TRUE NORTH

By Lee Nowell, directed by Heidi S Howard, edited by Robby Myles, featuring Markell Williams, Scott Turner Schofeild, and Dorothy Bell-Polk

All New Director’s Cut is available On Demand June 24, then throughout the festival!

In 2000, Magnetic North began moving at an erratic, sudden speed. It’s averaging 34 to 40 miles per year. It’s been scientifically proven that human beings can feel this, and we’re learning that it’s affecting us in wide-ranging ways.

When magnetic fields move erratically and quickly around us, the part of our brain that makes ethical decisions becomes impaired. Changes in electromagnetic energy, caused by magnetic movement in the Earth’s core and in the magnetosphere around the Earth, can affect our health, our potential, and our physical and mental well-being.

Originally created as part of our Home Brew @ Home Series, True North offers HOPE as a guidebook for all of us, combining the latest scientific research with ancient practices that enable each of us to ground ourselves in the midst of uncertainty.

Alien with Extraordinary Skills

Diary of a Playwright Without Borders

7:00 PM ET

by Saviana Stanescu – Live Virtual Performance with Talkback

video design & editing by Darya Gauthier

SAVIANA STANESCU   is an acclaimed NY-based playwright, poet, and ARTivist, author of Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, Ants, Lenin’s Shoe, Hurt, Useless, and other plays centering the immigrant experience. Winner of New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Play (Waxing West) and Best Romanian Play of the Year  (Inflatable Apocalypse), Saviana’s work has been widely produced in New York, regionally, and internationally. ~ www.savianastanescu.com, www.saviana.com.

Saviana Stanescu is a 20-year-old American playwright, and a 40+-year-old Romanian writer. She spent her formative years during Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania, protested in the streets at the Revolution in 1989, and worked as a journalist in the free millennial press. She arrived in New York late August 2001. After 20 years of ‘inbetweenness’ and many O1 visas for ‘aliens with extraordinary abilities in the arts’, Saviana is ready to tell her story.

“Alien with Extraordinary Skills” is an autobiographical performative lecture which includes monologues, poems, confessions, and Saviana’s over 100 photos of the US Flag displayed in New York in the aftermath of 9/11, investigating how objects perform identity, while questioning the power dynamics between countries and people. An imaginary dinner with Karl Marx concludes this political yet humorous (Zoom) autobiographical performative lecture that offers a unique perspective of a multi-rooted “extraordinary alien” who continues to challenge stereotypes, borders, and herself.

Thoughts and Prayers

8:30 PM ET

by Danse Theatre Surreality – Virtual Performance

Directed and Edited by Lauren Hlubny

“Thoughts & Prayers” is a dance-theatre work with a palpable activist heart. In equal parts music, movement, and theatre, we take a journey with Dana and Felix, as the couple experiences five Disasters.

In a dramatic mix of original, virtuosic music, partnering, dialogue, and unique staging, six musicians (woodwinds and strings) play active roles in the performance and embody two distinct Greek Choruses: Congress and The Activists, giving full voice to the political clashes of present-day.

Thoughts and Prayers is a complex, elegant, disruptive world brought to life by creator/director Lauren Hlubny and composer/performer Thomas Giles.