JUMA B. ESSIE + ELLEN HINCHCLIFFE
Juma B. Essie is a playwright, performance artist, video maker. In 2008 he performed his piece 2Real 2Be Free as part of the Naked Stages Program for emerging performance artists. 2Real 2Be Free explored race, healing and the search for authenticity. Juma’s video work has screened at Translations film festival in Seattle, and most recently his short, “Can You See Me Now?” screened as part of Soul Night curated by Gabrielle Civil in Mexico City. In 2009 he was a Jerome Many Voices fellow at the Playwright Center. An avid reader, gardener, hi-fi enthusiast, and brewer, Juma is originally from New Jersey and spent his adolescence in Detroit. He moved to the Twin cities in 1999 where he lives with his wife and too many cats.
Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe is a poet, performer, videomaker and loving Auntie. Her performance work includes: Dirty the Bones- On being white and other lies commissioned as part of the Naked Stages program, Death’s Daughter- a love letter, a prayer for Mama that premiered in 2010 at Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis and her recent collaboration with Gabrielle Civil for Bedlam's 10 Minute Play Festival- From the Hive. Ellen's video short, Art Letter premiered on Twin Cities Public Television in December 2010. She is currently working on a documentary about the late, great writer/thinker Paula Gunn Allen. Ellen is honored to be collaborating for the first time with Juma B. Essie who also happens to be her husband and best friend.
website social media:
http://sites.google.com/site/ellenhinch/
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SUN MEE CHOMET
Sun Mee Chomet is a St. Paul-based actor and playwright. She has worked with Mu Performing Arts Arts (WTF, Cowboy vs. Samurai, Asiamnesia, Circle Around the Island, Mask Dance); Guthrie Theater (Macbeth, Tony Kushner’s world premiere: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Naomi Iizuka’s world premiere: After 100 Years); History Theater (Jeany Park’s 100 Men’s Wife); Penumbra Theater (for colored girls…) and many other theaters locally and nationally. Upcoming, Sun Mee will be in Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes at the Guthrie Theater in October 2011.
Performance Description:
This piece is a work-in-progess. It’s a piece about my recent reunion with my Korean birth family and the shake-up it has caused in my own identity formation. What was expected to be a fulfilling moment of completion ended up destabilizing me to the core. I hope to explore identity, deconstruct the idea of self-actualization and examine the human desire for love and acceptance within one’s own family, adopted and biological; all told, of course, with lots of humor.
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JULIA E. BABB
Julia Elizabeth Babb is a self-mythologizing Performanceusse and Conceptual Artist. On a polizontal Search and Create Mission from Inner Space, Julia employs whatever methods, means and materials are at hand—but mostly calligraphy, a pack of lies and a rubber face—she boldly rushes in where devils fear to tread.
Part mad scientist, part Monk of the Enthusiastical Order, her ultimate aim is to delight and surprise audiences by drawing unseemly parallels between emotion and HVAC, Quantum physics and ritual, Dragon taming and her job at the Mobius strip factory; all while making a HUGE fool of herself in public.
In 2009 Julia received a Jerome Grant for the “Naked Stages” Emerging Performance Artist Program through Intermedia Arts, and hosted by Pillsbury House Theater. In this program, she wrote and performed her first solo show titled “A Fool’s Paradox” in April of 2010.
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LISA BRIMMER
Lisa Brimmer has been writing in the Twin Cities area for the last six years. The playwright, poet and essayist is driven to collaborate with multiple forms of art and media. A fellow through the Given’s Foundation of African American Literature and a member of Nu Griots III in 2009, Brimmer was awarded a Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellowship in 2010. Her play 10 minute play “Dear Daughter” was recently produced through Bedlam Theatre’s 10 Minute Community Play Festival. A truly collaborative artist, Brimmer has worked with Lulu’s Playground, Fantastic Merlins, The Max Corcoran Project, Andrew Foreman Trio and most recently rock/jazz guitarist Todd Clouser and A Love Electric. Her work has been published in the Summit Avenue Review and Konch Literary Magazine as well as exhibited in the Lowertown Reading Jam Series hosted by the Saint Paul Almanac at the Black Dog Cafe, Blue Ink's Groove Theory at Elixir Lounge, the Fineline Music Cafe in Minneapolis, Honey, The Red Stag Supperclub and The Turf Club’s Clown Lounge.
Social Media
Twitter: @2peakease
Website: www.2speakeaseblog.wordpress.com
Performance: will most likely be spoken word- maybe with music. I'll let you know as things solidify, but if you need to call it something, Spoken Word is fine.