PlayGround’s 2020 Innovator Incubator

PlayGround has announced a 2nd round of selected teams to participate in their continued Innovator Incubator.  This year’s teams include three companies new to the Incubator, and three returning candidates.  Last year’s initiative saw the inception of six brand new production companies, and provided a comprehensive and integrated suite of more than $50,000 in tools and resources — including fiscal sponsorship, one-on-one mentoring, free and discounted performance and rehearsal space, and co-marketing — resulting in the premier of three full-length works (The Julie Cycle by Poltergeist Theatre Project, Cheer! Story of a Dreamer by Theatre Cultura, and The Gay Divorce Play by Queer Cat Productions), and workshops of three brand new plays: two of which continued to full premier at other venues (Darling Marjorie’s Arboretum by The Moonrisers, and Love in the Time of Piñatas presented by Epic Party Theater, written and performed by Baruch Porras-Hernandez) and one of which returns to Potrero Stage later this year for debut (The Emeryville Horror by Same Boat Theater Collective).

Three teams return for this year’s incubator: Poltergeist Theatre Project, Theatre Cultura, and The Moonrisers; while three new applicants have been selected to join fiscal sponsorship and mentorship at PlayGround: The Forum, Analog Theatre, and Kunoichi Productions. These six companies have all proposed unique productions for the 2nd Annual Innovator Showcase: ranging from devised mask work to drag revisionism, from Japanese aesthetics to Latinx-American narratives, from journalistic activism to satirical bombastics. Over the course of the year, these six companies will work to refine their organizational structure, learn the strategies of fundraising and budgeting, and hone their mission and vision statements to enter the wider Bay Area theater scene prepared to continue on as full fledged production organizations.

2020 THEATRE COMPANIES AND TEAMS

Moonrisers Theater Company (Christopher Magee, Michael Magee, Angel Hertslet)
Poltergeist Theatre Project (Britt Lauer, Chris Steele)
Theatre Cultura (Linda Amayo-Hassan, Dov Hassan, April Ballenstros)
The Forum (Julius Rea, Leigh Rondon-Davis, Kieran Beccia)
Analog Theatre (Rebecca Pingree, Elissa Beth Stebbins)
Kunoichi Productions (Ai Aida, Keiko Shimosato Carreiro)

THE INNOVATOR INCUBATOR 2020 COMPANY STATEMENTS:

Moonrisers Theater Company
Moonrisers is dedicated to creating new works featuring the bizarre, the magical, and the surreal, that joyously celebrate escapism and embrace comedy of the absurd. To never linger overlong on a success but hurtle forward with new, exciting projects. To plant a seed of levity in our audience that can be carried and shared with others, in abundance. The Moonrisers seek to celebrate the Bay Area’s vibrant theater community and draw audiences out of the ordinary and into a magical world, just outside of their awareness, maybe missed or forgotten. To demonstrate that if looked for, if sought after, the world reveals phantasms, waking dreams, and fairy tales.

Poltergeist Theatre Project
Poltergeist is a company dedicated to creating art that is visceral. Art that trusts its audience enough not to pander to them or didactically explain what they should be feeling and how they should be thinking. Art that asks more questions than it answers. Theater that follows you home: like a summoned apparition that haunts you even after leaving the theatre, that forces you to exorcise it with personal introspection, interpersonal debate, and societal action. Like the ghosts of our past inform so much of our queer aesthetic and our theatre ritual, we seek to hearken back to the sensibility of the travelling bards: travel light; reach as many people as you can; rich or poor, high or low, all are welcome to art. Something we grapple with in the current theatrical climate that often stands at odds with the tenants of radical art that by definition to be radical it must be accessible to all financial strata is the ever-increasing costs of living, often directly reflected in the ever-increasing costs of ticket prices. Poltergeist will help sculpt the socio-political climate by bringing the haunted past of public domain plays to the forefront and boldly exposing their biases through queer feminist perspectives. We will innovate to redefine the nature of the problematic play, not as something to be feared, but as something to be exorcised—something seeking resolution of past traumas.

Theatre Cultura
The mission of Theatre Cultura is, first and foremost, to provide the opportunity for local and national Latina theater artists to have a place for their voices to be heard in high quality, deeply invested productions. TC’s intention is create theater that will inspire, inform, challenge, empower, embrace and reflect the lives and communities of Latinas of the SF Bay Area and around the country. Themes of immigration, Latinx and women’s issues will provide the main focus for content. Plays will mostly be original and selected from active, working Latina playwrights from around the country in order to build a community of professional Latina playwrights who wish to tell the stories borne of the Latina experience and create a dynamic connection between those artists and the communities they serve.

The Forum
The Forum is dedicated to creating a new structure of journalism theatre. In lieu of a singular artistic director, the company is led by a group mirroring an editorial board in order to create works of art that discuss topics from multiple viewpoints and mediums. Each project blends live performance, gallery curation, and journalistic reporting to produce multidisciplinary events that intellectually challenge and emotionally engage patrons. In many cases, the projects will pair a performance piece with a living newspaper gallery. The Forum’s goal is to create sanctuaries of open discussion through projects that a) address extremely current political and social issues, b) are decided upon through a board of multidisciplinary artists and c) structurally discuss a central issue using multiple mediums. Instead of relying on purely site-specific projects, we are hyper-focused on community-building and outreach. For many of our projects, we are now exploring how we can literally bring performances to communities that would not attend and do not have access to traditional theatre spaces. While the scope of stories of previously underrepresented groups is expanding, community outreach to invite non-theatre goers into theatre spaces have not always been successful. Now, we are moving the performances into non-theatre spaces. We are now transforming our runs to include a number of performances or staged readings in community centers, classrooms, and libraries — which lead up to a shorter run in a traditional theatre setting.

Analog Theatre
Analog Theatre’s mission is to create collaborative, out-of-the-box, multidisciplinary, multi-sensory storytelling, devising performances that rely on performing skills and collective acts of actor-audience imagination, rather than literal representations of reality onstage. Rather than competing with film to faithfully reproduce realism, Analog seeks to create rich settings, stories, and characters from empty and bring alive objects that are inanimate. We believe that simpler styles of storytelling can provide catalysts for increased hope and imagination that gravely needed in the world today. We use bodies, voices, instruments, interactions, improvisation, poetry, puppetry, maskwork, and mime, to create back-to-basics theatre magic.

Kunoichi Productions
The mission of Kunoichi Productions is to create bold, innovative multidisciplinary theater with Japanese aesthetics, blending the ancient and the modern, using both comedy and philosophy, while fusing Eastern and Western theatrical elements. “Kunoichi” means “female ninja” or “female warrior.” We produce thought-provoking original plays with Japanese aesthetics, breaking traditions, taboos and gender/cultural assumptions; casting new light on old ideas or old stories; and engaging and challenging our audiences artistically, intellectually as well as politically through the fusion of different art forms – poetry, music, movement, visual arts, storytelling and puppetry. We are committed to supporting local artists with diverse backgrounds and talents, working and growing with them in an experimental, collaborative environment, and to bringing a fresh, multicultural perspective to the Bay Area and beyond.

For more information on last year’s teams, and upcoming information on this year’s, visit https://playground-sf.org/incubator or call (415) 992-6677.