Liz Allbee earned a silver trophy in the 1986 rowboat competition, despite being docked points for jumping out of the watercraft to push. She has since gone on to pursue other interests, among them a keen love of music and cheese. As a composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist, Allbee is never content to relegate herself to one genre or idiom. Her work spans new music, improvisation, electronic composition, Asian folk and pop, noise, minimalist, free jazz and experimental rock. She currently performs with groups Neung Phak, Le Flange du Mal, Marauder and Alibi and countless other local and global configurations. She lives in Oakland.
Brenda Wong Aoki
(Founding Company Member; Guest Performer)
Brenda Wong Aoki has broken barriers and established a new artistic genre as a contemporary American storyteller. Her work is a synthesis of Japanese noh and kyogen Theater, Commedia Dell’Arte, modern dance and every day experience. She was an early member of Theatre of Yugen and studied under its founder, Yuriko Doi, from 1979 to 1985. Aoki is a writer and performer, whose works have been staged at the Kennedy Center, The Esplanade in Singapore, the New Victory Theater on Broadway, the Hong Kong Performing Arts Center, the Adelaide Festival in Australia, Sapporo University, Whitney Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institute and the Apollo Theater in New York City. Twice a National Endowment for the Arts Theater Fellow, her plays have been published in Extreme Exposure: Solo Voices of the 20th Century (Theater Communications Group, 2001) and Contemporary Plays by Women of Color (Routledge Press, 1996). They are part of the Asian American Women Playwrights Archive at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and include Mermaid Meat and Other Japanese Ghost Stories, Kuan-Yin: Our Lady of Compassion, Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend, Obake: Tales of Love & Passion, The Queen’s Garden, Random Acts, Tales of the Pacific Rim and Skin Privilege. Her recordings: The Queen’s Garden (1999) and Tales of the Pacific Rim (1990) won INDIE awards for Best Spoken Word Recording of the Year. Her book/cd of Mermaid Meat and other Japanese Ghost stories (2007) is the first of a series of her work. She has been selected as a fellow for the 2007-2008 Japan Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship and will be researching the pre-quel to her play Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend in Japan. She is thrilled to back with Theatre of Yugen after a hiatus of 26 years!
Sheila Berotti
(Ensemble Member; Actor)
Sheila moved to San Francisco in 1996 after graduating from Bard College with a degree in Drama/Dance. She began training with Theatre of Yugen in 1998 and became a company member in 2004. She has appeared in The Old Man and the Sea, Don Q, and in her premiere of Shandyland #18 West Meets East as part of the 2006 Noh Pressure Cooker. Sheila also tours with Theatre of Yugen’s repertoire of kyogen comedies in English. You can also find Sheila at Pretzel's Yoga and Pilates where she attends and instructs classes. www.pretzelsyoga.com.
Erin Blendu
(Costume Designer)
The daughter of a quilter, Erin became acquainted with sewing machines at a young age. Using pieces of scrap fabric from her mother's quilts, she stitched together her first costumes for dramatic performances. Surrounded by nothing but sky and land as far as the eye could see, it was not until much later that she set her glass dolls aside for collaborations on a more human scale. She has worked with inkBoat, C.A.F.E., foolsFury, and designed the costumes for the Theatre of Yugen production of Frankenstein for which she received a 2004 Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award. She has also worked with directors R. Klopotowski and J. Mulligan on a site-specific work, Hold #3, created and performed on the late 'Art Ship' in Oakland.
Yuriko Doi
(Founding Director & Artistic Associate for Theatre of Yugen; Actor/Co-Creator for 10,000; Movement Consultant)
Yuriko Doi was born in Tokyo and introduced to the Japanese traditional theater of noh and kyogen at an early age. She earned M.A.s in Drama from Waseda University in Tokyo and San Francisco State University, and has studied with the most esteemed masters of kyogen and noh: Mansaku Nomura and Shiro Nomura in Japan. She founded Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco in 1978 where she served as its artistic director, teacher and producer of classical, contemporary and original fusion works of Japanese theater for over 20 years. Yuriko Doi has directed more than forty plays including a repertoire of kyogen comedies in English, Drifting Fires (Beichman), Down the Dark Well (Tada), Komachi Fuden (Ohta), Inugami (The Dog God) (Terayama), Elephant (Betsuyaku), Antigone, Medea: A Noh Cycle Based on the Greek Myth (Sorgenfrei), Purgatory (Yeats), Waiting for Godot (Beckett), Noh Christmas Carol, Salome (Sarame Kyu Kyu No Dan) (Gunji) and Velina Hasu Houston’s Kokoro/True Heart for which she won the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Outstanding Achievement Award in Direction. Her signature work of blending other cultures with Japanese traditional theater styles includes a Kabuki-Flamenco collaboration of Carol Sorgenfrei’s Blood Wine, Blood Wedding, Amelia Lapena Bonifacio’s "FilipiNoh", Sisa with Chris Milado, and Erik Ehn’s Crazy Horse performed at San Francisco’s Japantown Peace Plaza (September 2001) as part of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the US-Japan Peace Treaty, and (remounted as Moon of the Scarlet Plums) at the EXPO Aichi 2005 and Tokyo’s Theater X as part of a US-Japan Tour. Ms. Doi has worked as consultant for several theaters including the Globe Theater, TheatreWorks, and the Annenberg Theater.
Gulshirin Dubash
(Stage Manager; Koken)
Gulshirin is from Bombay, India and has spent the last 13 years between the US and India. She is currently in the last phase of her MFA from the De'll'Arte International School of Physical Theatre. Through the years her theatre work has taken her from doing theatre activism for Greenpeace International - to pusuing a career in physical theatre - to meeting the Theatre of Yugen at a Noh training intensive - to working with Clowns without Borders. She is thrilled to be working on this project with the members of Theatre of Yugen who have so graciously invited her into their family.
Erik Ehn
(Artistic Associate; Director and Playwright)
Erik is married to Patricia Chanteloube-Ehn. Erik’s work includes Maria Kizito, The Saint Plays, Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling, No Time Like the Present, Wolf at the Door, Tailings, Beginner, Ideas of Good and Evil, and an adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. He is an Artistic Associate at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen, recently writing and directing a noh-inspired Frankenstein with them (2003, 2004) which received 2 BATCC awards (Costumes, Lighting) and 3 other nominations. Additional work with Yugen includes Crazy Horse (2001), which combined noh forms with Native American music and dance. Remounted in 2005 as Moon of the Scarlet Plums, the new bi-lingual production opened at Expo Hall at the World’s Fair in Aichi, Japan. His plays have been produced in San Francisco (Intersection, Thick Description, Yugen), Seattle (Annex, Empty Space), Austin (Frontera), New York BACA, Whitney Museum), Atlanta (7 Stages), San Diego (Sledgehammer), Chicago (Red Moon), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY); elsewhere. He has taught at the U of Iowa, Naropa, UC San Diego, UT Dallas, and Cal Arts (graduate), as well as U San Francisco, SF State, Santa Clara, and Skidmore (undergrad). He currently is Dean of the Theater Department and Head of Writing for Performance at Cal Arts.
Bodil Volmer Fox
(Set Design)
Bodil is a textile artist and sculptor. She holds an MFA and BA in Art with an emphasis on textiles from San Francisco State University, an AA in Visual Communication from Shoreline Community College in Seattle and has studied at Engelsholm Hojskole Textile College, Vejle, Denmark. She works with unusual materials such as wire, fortune cookie notes and lampshades. She has shown her work at numerous Bay Area locations including Thoreau Center Art Gallery, California Crafts Museum, Art Rise Gallery, Vorpal Gallery and SFSU Gallery. Collaborations with her artist/husband Larnie Fox include a giant working Dragonfly Ornithopter for the DuPage Museum, Naperville, Il, and 23 ft. bamboo and muslin airplane/kite for Burning Man, 1998. Bodil has also created a giant clothesline and laundry hanging near the SF airport for viewing by airline passengers, and has worked with Contraband for their Religare 2 public housing installation and ritual. Bodil is a member of the new music group "the Crank Ensemble" and sings alto for the San Francisco Sinfonietta Chorus. Originally from Denmark, she now lives and works in San Francisco with Larnie and teen-age daughter Liv. Bodil is also a San Francisco Realtor specializing in first-time home buyers and artist's spaces.
Larnie Fox
(Set Design; Composer /Musician)
Larnie is a visual and sound artist known for paintings, monumental bamboo sculpture, sound art, sound installations and performances. His kinetic/sound sculpture and paintings have been shown in one-person shows at The Lab, The Richmond Art Center and The Randall Museum, and in numerous group shows in San Francisco and Salt Lake City. In 2003 he built a bamboo airplane/sound-sculpture in The Lab with a thirty-foot wingspan, and in 2006 he and wife/collaborator Bodil Fox built a giant kinetic dragonfly for the DuPage Museum, near Chicago. He is a founding member of 23five Incorporated, a non-profit that promotes sound art. He has performed at many Bay Area venues solo, with Scot Jenerik as “Targodie” and directing “The Crank Ensemble”, a fourteen-member group that performs on hand-cranked instruments built by Larnie. The Crank Ensemble has performed at Garden of Memory, The Launch Pad, KFJC, “Edgetone Music Summit” at 21 Grand, Ashkenaz, the Luggage Store, Other Mind's “Brink” and Epic Arts, and has two compact discs available. Larnie is the Director of the Children's Fine Art Program for the City of Palo Alto at the Palo Alto Art Center. He is past director of the ArtKids Program at the Community School of Music and Art in Mountain View. He has taught visual art at Weber State College, the University of Utah, and the Community University in Bozeman, Montana. He holds an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the University of Utah, and a BA in Painting and Drawing from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. Larnie lives with his wife/collaborator Bodil, and daughter Liv in San Francisco’s well-known Excelsior district and sings bass in the San Francisco Sinfonietta Chorus. More info www.infoflow.com/larnie.
Alison Heimstead
(Designer of the Canatastoria in Letters from a Small House)
Alison Heimstead has designed puppets and masks for Mycenaean – with Carl Hancock Rux performed at BAM and PICA, Blood Wedding - with Juliette Carrillo and Ten Thousand Things. Currently she is designing an intricate animated puppet set for Lead Feet and Nothing Upstairs with Susan Simpson. This summer she is showing Milk at St. Ann’s Puppet Lab, with Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, teaching at Parade School with Nana Projects, and her production of The Saint Plays (from Erik Ehn’s Saint Plays collection) will be performing at The Velaslavasay Panorama and Open Eye Figure Theater.
Max
(Ensemble Member; Actor; Mask Designer)
Max creates puppets and environments using materials as varied as fire, cloth, metal, papier-mache and plastic. She has puppeteered on both coasts and middle Europe. Original puppet productions in San Francisco include Killing Mom, Hop, Sweet Meat and The Sand Child, a solo shadow show. With Theatre of Yugen she has designed the set and props as well as performed as the guest puppetry artist in Theatre of Yugen's production of Frankenstein (for which she was nominated for a BATCC set designer award), designed and manipulated puppets for The Old Man and The Sea, designed the set for Don Q - Theatre of Yugen's adaptation of Don Quixote and created the premiere puppet piece See Things Thru for the 2006 Noh Pressure Cooker.
Suki O'Kane
(Associate Ensemble Member; Lead Composer/Musician) )
Beginning her musical education at age 6 in the basement of Stan Lunetta (timpanist, avantgarde composer and early innovator in electronic music instrument building), Suki played her first orchestra pit at age 13 (CSU Sacramento, Fiddler on the Roof, principal percussionist), detoured into dozens of experimental, jazz and punk ensembles and for the past 14 years has lived in the Bay Area creating site-specific sonic collage. Her work with the Theatre of Yugen started in 2002 as guest composer and musician for Frankenstein for which she and Whitman received two BATCC nominations (Best Original Score, Best Sound Design). Most recently she curated The Illuminated Corridor, a nomadic public art project that creates streetscapes of live experimental music and performative projection. She is as a founding member of the sample sound project The Noodles, performs on mallet and toy percussion in the new music ensembles Moe!kestra! and Daniel Popsicle; and is the drummer in She Mob, the women-led post-punk band that came in 771st (tied with Michael Jackson) in the Village Voice 2002 Pazz and Jop Poll.
Joshua McDermott is the Technical Director for Intersection for the Arts and has worked primarily with the Compo Santo productions for the past two years. He has also enjoyed gigs at The New Conservatory Theatre, ODC, Artaud, Brava, and others, as a master electrician, general hand, TD, and designer. Currently he is working to build a coalition toward a community shop space for San Francisco and involved with Theatre Bay Area's attempt to create a Bay Area Professional Small Theatre organization. He was graduated from the University of Hawai'i with an M.A. in Asian Theatre with thesis on Shuji Terayama and the Emperor Tomato Ketchup. In an earlier life he managed to obtain a M.S. in physics from Brown University and did some studies at Vassar college in dramatic literature and astronomy.
Jubilith Moore
(Joint Artistic Director; Actor)
A graduate of Bard College, Jubilith is one of the Artistic Directors of Theatre of Yugen and has been a student of founder Yuriko Doi and with the company since 1993. She has also had the honor of studying with Richard Emmert, Akira Matsui (Kita) Shiro Nomura (Kanze), kyogen master Yukio Ishida (Izumi school) and kotsuzumi noh drum with Mitsuo Kama (Ko School). With Theatre of Yugen she has performed in Janine Beichman’s Drifting Fires; the modern noh play, The Well of Ignorance (or Down the Dark Well) by Dr. Tomio Tada; a noh adaptation of William Butler Yeats’ Purgatory and in several productions of Noh Christmas Carol. Recently she performed in Erik Ehn's Moon of the Scarlet Plums (previously Crazy Horse), which had the honor of being a part of the World Expo 2005 as well as a US national tour. She has adapted and directed a noh influenced adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea based on Hemingway's work of the same title for Theatre of Yugen. Jubilith has been an Artist in Residence at San Francisco’s School of the Arts since 1998, and is a founding member of Theatre Nohgaku.
Helen Morgenrath
(Founding Company Member; Guest Performer)
Helen, one of the founding actors of Theatre of Yugen, came from the dance world. She performed Hindu dance with Ragini Devi, studied modern dance with Hanya Holm, Jose Limon , in NYC. She moved to California and taught dance improvisation for many years and joined Theatre of Yugen in 1979.
Lynn Murdock
(Guest Musician)
Lynn Murdock is a keyboardist and vocalist who performs regularly with Dan Plonsey's ensemble, Daniel Popsicle, and the Oakland Symphony Chorus. She also works as a music librarian.
John Oglevee
(Associate Ensemble Member; Actor)
John is an actor, performer and musician currently completing his MFA in Asian performance at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. He has been studying, performing and teaching noh since 1996 under the tutelage of Richard Emmert, Sadamu Omura, Mitsuo Kama and Akira Matsui. Apart from noh, he has performed extensively as an actor in New York City, Europe, North America and Asia with a variety of companies including Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet, GAleGAtes et al, and Rinkogun (Tokyo). With Theatre of Yugen he has performed in Crazy Horse (2001) and as both the Monster (2003) and the title role (2004) in Frankenstein. John is the founding managing director of Theatre Nohgaku.
Sanna Olsson
(Fan Designer)
Sanna Olsson is a sculptor, born and trained in Stockholm, Sweden. She works with clay, plaster and concrete, as well as found objects and whatever she gets her hands on. Initially trained as a choir singer at Adolf Fredriks Musikklasser and Stockholm's Musikgymnasium, after her graduation she left the world of performing music and entered the world of visual arts. She attended Nyckelviken's School of Arts and Crafts where she studied various diciplines, and moved on to the acclaimed Idun Loven's School of Sculpture in 2004, from which she is presently on sabbatical. She moved to the Bay Area in September of 2006. This is the first exhibition of her work in the U.S.
Dan Plonsey
(Composer/Musician)
Dan Plonsey is known as a composer, saxophonist, concert presenter (Beanbender's) and teacher of math at Berkeley High. He has written music for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Toychestra & Fred Frith, Santa Cruz New Music Works, and Illuminated Corridor, but most of his music has been written for his own ensembles, as documented on a dozen CDs. He has recorded with Anthony Braxton, Eugene Chadbourne, and Tom Waits, but more frequently with local greats John Schott, John Shiurba, Robert Horton and many others. Plonsey is currently at work on an opera, in collaboration with Harvey Pekar (of "American Splendor").
Kate Rannells
(Fan Designer)
Kate Rannells was born and raised in Northern California by a family of artists and goldminers. She has a B.A. from Western Washington University in Art and Art Criticism. She has been making sculpture since she was 6 years old in a variety of media; including clay, metal, paint, printmaking, encaustic wax and found object sculpture. She has exhibited in the United States and Mexico. This is her first time working with Noh theatre. More of her work can be seen at www.katerannells.com.
Edward Schocker
(Administrative Director)
Since starting the Annual Music for People & Thingamajigs festival 10 years ago, Edward Schocker has been active in promoting and producing experimental arts events. He is one of the founding members of the Thingamajigs Foundation (promoting musician and artists who work with made/found objects and alternate tuning systems). Recently Edward was awarded the Japan/US Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellowship, allowing him to live and work in Tokyo for 2006. Here he created The Pacific Exchange Concert Series –an international music festival designed to bring together artists from all over the Pacific Rim on one concert stage. Since October 2006 he has been Administrative Director Theatre of Yugen.
Jonathan Segel (Composer/Musician)
Jonathan Segel is an accomplished musician and composer. He has composed music for film and dance and has toured throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan as a solo artist as well as with a number of bands–most notably Camper Van Beethoven, Sparklehorse, Cracker and with avant-garde musician Eugene Chadbourne. Jonathan plays several instruments, including the guitar, bass guitar, violin, viola, mandolin, keyboards and computer. He composes and performs in many genres of music, including rock and country music, modern classical, avant-garde and improvisation in both acoustic and electronic milieux. He has also worked as a sound designer and editor for film with Academy Award winning sound designer Dane A. Davis at Danetracks in Los Angeles, CA. An extensive biography and discography can be found online at http://www.magneticmotorworks.com/jes.html or at www.myspace.com/jonathansegel.
John Shiurba
(Guest Musician)
John Shiurba is a composer and guitarist whose musical pursuits include improvisation, art-rock, modern composition and noise. Shiurba has recorded and toured the U.S. and Europe as a member of the bands Eskimo, The Molecules and Spezza Rotto, as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Anthony Braxton's ensemble and the SFSound Group, and as an improvisor. Shiurba has conducted the premieres of his compositions at ODC in 2005 ("Moon Cycle" for SFSound) at New Langton Arts in 2002 ("Triplicate") and at SFAlt in 2002 ("5x5 1.4" for SFSound). Shiurba was invited to play at the Seattle Improvised Music Festival in 1998, at the High Zero Festival in Baltimore in 1999, at the SFAlt Festival in 2004 and at the Olympia Experimental Music Festival in 2002 and 2004, the Push International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver in 2007, and at Musique Action in Nancy, France in 2007. As a guitarist Shiurba has developed a unique and personalized approach to the guitar. Through the use of extended techniques and unusual preparations, he expands the traditional sound range of the instrument, producing stunning, often unrecognizable results. Cadence Magazine calls Shiurba a “wildly creative guitarist... anti-jazz, anti-everything else, yet utterly compelling.”
Stephen Siegel
(Ensemble Member; Koken for opening ritual)
Originally from Cleveland, Stephen has been a San Francisco resident for many years. Stephen first became interested in acting at a young age and pursued performance through high school during which time he received a number of scholarships to study acting at the Cleveland Playhouse. In 1997 Stephen returned to the performance arena and began studying acting again at City College of San Francisco and Studio ACT. Physical acting has always interested Stephen and while taking a Commedia Dell'Arte class he was introduced to Theatre of Yugen through a friend and immediately fell in love with the noh and kyogen forms. His first role was in Noh Christmas Carol ('99) where he played a number of roles, primarily Taro-kaja. He has also accompanied the ensemble on a number of short tours. In January 2003 he premiered his solo piece RunEscapeEmbrace at Yugen Presents. In addition to designing lights for: The Clay Play; Norton, I;Frankenstein (for which Stephen won a BATCC award); The Old Man and The Sea and Don Q for Theatre of Yugen, Stephen has also designed for The 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, Asian American Theatre Company, Amy Hill, Takami Craddock, Hiroko Tamano, Pauline oliveros, Strangefruit, Eri Majima, Ashpool and many other talented performers from the Bay Area and beyond.
Moe! Staiano
(Composer/Musician)
Moe! Staiano is a drummer/prepared percussionist who has played throughout the Bay Area and the US for over a decade. Besides playing solo, he was a former member of Vacuum Tree Head and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and now has formed a new band, Mute Socialite with talented musicians from Mills college. He also leads a rotating collective called Moe!kestra! which can employ from 12 to 50+ musicians, playing composed scores or lead through a conducted orchestra improvisation, done through Moe! himself. He plans on releasing and composing more orchestral works as well as working on music with Mute Socialite.
Jason Stamberger
(Composer/Musician)
Jason Stamberger is a performer/composer born in rural Ohio. In 1980 he was awarded the Copper Bishop For Chess Excellence. Since that time, Jason has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan, and has performed with Crack:WAR, Le Flange du Mal, Neung Phak, The Weegs, Multiplicator, and Marauder and Alibi. Together with Liz Allbee, Jason has written and performed scores for magical realist pornography, animal cruelty videos, and the short films of Maximillian Godino. He has made appearances in a Eurythmics video and on the television program "Let's Make A Deal!", as well as writing and acting in drunken performance art pieces at the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts and Highways in Los Angeles, CA. Currently residing in Oakland, CA, Jason works as a substitute teacher and is affectionately known by students as "Mr. Hamburger."
Mei Ann Teo
(Associate Artist, Dramaturgy)
Mei Ann Teo is a Singaporean director now based in San Francisco. Productions include: Waiting for Godot, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Good Woman of Setzuan, Our Town, Measure for Measure, The Misanthrope, Fiddler on the Roof, The Skin of Our Teeth, Twelfth Night, Porcelain, the Bay Area Premieres of Boy Gets Girl, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bee-Luther-Hatchee, and the World Premiere of Middle Flight. In the Bay Area she has worked with Berkeley Repertory (Assistant Director), Cutting Ball, Actor’s Collective, Phoenix Theater, Abydos, Crowded Fire, Playwrights Foundation (dramaturg). She has trained as an actor in Singapore, in Viewpoints and Suzuki with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, the DAH Teater of Belgrade, and briefly with the Theatre of Yugen. She is currently the Resident Artist at Pacific Union College where she teaches and directs drama.
Lluis Valls
(Joint Artistic Director; Actor)
Originally from Iqualada, Spain, Lluis moved many times before settling here. He holds a BA in Dramatic Arts from SFSU where he was introduced to the Suzuki Method with Dr. Yukihiro Goto, and from there to Yuriko Doi and Theatre of Yugen. Since 1993 Lluis has performed on tour in the company's repertoire of Kyogen comedies and in many of the mainstage productions, notably Erik Ehn's Crazy Horse/Moon of the Scarlet Plums, the modern Noh play The Well of Ignorance (or Down the Dark Well) by Dr. Tomio Tada, and Yuriko Doi's Noh adaptation of Yeats' Purgatory. Since 2002 he has worked collectively with Theatre of Yugen's Joint Artistic team to create the original experimental pieces The Clay Play, Norton I, Frankenstein, and The Old Man and the Sea and his own adaptation of Cervantes’ classic entitled Don Q. Lluis is also a founding member of Theatre Nohgaku.
Lexa Walsh
(Composer/Musician)
Born 1968 Haverford, PA; 1986-88 Parsons School of Design NY, NY; 1988-90 BFA With Distinction California College of Arts & Crafts (CCAC) Oakland, CA, Lexa Walsh is the co-founder of Toychestra, an all women toy instrument ensemble that has performed in the San Francisco Bay Area and Europe. Venues include gallery spaces, clubs, community centers and grammar schools. Highlights include the Lab's "Live Art Lab" festival, (S.F., Spring 2000), the opening of "Juvenilia" (S.F., Fall 2000) and “Bay Area Now/Under the Radar 1” (Fall 2005) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the recent collaboration with Dan Plonsey and Fred Frith (S.F. Bay Area, May 2003-May 2004), the group's five European tours and the recent "Musiques et Jouets" festival (Cite de la Musique, Paris, Winter 2004). The group has five releases, three on Lyon’s S.K. label. Walsh is also an active visual artist with a substantial exhibition history. Her most recent work “The Immortalization Project” was the subject of her 2006 residency in Kaosiung, Taiwan. The project brings together artists and audience members, inviting participants to offer a nostalgic item to be "Immortalized" by recording, documenting and altering the objects and their stories. Walsh will return to the project in Xiamen, China in 2007. Walsh is a member of administrative & curatorial team at CESTA, an international arts and resource center in the small Czech town of Tabor, Southern Bohemia whose mission is to foster tolerance and understanding through the arts.
Allen Whitman
(Associate Ensemble Member; Lead Composer/Musician)
Allen Whitman has performed, recorded, produced, licensed and written music for over thirty years, touring Japan, Sweden, most of the lower 48 U.S. states, Alaska and Canada. He has worked in a wide variety of musical forms and with a wide variety of musicians including Helios Creed, Tiny Tim, The Inkspots and The Sandals. He produced the Million-Mom March benefit CD featuring Emmylou Harris, Ani DiFranco, Melissa Etheridge, Shawn Colvin, and others. He is a founding member of the San Francisco cult psychedelic surf band The Mermen. He has worked with playwright Erik Ehn on productions in both San Francisco and New York. He is co-creator of the instrumental dancehall CD "biL" and executive producer of "The Unfinished Tattoo," a spoken word CD of the life and times of Leon "Whitey" Thompson, ex-bank robber and former Alcatraz prisoner. He has released numerous other albums and performs sporadically around the San Francisco area with The Mermen & others. He was nominated along with co-composer Suki O’Kane by Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards (2004) for Best Original Score and Best Sound Design for their work with Theatre of Yugen’s Frankenstein
Libby Zilber
(Producing Artistic Director; Actor)
Libby Zilber holds degrees in Theater and French from Lawrence University (1982) and is a graduate of The Drama Studio of London at Berkeley (1985). She is a Joint Artistic Director along with Lluis Valls and Jubilith Moore for Theatre of Yugen where she began studying Noh and Kyogen with Founder Yuriko Doi in 1986. She has toured nationally with the company and their repertoire of Kyogen comedic plays in English. Experimental fusion productions include Shogo Ohta's Komachi Fuden (chorus/Nurse), Janine Beichman's modern Noh play Drifting Fires (shite), and Erik Ehn's Crazy Horse/Moon of the Scarlet Plums (Assistant Director/Chorus) which played at the World’s Fair in Aichi, Japan. As Joint Artistic Director, she spearheaded a collectively created original piece, The Clay Play, created the role of Elizabeth and Monster Bride in Erik Ehn's Frankenstein, danced the role of the Marlin in Jubilith Moore's adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea and directed Lluis Valls’ adaptation of Cervantes’ classic entitled Don Q. Libby has also studied with Noh master Akira Matsui and Nohkan flute with Junko Shishido and Richard Emmert, and is an Affiliate Artist with Theatre Nohgaku.
GUEST COMEDY ARTISTS
Moshe Cohen
Kosovo, Tokyo, Rio, Jerusalem, Barcelona, San Francisco, El Bosque, Brooklyn: Moshe Cohen spreads laughter around the globe. When not performing his acclaimed show ‘Mr. YooWho’, he is busy teaching workshops about humoring one’s human, and bolstering the work of Clowns Without Borders, as director of the US branch and international ambassador. Artistically, Moshe continues to investigate the intersection between physical theater, clown and butoh dance (Ohno style) in search of light levity, poetry and absurdity. Moshe has started the Institute of Contemplative Clown and Sacred Mischief (i.smacc) at the Zen Center in Los Angeles, and will expand to the San Francisco bay area this coming fall.
Laura Jorgensen & Fred Curchack
Fred Curchack has created over seventy original theatre works, twenty-five of them solos. His performances have been featured at dozens of international theatre festivals. He has received the Gold Medal at the International Festival of Solo Theatre in Belgrade, the American Theatre Wing Award, Critics' Awards in L.A., S.F., Dallas, Austin, and his work has been in the "Top Ten" of The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times. This year, his solo Gauguin's Shadow was cited as "Best New Play" by the Dallas/Fort Worth Theatre Critics Forum. He has received funding from Creative Capital, the Jim Henson Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Arts International, and he is a Guggenheim Fellow. After receiving a drama degree from the High School of Performing Arts in N.Y., and a BA and MA in Theater from Queens College, Curchack studied Indian Kathakali, Japanese noh, Balinese Topeng, choreography with Alwyn Nikolais, and he trained with Grotowski's Polish Theater Lab. He has taught theatre at the United Nations International School, N.Y.; Sonoma State University, California; and he is currently Professor of Art and Performance at The University of Texas at Dallas.
Laura Jorgensen worked with The English Theater Company in Budapest, directing their production of Our Country's Good. Recently, Laura played leading roles in Northern California productions of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, Terrence McNalley's A Perfect Ganesh, George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, Athol Fugard's The Road to Mecca, and Christopher Durang's Laughing Wild. She created roles in the world premieres of John O'Keefe's Glamour and Queer Theory.
mugwumpin
mugwumpin is at the forefront of young American companies interested in creating a visual experience, questioning the primacy of text and narrative in theater. They strive to embody common creative values, emphasizing collaborative creation through play, honoring their different aesthetic perspectives and recognizing the strengths to be found in bringing them together. Rabbit Causes Dog, the company’s first production, performed to great acclaim, winning Best Play in the San Francisco Fringe Festival 2004. Bouge!, an early version of Symphony of Frogs, sold out houses at the Bebersee Festival [Germany] in 2004. Your Nightgown Is Jealous When You Dream, premiered at the Boulder Fringe Festival in 2005. In early 2006, mugwumpin presented Nightgown, Symphony, a double bill of Symphony of Frogs and Your Nightgown…, at the EXIT Theater. April, 2006, saw the premiere of Frankie Done It 291 Ways as part of the Shotgun Players Theatre Lab. In November, 2006, mugwumpin presented its most recent show, super:anti:reluctant, to great acclaim at the EXIT Theater. In April, the company unveiled Still Sitting Still, a chilling yet hilarious look at the repression and subsequent explosion of fear and anger.
The Cycle Plays is made possible by support from
The Creative Work Fund, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, The Flintridge Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Japan Foundation Los Angeles, The James Irvine Foundation, Lalys Wine, Meet the Composer’s Creative Connections Program, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller MAP and the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts.
