Mz. Fest is a premiere festival hosted by Plays & Players that brings multiple local theatre companies together for a week to explore, question, and celebrate female stories. This year Mz. Fest attempts to answer “Who are women in today’s world? In yesterday’s world? And in tomorrow’s world?”
For Mz. Fest 2015, Plays & Players is joined by TS Hawkins, ReVamp Collective, and Kaleid Theatre to bring you a one week festival the first week of April of women’s’ voices through art. Click HERE for tickets and more detailed festival information!
ABOUT THE SHOWS:
THE SECRET LIFE OF WONDER: A PROLOGUE IN G
BY TS HAWKINS
Directed by: AMBER EMORY
The Secret Life of Wonder: a prologue in G journeys through the lives of seven girls being escorted into womanhood. Embracing multiple levels of play, the girls teach one another ways to interact with the world at large. Using poetic dialogue, these girls introduce that their similarities expand beyond their assigned genders while exploring how their differences bring them together. Positioning itself as a foreshadowing to Ntozake Shange’s work “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”, The Secret Life of Wonder: a prologue in G highlights the embryonic spark of when all girls gather; soothing one’s aches, sorting each one’s puzzles, and sharing one’s triumphs with her chosen collective.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
TS Hawkins plays include two off-Broadway solo works titled “Seeking Silence” and “Cartons of Ultrasounds” that were created in partnership with Alphabet Arts (NYC). “The Secret Life of Wonder: a prologue in G” is her first full length play. Additionally, Hawkins is an internationally recognized author and an artist of many trades. She adores teaching and conducting workshops for audiences across the nation. In her spare time, she leads a course titled “Legacy & Lineage” which she designed specifically for youth to explore poetic language and hone proficient skills in creative writing to pursue artistic careers in literature. For fun, she runs her own radio station dedicated to promoting a community at large; it currently serves over 42,000 listeners worldwide with satellite offices in the West Coast & London.
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SHIT MEN HAVE SAID TO ME: TALES OF HOW MEN AND WOMEN COMMUNICATE
BY REVAMP COLLECTIVE
Directed by: CARLY BODNAR
“Shit Men Have Said to Me: Tales of how Men and Women Communicate” is a devised piece about the ways in which men and women interrelate. The work blends together the thoughts and interactions confronting societal realities—from catcalling to slut shaming, and everything in between, it is a piece about “what is” as well as “what has been” in the lives of women and men.
ABOUT REVAMP COLLECTIVE:
ReVamp Collective is a woman-centric theatre company that strives to create opportunities for women in all aspects of the theatrical process. We create inspiring work that investigates societal constructs and cultivates theatrical discourse–all the while producing established contemporary plays, works by new and emerging artists and collective devised theatre. Both behind the scenes and on the stage, our goal is to reset the woman default in theatre and to explore the direction of the work when women collaborate.
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TAKE/SACRIFICEKaleid
BY KALEID THEATRE
What do we cling to? In history and in myth, we sacrifice humans to win battles, abate crop failure, or maintain peace. Iphigenia was sacrificed for wind to take her father’s army to Troy and Jephthah offered his own daughter in exchange for victory in battle. We trade human lives to shape the world and ask for cosmic favors. Take/Sacrifice explores this space of desire, a landscape littered with those we have sacrificed to secure the things we want. Surrounded by iconic figures and archaeological mysteries, our wishes become reflections of ourselves – what we want from the world, how we want the world to behave, and the lengths we are willing to go to make it so. What do we cling to? What do we want so much that we’ll destroy each other for it?
ABOUT THE KALEID THEATRE:
Kaleid Theatre (as in kaleidoscope, as in collide) is a physical theatre ensemble that combines an obsession with language, a compulsion to dance, and a thirst for community knowledge to create new work. We are dedicated to exploring the dynamic, contemporary questions our communities are asking today. Kaleid combines language, movement, music, and sound to create a new, multi-sensory, multi-dimensional language, which, allows us to honestly explore the conflicted emotions and urges of these human experiences.
