JACOB GRAHAM

The Creatures of Yes Indoor Adventure – Jacob Graham

Featuring collaborators: Jacob Graham, Karen Hover, Caleb Graham, Sasha Panyuta, and Michael Vanderpool

Mary Broomfellow is your average lady who just so happens to have magic powers. With the approaching holiday season she’s struggling to find meaning in her life. Over the course of a dramatic indoor adventure, she realizes that true meaning comes from the special relationships she shares with her closest friends and most importantly from the superficial decorations she’s decided to bestow with meaning. In her perfect holiday world everything is sparkly and frivolous. Join Ms. Broomfellow and the other Creatures of Yes as they decorate for the holidays in a glittering pageant of sight and sound!

Jacob Graham is the creator of The Creatures of Yes – a puppet web series set in the 1970s and made with period-appropriate technology and effects. In 2016 Creatures of Yes was officially made a part of the VICE creators project and in the following year received an honorable mention in the digital shorts category at Series Fest in Denver. Jacob is also a lighting and costume designer for the dream-pop band Sound of Ceres.  creaturesofyes.com

MONICA LERCH

Deep Trash – by Monica Lerch

Featuring collaborators: Emily Batsford*, Sara Jane Munford
*Actors appearing courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association

Party like a tardigrade in a post-human ocean. Dive deep, it’s gonna be lit. Tardigrades are 8-legged micro-animals found nearly everywhere. They can endure exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures, air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation. They have lived through all five of Earth’s mass extinctions, and are considered the most resilient animals on the planet. They, like plastic, will survive long after we are gone.

Monica Lerch is a performer, model, puppeteer and thing-maker from Chicago now based in Brooklyn. Recent directing work includes ’Otherworlds’, a piece which explores consciousness and meditative journeying using animal skeleton puppets for the 2019 Object Movement Festival. Recent performance credits include ‘The Paper Piece’ directed by Rachael Shane for Labapalooza at St Ann’s Warehouse and ‘Unfolding’ by Margarita Blush Productions. More on her work can be found at www.monicalerch.me and @death.by.monica

Phenomenal Woman (#blackgirlmagic) – by Sifiso Mabena

Collaborators:
Maria Camia: Puppet design
Sifiso Mabena*
*Actor appearing courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association

You can’t get #blackgirlmagic by talking black or, stuffing yo’ ass. Maya already told y’all, “You may {…} but still, like dust, I’ll rise.” Black girl magic is not transferable,it’s not a kink, you can’t get it by talking black or, stuffing yo’ ass. Like diamonds at the meeting of our thighs, the magic is made from the pressure of being a black woman. Black skin, without the white masks: they say desire faces up, while oppression flows down. Maya already told y’all though, “You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise”
Black queens, we really are magic: we be doin’ the most with the very least. 

Sifiso Mabena is a New York based multidisciplinary theatre maker from Zimbabwe. Off Broadway: Red Hills (En Garde Arts), The Art of Luv Part 6 (Abrons), Molly’s Dream (The Public: Fornes Marathon), Shoot Don’t Talk (Labapalooza, St Ann’s Warehouse), Ocean Filibuster (Abrons) Mashup Dreams for Nostalgics (Puppet Blok 2018). Regional: Riddle of the Trilobites (Flint Rep). International: Winter’s Tale (National Arts Festival, SA), The Comeback (HIFA, ZW), Love in the Time of Malaria (NAF, SA), Romeo and Juliet (SayTwo, UK). Sarah Lawrence: Macbeth, Harmless, Endless Long Hot Summer, Under African Skies (solo show). As a playwright, Sifiso has collaborated with The Royal Court Theatre and the British Council (ZW). Her work has been performed at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (Winner of HIFADirect 2011), the Intwasa Festival and the Chimanimani Festival. She holds an MFA in Theatre from Sarah Lawrence College, is a CUNY Adjunct Professor in Theatre and a Guest Teaching Artist at Sarah Lawrence College. Coming Up: Riddle of the Trilobites with Collaboration Town at New Victory Theatre in February 2020.