PlayGround’s Innovator Incubator Announces 5th Annual Cohort
PlayGround has announced the 5th annual cohort for the Innovator Incubator program. The Innovator Incubator was launched in 2019 to foster new innovative theatre companies and productions with a strong commitment to BIPOC representation. The multi-year intensive incubation program provides access and opportunity for emerging theatre companies, by offering financial support, fiscal sponsorship, free space and mentorship to bolster the diverse voices of the participating companies.
To date, more than 13 companies have been launched through the Innovator Incubator, helping to employ more than 400 local theatre artists and fostering the development of over 20 new works for the stage. Last year’s initiative supported eight production companies and provided 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.
Beyond the Innovator Incubator program, the companies continue to make an impact on the Bay Area community through original works. Queer Cat Productions had over 100 people participate in RISE, a queer ritual of remembrance conducted by Rawiyah Tariq, in October 2022. The Forum Collective premiered a new work by Tiff Lin & Diego Mireles Duran called MOTHER+PEACE in May 2022, which explored healing an individual’s relationship with the land. Poltergeist Theatre Project premiered its immersive solo show, GASLIT, Feb 23-25 at Cutting Ball Stage, which was fully sold-out and will be returning to Potrero Stage for a limited run, Mar 9 & 10. Linda Amayo-Hassan’s LA VIDA LOBO, a Chicano musical about the endangered lives of Mexican gray wolves and a PlayGround-Planet Earth Arts co-commission, premiered at the 2022 Innovator Showcase at Potrero Stage this past November.
This year’s participants for the Innovator Incubator include one company new to the Incubator, and six returning candidates. Returning companies include Poltergeist Theatre Project, The Chikahan Company, City Street Artists, Native Writers’ Theater, Analog Theatre, and Oakland Public Theater. The new addition to the program is Network Effects Theater Company.
These chosen 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 theatre scene prepared to continue on as full fledged production organizations. PlayGround will continue to support and sponsor these companies on an ongoing basis, culminating in the season-ending Innovators Showcase each November. The 5th annual Innovators Showcase is scheduled November 6-26, 2023.
2023 THEATRE COMPANIES AND TEAMS
Analog Theatre (Rebecca Pingree, Elissa Beth Stebbins, Jed Parsario)
The Chikahan Company (Alan S. Quismorio, Krystle Piamonte, Ely Sonny Orquiza)
City Street Artists (Tony Ortega, Linda Maria Girón, John R. Lewis, Livia Gomes DeMarchi, Natalia Delgado)
Native Writers’ Theater (Matt Kizer, Armondo Solorzano Jr., Nick Garcia, Linda Amayo-Hassan)
Network Effects Theater Company (Ipsheeta Furtado, Michael Tuton)
Oakland Public Theater (Norman Gee, Natalie Rich, Richard Talavera, Jake Fong)
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)
Past participants of the Innovator Incubator include: Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project, Theatre Cultura, LatinX Mafia, Epic Party Theatre, The Forum Collective, Kunoichi Productions, The Moonrisers, and Queer Cat Productions.
THE INNOVATOR INCUBATOR 2023 COMPANY STATEMENTS:
Analog Theatre
Analog Theatre is a home for multidisciplinary, devised performances that rely on collective acts of imagination. Its mission is to invest in our richly diverse community of Bay Area artists, using our Mask Monday platform to provide paid performance opportunities for local, experimental works-in-progress. They delight in and invite transformational work and back-to-basics theatre magic, including (but not limited to): mask, mime, puppetry, music, and improvisation. Rather than competing with film to faithfully reproduce realism, Analog seeks to create rich settings, stories, and characters from an empty stage and bring alive objects that are inanimate.
The Chikahan Company
Exploring Filipinx history, politics, psychology, and diaspora through the craft of theatre and the performing arts, ChikaCo strives to develop the unique voices of and uplift the robust Filipinx narratives and artistries, and advocate its influence to the American theatre. They aim to reclaim and to reveal the multifaceted experiences of the Filipinx community in the San Francisco Bay Area. The vision is to amplify the complex and dynamic narratives that have long been pushed to the margins and to actively challenge the stereotypes about our kababayan (people), our kuwento (story), and our kasaysayan (history).
City Street Artists
City Street Artists vision is to bring live theater to historically underserved communities, showcasing the breadth of our city’s cultural diversity through shared storytelling and equal access for the arts. City Street Artists creates fearlessly equitable theatre, centers BIPOC & Queer storytelling, and uplifts arts access throughout the Bay Area. By utilizing unconventional city spaces (including but not limited to: storefronts, parks, restaurants, schools and community venues), City Street Artists brings the play to the people.
Native Writers’ Theater
Native Writers’ Theater is dedicated to: Creating opportunity by making space for the playwriting process and producing the resulting works onstage; Fostering dialogue to tell Native American stories to inspire open, decolonized communication between all people; Amplifying stories of a forgotten people to preserve our heritage that has been all but erased. They aim to bring Native American stories to the theatre through creating new works and producing existing or evolving works.
Network Effects Theater Company
“Make passive impossible”
Network Effects Theater Company excavates the themes of today’s tech industry. By exploring the unconsidered effects of new technology–through its creation, its investors, its culture, and its end users–we can reverse the passivity of a public made numb to its effects.
Oakland Public Theater
Oakland Public Theater creates a ‘different kind of Black Theater’, expanding notions of culture to encompass often the invisible roles of African-Americans & others. OPT gives old stories a multicultural face: a Strindberg ancestral fantasy shifted to Africa; a Filipina immigrant trapped in the secretive world of Ibsen; actual people of color in Shakespeare’s foreign lands (& referencing the long history of Africans in England). OPT also features new works, celebrating things like complex families, intellectual love affairs, heroism, tragedy, engaging histories -from OUR perspective, and yet often surprisingly familiar. The goal is to make established theater more accessible to a wider range of community, while sharing with traditional audiences some insight into both the nuance and universality of our diverse community members. Oakland Public Theater will use the Baldwin Centennial Project to revive the organization, develop staff & kickstart the company’s next era.
Poltergeist Theatre Project
“Theatre that follows you home.”
Poltergeist’s mission imission 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.
ABOUT PLAYGROUND
PlayGround, California’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s, Los Angeles’ and now New York’s best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 250 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1,000 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 34 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theatre communities. Most recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, New York International Fringe Festival, and others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award.
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.