moving on

It’s Boulder International Fringe Festival time. What a busy summer. This is following the (decidedly uninteresting) Theatre Communications Group and National Performing Arts joint convention and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference (which only Michelle can report on appropriately, if interested). All here in Denver.

Next week is the DNC, which will be crazy. We have Arturo Ui going back up, as well as the San Francisco Mime Troupe using our space, and possibly more - All part of our own Artistic | Political Convergence 2008. Who knows what else might happen.

But this week is Boulder Fringe, so Julie and I went up for two shows last night. The second, advertised as a Butoh piece, was a sloppy bit of performance resembling improv-style exercises more than anything. You win some, you lose some. The first piece, however was brilliant (and also butoh-influenced).

Performed by One Continuous Mistake (founded in Chicago by two MFA students of Naropa University here in Boulder), it was a Two-man production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, as de- and re-constructed with help from Shakespeare, Beckett, Sacher-Masoch, Sophocles, Genet, Camus, and Hitler.

It was the perfect mix of Three Sisters and Waiting for Godot (or Masha, to be accurate), to bring the dark subtlety of Chekhov’s piece into it’s absurd and broken proper light. Absolutely beautiful in conception and performance, with live sound/music from a third performer and an overall precision I haven’t seen in a while.

Inspired once again to create something, Julie and I decided there was no better time than the present to start a (third) theatre company. And thus: Vicious Trap, a theatre collective without a mission, vision, leadership, venue, budget, structure or plan for the future (save the whims of two “executive suckers”) is preparing to announce it’s first ever production. We are reading two scripts, and will start rehearsal on one of them as soon as we can get the Democrats out of our city and the hippies out of our warehouse in a few weeks. You’ll be the first to know what we decide on.