Cal Shakes and Intersection for the Arts Announce Selections for Triangle Lab's Artist-Investigator Project

California Shakespeare Theater and Intersection for the Arts today announced the Triangle Lab's selections for its Artist-Investigator project, a series of ten experiments to develop new models of theater making. The Artist-Investigator project seeks to support artists from a variety of disciplines-theater, dance, performance and visual art, multidisciplinary artists, and those exploring social practice-who are curious to invent, discover, or refine a particular way of working.

The request for proposals generated a total of 140 submissions covering a remarkable array of undertakings by diverse Bay Area artists from many fields. The ten selected projects present a wide range of topics explored in various medium, from a QR-code based, choose-your-own adventure play, to multiple responses to the ongoing problem of violence in Bay Area cities, to a crowd-sourced video of hundreds of people performing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Each Artist-Investigator will receive a $3,000 stipend, plus $1,000 for project expenses.

"The goal of this project is to support experiments that will yield models that can be replicated by other artists," says Triangle Lab Director Rebecca Novick. "These ten projects, delving deeply into thorny community issues, new technologies, and new ways to involve a wide range of voices in the creation of new performance, are exactly the inspiring models that we think represent the future of what artists can bring to our changing culture."

Those selected as Artist-Investigators are:

Chris Black
Black is collaborating with students from Marshall Elementary School in San Francisco to develop a dance-based, site-specific performance exploring the students' relationships to the school's physical and cultural environment.

Arielle Julia Brown
The Love Balm Project will curate a series of site-specific performances-based on the play Love Balm for My SpiritChild-throughout Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose featuring testimonies from Bay Area mothers who have lost children to systemic violence.

Desdemona Chiang
Chiang will create a short (30-minute) interactive "play" engaging individual audience members in a choose-your-adventure structure via mobile technology and QR code.

Debby Kajiyama and José Navarrete
The Anastasio Project is a mobile, multidisciplinary street performance work using the stories of Rodney King and Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas as inspiration to investigate race relations with East Oakland youth.

Jo Kreiter
Kreiter is launching a site-specific performance project in partnership with Quesada Gardens Initiative, College Track, and 10 young women ages 14-18. The project responds to the transformation of one street in the Bayview District of San Francisco, where neighbors have radically remade their block from a junkie paradise to an inspired greenway that encompasses several community gardens. She will be assisted by dance artist Jennifer Chien.

Susie Lundy
Sky Burial is a publicly installed, community-processional project composed of 131 hand-crafted, mixed-media wings exhibited throughout Oakland at each homicide site, commemorating individual murder victims of 2012. The wings will be on display at La Peña Cultural Center in April and May 2013 before they are installed throughout the city in June.

Kegan Marling
With a whiskey-ginger in hand, choreographer Marling inhabits two local queer pubs to listen to stories of bartenders and regulars about gay role models and growing up during the AIDS epidemic-all the while mining for performance structures relevant to how each community absorbs art.

David Szlasa
Full Balcony is a crowd-sourced video performance of the balcony scene from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Michelle Wilson
In Carbon Corpus, artist Wilson sells the animal-based carbon credits of her body in order to scrutinize and critique environmental issues, food systems, and alternate economies.

Dan Wolf
Corner Collisions will be sounds, songs, and scenes collected from and performed on nine street corners in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The ten selected Artist-Investigators will be introduced at a private reception on February 28, from 5-7pm at Intersection for the Arts' 5M space, 925 Mission St. The honorees will begin with a short presentation of their proposed projects, followed by a facilitated conversation about the investigations revealed in the applications, and an informal reception. Please note, this event is not open to the public; members of the media interested in covering the event should contact Cal Shakes Marketing and PR Manager Marilyn Langbehn at press@calshakes.org