Naked Stages Performances 2024
PILLSBURY HOUSE + THEATRE ANNOUNCES 2024 NAKED STAGES PERFORMANCE DATES
November 14 – 23
Thur – Sat
November 14 (Opening), 16 and 22 at 7 PM
Skye Reddy and Atim Opoka
November 15, 21 and 23 (Closing) at 7 PM
Sarah M. Greer and hal sansone
About the Naked Stages Program
Pillsbury House + Theatre (PH+T), with support from the Jerome Foundation, provides a fellowship opportunity for early career performance artists in Minnesota. This program is designed to give artists a supportive environment for building their performance and production skills while creating a stage or site-specific performance piece with PH+T as the venue. Naked Stages emphasizes the development of artistic process rather than technical production.
DISCLAIMER – Skye and Atim’s show contains partial nudity, Sarah and hal’s show contains adult language, both shows have fast moving lights
Sarah M. Greer
Title: Heap Cull Gather Sow
Directed by Dipankar Mukherjee
Words & Music by Sarah M. Greer
Show Description:
Heap Cull Gather Sow is a ceremonial journey through grieving, ancestral guidance and heart memory carried by tears and talismans, movement and memory, stories and songs. Sourced from intuition and melody, Heap Cull Gather Sow asks how we hold loss and sorrow from the present and the past and from where we garner the resources to re-imagine and re-member ourselves.
Artist Bio:
Sarah M. Greer (www.sarahmgreer.com) is a singing, improvising, and performing artist who works at the intersection of song, sound and story. She has performed in numerous Twin Cities venues, at the Twin Cities and Madison, WI Jazz Festivals, for NPR’s Talking Volumes with Give Get Sistet, opened for Take 6 (also with Give Get Sistet), and has invented music on regional and national stages.
As a recording artist and composer, Sarah released their original and highly improvised debut album What the Music Says Do in 2018 and will release a live album of their improvised work Between: A Journey Through the Middle (2024) this year. Additionally, she is developing an improvised composition sourced from the sounds we make as we express sorrow entitled Giving Voice to Grief.
Sarah holds a Bachelor of Special Studies with a focus in music and a vocal performance degree. She is passionate, nearly evangelical, about the power of our voices to change our world.
hal hansone
Title: Trans Man Gay Club Disco Fantasy directed by Cat Hammond
Show Description:
A gay trans man looks for belonging in queer nightlife. He does and doesn’t find it. So, he flirts into the silence and listens for desire. An impossible trans ancestor answers across space and time. Interweaving disco, go-go dancing, and drag, this show asks: what do you do when loneliness and community live side by side? How can pain become a portal to pleasure and possibility? Part autobiography, part fantasy, 100% gay.
Artist Bio:
hal sansone (he/him) is a theatre artist, writer, and herbalist-gardener. He has been a company member with Sandbox Theatre since 2019. Most recently with Sandbox, he organized and directed the Minneapolis premiere of the Trans Voices Cabaret, which will occur again this December. Other works with Sandbox include Light My Way, Bone Mother, The Golden Record Project, and Words.Do.Move. He has also worked with various theatre companies in the Twin Cities as an actor, deviser, and teaching artist. As a poet, his micro-chapbook Winter Garlic: Healing Poems for my Root System was published by Ethel in 2023. hal holds a BA in Performance Creation from the University of Minnesota and a certificate in Herbal Studies from Minneapolis Community and Technical College.
Skye Reddy
Title: The Field of Three Horizons co-directed by Aamera Siddiqui and Suzy Messerole
Show description
Combining movement, voice, and digital media, The Field of Three Horizons is based on Bengali cultural beliefs about ghosts. In a community without strong written traditions for common people, bamboo ghosts, fish-obsessed ghosts, and spirits that possess grapefruits have a beautiful specificity. They reveal much about the histories of Bengali people through their lives, livelihoods, fears, and unfulfilled desires. Told through fictionalized vignettes of real family stories, the performance plays upon ghost stories to explore themes of queerness, family relationships, language, and loss in a contemporary diaspora experience.
Artist Bio
Skye Reddy is a multidisciplinary South Asian artist working in film and live performance. Their screen dance works have been shown at festivals in India and the U.S. and featured in the LA Times. In different capacities, they have previously worked with The Southern Theater, Black Ensemble Productions, Red Eye Theater, Children’s Theatre Company, Asian Media Access, Theater Mu, LimeArts, and on various Twin Cities-based short films. Skye is currently a member of the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN) Spotlight Shorts documentary cohort and was the 2022-23 Production Management Fellow at Children’s Theatre Company. They hold a degree in Theater and Dance from Macalester College.
Atim Opoka
Title: This body is a gift: Messages from the Ancestors directed by Leah Nelson
Show Description:
An ancestral journey of remembrance.
Artist Bio:
Atim Opoka (They/She) is a Ugandan-American (Acholi) songwriter, vocalist, composer, producer, and teaching artist, who fuses Afro-pop and alternative beats while embracing the power of transformative storytelling. Atim believes in the power of storytelling. Part of their current practice is decolonizing what is “Good Art” and challenging the power structures that decide what and whose stories get told. Life is art, and it is all around us. If we listen to nature, the stories will unfold. The power of imagination, and being able to dream. To let your mind wander, and your heart feel. That is how they create their art. Through songs, scenes, music, or with bodies. Allowing yourself to be open to all emotions, and all stories. They are a 2023-24 Monkeybear Puppetry Cohort, 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, TRCSTR 2023 Artist, a 2021 recipient of a Waters Award, as well as an Our Space is Spoken For Fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance. She has had a residency at three-thirty one space with Rosy Simas Danse. She’s inspired to share authentic stories and amplify marginalized people taking their power back by telling their stories. She believes that art is a birthright.
“There is value in learning foundations, and building things the traditional way. But there is something refreshing in breaking the rules. Trying new ways to use the tools that you have mastered and received. That is how I approach creating art.” – Atim Opoka