The Innovator Incubator Welcomes Its 2021 Companies!

PlayGround has announced a 3rd round of selected teams to participate in their continued Innovator Incubator. This year’s teams include three companies new to the Incubator, and six returning candidates. Last year’s initiative saw the inception of three brand new production companies joining three returning 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. Due to the Covid crisis, our culminating festival pivoted to a robust multi-week online showcase resulting in seven premier digital productions, each a unique experiment with form and content for the pandemic era (I Am Dracula: A DocuDrama Experiment by Poltergeist Theatre Project, Corazón of a Latina by Theatre Cultura, Ether: Ep 1, Ep 2, and Ep 3 by The Forum Collective, How Do You Plug In An Analog by Analog Theatre, Black Face Matters by Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project, The True Tale of Princess Kaguya by Kunoichi Productions and Baboons in the Nighthouse by The Moonrisers).

Six teams return for this year’s incubator: Poltergeist Theatre Project, Theatre Cultura, The Moonrisers, The Forum Collective, Analog Theatre, and Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project; while three new applicants have been selected to join fiscal sponsorship and mentorship at PlayGround: The Chikahan Company, The People From Here Theater Company, and Latinx Mafia Presents. From this year forward, the Innovator Incubator is making an intentional shift from a single-year structure towards creating a multi-year community of groundbreaking and growing companies. All companies in the Incubator community are invited to reapply yearly to be a contender for that year’s Innovators Showcase, and each year the Incubator will take in 1-3 new companies to help foster their development.  Over the course of the year, chosen new and returning 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. All companies admitted to the Incubator will continue to have access to the financial and institutional support of PlayGround’s fiscal sponsorship until such time as they decide to matriculate from the program.

2021 THEATRE COMPANIES AND TEAMS

Moonrisers Theater Company (Christopher Magee, Michael Magee, Angel Hertslet)

Poltergeist Theatre Project (Britt Lauer, Brooke Jennings, Caroline Portante, Chris Steele AKA Polly Amber Ross, Giselle Boustani-Fontenele, Jesse Annette Koehn, Lavale-William Davis AKA Coco Buttah, Linda Maria Girón, Ling Lee, Mey Lee, Sgt. Die Wies)

Theatre Cultura (Linda Amayo-Hassan, Dov Hassan, April Ballenstros)

The Forum Collective (Julius Rea, Leigh Rondon-Davis, Keiran Beccia)

Analog Theatre (Rebecca Pingree, Elissa Beth Stebbins)

Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project (Aldo Billingsea)

The Chikahan Company (Alan Quismorio, Krystle Piamonte, Ely Sonny Orquiza)

The People From Here Theater Company (Matt Kizer)

Latinx Mafia Presents (Tony Ortega, L. Durate, Sedrick Cabrera, Natalia Delgado)

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

“Theatre that follows you home.”

Poltergeist’s mission is to reclaim Queer narratives through performance processes that dismantle toxic cultural norms, viscerally immerse audiences, and celebrate the innovation and liberation of Queer folx. Honoring San Francisco’s strong tradition of revolutionary art that ignites the flame of cultural and societal progress, Poltergeist creates radically queer, feminist, intrinsically participatory theater. Whether highlighting work by new artists or subverting and re-framing a problematic public domain play to create a brand new adaptation, Poltergeist seeks to normalize and centralize Other narratives. Focusing on the tenets of inclusivity, representation, and accessibility, Poltergeist seeks to remind this city of its deep roots in queer art. 

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 to 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 Collective

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.

Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project

The Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project was launched by Aldo Billingslea to center Black theatre artists and new voices, address systemic racism in the theatre industry, and help raise much needed funds in support of Black Theatres around the country. The inaugural project featured more than half a dozen online staged readings of Vincent Terrell Durham’s play, Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids, on Juneteenth 2020, involving over sixty theatre companies from around the country and in support of a national GoFundMe campaign for Black Theater.

The Chikahan Company

Exploring Filipinx hxstory, politics, psychology, and diaspora through the craft of theater and the performing arts the Chikahan Company strives to develop the unique voice of and uplift the robust Filipinx narratives and artistries, and advocate its influence to the American theater. Reclaiming and revealing the multifaceted cultures of the Filipinx community is a fundamental vision of the Chikahan Company in order to amplify the complex and dynamic narratives that have long been pushed to the margins and to actively challenge the stereotypes about our kapamilya (people), our kwento (story), and our kasaysayan (hxstory).

The People From Here Theater Company

The People From Here Theater Company is dedicated to: Creating, producing and performing plays written by Native playwrights past and present; creating a community of Bay Area Native and BIPOC artists; telling our stories to inspire open, decolonized communication between all people; preserving and sharing our stories from our heritage that has been all but erased. 

Latinx Mafia Presents

The Latinx Mafia was founded to empower and support Latinx teatristas by reclaiming, demystifying and recreating Latinx representation in theatre/media. They aim to ensure that Latinx representation in theatre and media radically and accurately embraces historically marginalized communities including but not limited to: the LGBTQ+ community, indigenous and Afro-Latinx people, differently-able folx, migrants regardless of immigration status, and the many linguistic backgrounds in Latin America.