, directed by Michael Michetti; At Wit’s End, for Cincinnati Playhouse, directed by David Esbjornsen; Three Sisters for The Studio Theatre directed by Jackson Gay; and the premiere of No Sisters for The Studio Theatre written and directed by Aaron Posner. Nominated for Washington, D.C’s Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Set Design fourteen times, he received the award in 2000, 2009, 2015 and most recently in 2017 for Stunning, for Woolly Mammoth Theatre, directed by Anne Kaufmann. Inclusion of materials for The Chicago Shakespeare production of Macbeth was funded in part by The University of Maryland International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research where Mr. Conway is a Professor of Design.

    29 min

  2. 06/05/2019

    Marcus Dillard

    Marcus has designed for opera, theater and dance across North America and in Europe, including numerous productions for the Minnesota Opera, Lyric Opera Kansas City, the Guthrie Theater, Children’s Theater Company, Minnesota Dance Theater, and Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Recent designs include La fanciulla del West and Hansel and Gretel for Minnesota Opera, Otello for Pittsburgh Opera, Silent Night for Cincinnati Opera, Love’s Labour’s Lost for Actors Theatre of Louisville and The Moving Company; Tartuffe for South Coast Repertory; Dead Man Walking for Madison Opera; The Ballad of Emmett Till for Penumbra Theater; and Cabaret for Theater Latté Da. Other projects include By the Way and Meet Vera Stark for Penumbra Theater; Silent Night for Lyric Opera Kansas City; Tartuffe for Berkeley Repertory Theater and the Shakespeare Theater; and The Barber of Sevillefor Madison Opera.

    28 min

  3. 06/05/2019

    Marcus Doshi

    Marcus Doshi designs lighting and sets for theatre, dance, opera, and collaborates with artists and architects on non-performance-based work. Doshi is a frequent collaborator with New York’s Theatre for a New Audience, where his work has been seen in 11 plays, including The Skin of Our Teeth, A Doll’s House/The Father in rep., Othello (2009 — Lucille Lortel Award Nomination) and Hamlet (2009 – Drama Desk Award Nomination). He is also a frequent collaborator with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he has designed the world premieres of Linda Vista, Mary Page Marlowe, and Visiting Edna, as well as several others including Pass Over, which was later filmed for Amazon by Spike Lee. Other New York credits include productions for Juilliard Opera (Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, La Calisto), Lincoln Center Theatre, the Public Theatre, the Vineyard Theatre, and New York Theatre Workshop, among others. His work has been seen at virtually every important regional theater nationwide. Internationally he has designed for the Comedie Francaise, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Royal Opera House Linbury Studio, the National Theater of Sarajevo, the Sydney Festival, among many other venues. Doshi holds degrees from Wabash College and Yale University, and is a tenured Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, where he teaches in the MFA Design and Directing programs.

    35 min

  4. 06/05/2019

    Gregory Gale

    Gregory Gale is a two-time Tony Award nominated designer for Rock of Ages, and Cyrano de Bergerac featuring Kevin Kline and Jennifer Garnerwhich can be seen on Amazon. Other Broadway designs include: The Wedding Singer, Urinetown, Arcadia, and Band in Berlin. Off-Broadway he designed the costumes for the world premieres of Douglas Carter Beane’s To Wong Foo, Hood, and Fairycakes. His work at the Atlantic Theater with The Voysey Inheritance earned him a Lucille Lortel Award. Mr. Gale has an Irene Sharaff Young Master Award and has multiple Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Design Award nominations. His opera productions include world premieres of The Prince of Players by Carlisle Floyd for Houston Grand Opera and An American Soldier by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang for Opera Theater of St. Louis. Other opera designs include: The Magic Flute for Chicago Opera Theater, Camelot for Virginia Opera, and La Rondine for Opera Theater of Saint Louis. Mr. Gale designed two films that will be released in 2019: The Mental State and Real Drag. He is currently designing the feature film Blinded by Ed.

    33 min

  5. 06/05/2019

    Izumi Inaba

    Born and raised in Japan, Izumi came to the states to learn performing arts at age of 18. She double majored in dance and theatre design at State University of New York, Buffalo. Right after the graduation, she moved to Chicago to attend the master program at Northwestern University, focusing on costume and scenic design. Soon after completing the program in 2009, she started working as a freelance costume/makeup designer in Chicago. She has joined Red Tape Theatre as an ensemble member in 2012, where she has designed all productions since such as Skriker, Elephant’s Graveyard, Lear, Madam Barker, and Hamlet is Dead. She has also designed costumes for production with Griffin Theatre, A Red Orchid, The Gift, The Music Theatre Company, The Hypocrites, Lifeline, Strawdog, Albany Park Theatre Project, Steep, Porchlight Music, CPS Shakespeare at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, The Building Stage, Marry-Arrchie, Two Pence Shakespeare, Evanston Dance Ensemble, Wheaton College, Sideshow, TUTA, Raven Theatre, and Buzz 22. Her makeup designs appeared in the productions with Theo Ubique Cabaret (Cats, Non-Equity Jeff Award for Artistic Specialization), and Chicago Dramatists. She has served as a costume staff/designer at National High School Institute for last 7 years. Izumi is honored to receive Michael Maggio Emerging Designer Award 2014.

    35 min

  6. 06/05/2019

    Melpomene Katakalos

    Melpomene Katakalos has been a freelance scenic designer, combining the art of storytelling with a compelling environment, collaborative processes, and the dynamics between collaborators. She has been designing predominately in San Francisco, NYC, and Philadelphia designing over 100 productions, many of which were world premieres, over the last 20+ years. Her designs have been seen on a variety of stages including La Jolla Playhouse, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Berkeley’s California Shakespeare Theatre, Los Angeles’ Cornerstone Theatre and Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre. In NYC, she has designed off-Broadway at the Clurman, at HERE Arts Center, La Mama, 45th Street Theatre, and the Triad. Her designs and devised works have been performed at the Beijing International Fringe and the Singapore International Fringe. Katakalos is the director of the New Play Design Lab at the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation, and is a co-founder of San-Francisco-based Crowded Fire Theater Company, which has been producing and commissioning new works for over 20 years. Among her many nominations and awards are two San Diego Playbill Awards, two Bay Area Critics Circle nominations, a Barrymore nomination, and the honor of Best Set Designer from The East Bay Express. Ms. Katakalos is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Lehigh University where she was recently appointed as the Class of 1961 Professor. She received her BFA in Theatrical Production Arts, Concentration in Design from Ithaca College, and her MFA in Scenic Design from UC San Diego.

    47 min

  7. 06/05/2019

    Kinetic Light

    Alice Sheppard Alice Sheppard took her first dance class in order to make good on a dare; she loved moving so much that she resigned her academic professorship in order to begin a career in dance. She studied ballet and modern with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Alice joined AXIS Dance Company where she toured nationally and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. Since becoming an independent artist, Alice has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she has worked with Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton. As an emerging, award-winning choreographer, Alice creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies. Engaging with disability arts, culture and history, Alice attends to the complex intersections of disability, gender, and race by exploring the societal and cultural significance of difference. AliceSheppard.com Laurel Lawson Laurel Lawson found that dance combines her lifelong loves of athleticism and art, and began her professional career with Full Radius Dance in 2004. She has performed and taught in Atlanta and worldwide with the company. At Kinetic Light, in addition to choreographic collaboration and performance she designed and created the DESCENT costumes, designed the DESCENT wheelchairs in collaboration with Top End’s Paul Schulte, and is the product designer for AUDIMANCE, a revolutionary app centering non-visual audiences. Laurel also performs, choreographs, and teaches as an independent artist, and is the CTO and co-founder of CyCore Systems, a boutique engineering consultancy which specializes in solving novel, multi-realm problems. She is also a member of the USA Women’s Developmental Sled Hockey Team. Michael Maag Michael Maag designs at the intersection of lighting and projections for theatre, dance, musicals, opera, and in planetariums across the United States. He sculpts with light and shadow to create lighting environments that tell a story, believing that lighting in support of the performance is the key to unlocking our audience’s emotions. He has built custom optics for projections in theatres, museums and planetariums, and also designs and builds electronics and lighting for costumes and scenery. As a wheelchair user, Michael is passionate about bringing the perspective of the disabled artist to technical theatre and design. He is currently the Resident Lighting Designer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His designs have been seen on the Festival’s stages for the last 20 years, as well as at Arena Stage, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Utah Shakespearean Festival, Florida Studio Theatre, Henry Hudson Planetarium, Albany, and many other places. Michael has been a proud member of USITT since 1986.

    1h 21m

  8. 06/05/2019

    Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

    Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American poet, curator, and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. He is a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award recipient, a 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist-in-Residence, a 2019 Gibney DiP Artist-in-Residence, a 2017 Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Abrons Arts Center, a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow, a 2016 Gibney Dance boo-koo resident artist, and a recipient of a 2016 USArtists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. His previous work #negrophobia (premiered September 2015, Gibney Dance Center) was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and has toured throughout Europe having appeared in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), TakeMeSomewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), Zurich MOVES! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich). His current work, Séancers, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in December 2017 and has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Recent highlights include Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), Sophiensaele (Berlin, DE), and the Wexner Center (Columbus, OH). In 2019, Séancers will have engagements at the Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX) and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montréal, CA), among others. American performance venues include: Abrons Arts Center, Joyce SoHo, DTW, FringeArts, Dixon Place, Dance Theater Workshop, Bennington College, Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, the CEC Meeting House Theater, Wexner Center for the Arts, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, LAX Festival, Miami Theater Center, Art Basel Miami, and the Painted Bride Arts Center, among others. He was a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 Fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University where he earned his MA in Curatorial Studies. His work in performance is rooted in a creative mission to push history forward through writing and art making and advocacy. Kosoko’s work in live performance has received support from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Dance Advance, The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and The Philadelphia Cultural Fund. His breakout solo performance work entitled other.explicit.body. premiered at Harlem Stage in April 2012 and went on to tour nationally. As a performer, Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. In addition, creative consultant and/or performer credits include: Terry Creach, Lisa Kraus, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Leah Stein Dance Company, Emergent Improvisation Ensemble, and Faustin Linyekula and Les Studios Kabako (The Democratic Republic of Congo). Kosoko’s poems can be found in such publications as The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo. In 2009, he published he chapbook, Animal in Cyberspace, and, in 2011, he published his own collection, Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). Publications include: The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, The Interlochen Review, The Broad Street Review, Silo Literary and Visual Arts Magazine. Kosoko has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the Brooklyn Arts Council, the National...

    49 min
See All (23)

About

PQ&A is USITT’s companion podcast to the US Exhibition at the 2019 Prague Quadrennial. It is hosted by Ian Garrett, lead curator for the exhibition. On PQ&A Ian talks with the featured designers in the US Exhibition about their background, inspirations, and what gives them their unique world view. In the exhibition for 2019 we wanted to recognize that the United States is a nation of immigrants, and celebrate our diversity... most people in the US can identify immigrant roots. Those immigrant roots, together with the people that can trace their ancestry back to more than 500 Native American tribes, we refer to as this the cultural DNA of the artists who create the work in our communities. This rich cultural diversity and wisdom contributes to the creativity, ingenuity, and knowledge that we find inspirational. So, iIn addition to the selected work, the exhibition incorporates the oral history of the designers, positioning them in relationship to the field and their own work. For this podcast, I talk to the designers about their background, their connection to performance design, their mentors and influencers, who they have mentored and influenced, and how these factors have affected their approach to design and scenography.

Information

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.
Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada