Artistic Director, Omar Sangare

For a review, click here.

 

presented by Williamstheatre at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Williams College, November 21 - 22, 2008:

Friday, November 21st

11:00 a.m. Workshop with Obie Award winner John Clancy

7:30 p.m. Portrait Gallery

Saturday, November 22nd

2:00 p.m. The Event

3:30 p.m. A Fire as Bright as Heaven

6:00 p.m. Male Gaze

7:30 p.m. Portrait Gallery

8:30 p.m. Closing Ceremony

For more information phone .

Last December, the first Dialogue One International Theatre Festival was one of the most impressive and enjoyable events offered by Williams College during the academic year. It combined some carefully selected, top-notch professionals from New York and Germany with what was certainly the finest student performances I have ever seen. Organized by Williams theater professor who has recently added to the extensive collection of awards he has garnered for True Theater Critic, a one-man play he has written, directed, and performed, the Dialogue One Festival is an event which should be of vital interest, not only to the immediate community, but to theater-lovers everywhere. Last year some members of the audience travelled from New York and Boston to attend the Festival, and this year even more visitors will be making the trip to Williamstown to see four character-studies by Prof. Sangare’s students and three compelling works by professionals from St. Louis and New York. After last year’s passionate and imaginative student performances we can look forward to an exciting meeting of young actors-in-training and world of professional theater.

One-person theater is nothing new. Ruth Draper delighted Henry James and Edith Wharton with her solo performances and continued to work up to her death in 1956. Browning, Tennyson and Chekhov wrote monodramas, and Schoenberg an operatic version. Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape is perhaps the classic. The genre is especially popular today, supported by several important festivals in Europe and North America, of which Dialoque One is the most recent. Several different artistic forms come together in it: performance art, standup comedy, and traditional theater. Interestingly, earlier monodramas characteristically focused on one character, like Ruth Draper’s, while contemporary exponents often approach it as a virtuoso vehicle in which the actor shifts among multiple roles, either by taking on multiple characters or through a single character’s mimicry of his or her interlocutors, often reflecting a deranged or even schizophrenic state of mind. The Williamstown Theatre Festival presented a fine example in Ronan Noone’s The Atheist, which is now playing at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village. Ultimately, we owe this challenging and absorbing entertainment to Hamlet and his soliloquies, which have shaped our minds more than we can express. (For a review of Shakespeare & Company's touring production, click here.)

founding Artistic Director of The New York International Fringe Festival, winner of the first award at the Edinburgh Festival fringe and an Obie Award, wrote The Event and directed Matt Olberg in its performance, a comic, transparent examination of the act of theater. What starts as a straightforward deconstruction of the one-man show transforms into an honest attempt at communion with those gathered. Dealing directly and humorously with the technician, the stage manager, the critics and the audience, the actor moves into dangerous and slippery territory. Armed only with his memorized words, can an actor say something else? The Event premiered at The P.I.T. Theatre in New York City and went on to play The Undergroundzero Festival at Collective:Unconscious. John Clancy will be attending Dialogue One and will lead a workshop with Williams students.

A Fire as Bright as Heaven is a forty character, comedic and political solo show that chronicles the past seven years of American upheaval, from 9/11 to the 2008 elections, which, as Collins states, “spans our recent and tumultuous history through opinion, empathy, and outrage.” Let us hope that, on that post-election weekend, we will be able to see it with more amusement and relief than outrage. (Make sure you’re registered, vote, and make sure your vote is counted, if you can.) Commissioned by The Center For Cultural Exchange of Portland, Maine, it has been performed at Marlboro College, Bates College, the New York City International Fringe Festival, and The St. Louis Actor’s Studio.

The feminist themes developed so amusingly by Jessica Lynn Johnson last year will be observed from a different point of view in Male Gaze, a solo Hip-hop theater performance piece, inspired by the 1970’s film documentary “War Zone”. In Kymbali’s performance we meet an variety of characters as she portrays  young women, affected by the issue of consistent unwanted advances from men towards them, how it affects their wardrobe choices, lifestyle and daily routine: from the extremely sexy teen who addresses the issue of sexual abuse, to the free-spirited artistic b-girl just trying to get from point a to point b without the unwanted advances, to the thug girl hiding behind baggy jeans and a hoody to maintain her safety, to an afro-centric mother sista-girl in denial of domestic abuse, addresses the issue of woman hood to her teenage daughter who is a beacon of hope reclaiming her power of womanhood. While today’s actions are most likely influenced by the exploitation of women in the media and popular culture, variations of this male-dominated behavior have been prevelant for centuries.

Professor Sangare’s Williams College students will present original solo pieces based on historical or contemporary public figures, all combined into one preliminary event entitled “Portrait Gallery.” The works were developed in Professor Sangare’s course on solo theater in which students explore the process of creating a solo piece and learn to author and design all aspects of the production. I think it worthwhile to quote the students’ own descriptions of their works:

Meredith Nelson as Britney Spears in You Want a Piece of Me?

Britney Spears, once a young and brilliant pop star, has faced the challenges of the brutal scrutiny of the press, paparazzi, and media which have lead her down a somewhat tumultuous road of cigarette smoking, tattooing her body, shaving her head, and losing both her sons to a brutal divorce.  But who are we to judge?  Let her convince you that, like all of us, she is just a normal human being who makes mistakes and learns from them…

Meredith Nelson, a senior at Williams College majoring in Theatre, has always dreamed of being involved in the performing arts business.  She is a member of the Williams Women Swim and Dive Team, who won NESCAC championships in ‘06, ‘07, ‘08, and hopefully ‘09; and a member of Sankofa, Williams’ step team.  The three A’s have dominated her life: Academics, Athletics, and Acting, and she’s now happy to say that acting can finally take The Center Stage!

Leungo Donald Molosi as Seretse Khama in Seretse Khama: Blue, Black and Blue

Born as heir to the chieftaincy of Botswana’s largest ethnic group, Seretse Khama went on to become the first president of the Republic of Botswana. His marriage to a white British woman, in 1949 was opposed by the apartheid South African government. Under pressure from the South Africans the British government banned Khama and his wife from his homeland and stripped him of his hereditary rights to Bangwato chieftaincy. In Seretse Khama: Blue, Black and Blue by Leungo Donald Molosi we see one of Seretse’s first conversations with his tribal elders upon his return to Botswana.

Leungo Donald Molosi ’09 is a Theater and Political Science major. He trained as a classical actor through University of Cambridge, UK and spent his Williams junior year training at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, performing in England, Morocco and Swaziland. He is from Botswana. 

Lexie Hunt as Sylvia Plath in Integration

Based on the life of widely acclaimed poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, and inspired by the works of Samuel Beckett, David Lynch, and Salvador Dali, Integration, by Lexie Hunt ‘09, juxtaposes surrealist, neo-noir aesthetics with the unsettling questions and paradoxes of existence.

Although a political science major at Williams College, Lexie Hunt ‘09 has become engaged in her free time with the fields of existentialism, phenomenology, and Freudian psychoanalysis. She hopes to spend the next few years pursuing (and combining) those interests, as well as her more particular interests in clinical psychology, meditation, and Buddhist philosophy.

Andrei Baiu as Oliver in Oliver Reed

Oliver Reed, the world-renown British actor, was a man of extremes. While known for his complete professionalism on the set, the drunken revelry in which he engaged in his personal life brought him notoriety and an untimely demise.

 

Andrei Baiu is a sophomore student at Williams College. Born in Bucharest, Romania, he now calls Madison, Wisconsin his home. Andrei participated in theater actively as a high schooler and found it quite difficult to keep away from it once in college. While not pursuing a theater major, he is looking to spend more time on the stage in the coming years.

received his Ph.D. from the Theater Academy in Warsaw where he studied with the Oscar winning director, Andrzej Wajda. In 1994 he was awarded a scholarship to The British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. While there he worked with Derek Jacobi, Alan Rickman, Michael Kahn, and Jeremy Irons. Dr. Sangare holds many film, television, and radio credits. His one-man performance, True Theater Critic earned him the Best Acting Award at The New York International Fringe Festival, as well as other distinctions in Chicago, Boulder, Santa Barbara, and in Poland, and, most recently, the “Best of the Fringe” Award for best performance at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. Recently, the New York press acclaimed his lead part in the Arena Players Repertory Theater production of Shakespeare’s Othello. Barbara Delatiner wrote for The New York Times, “Omar Sangare was born to play Othello!” His published literary work includes two books of poetry, Landscape of the Soul and Postscriptum; collections of bestselling short stories titled Tales for Old Horse, Tales for Black Sheep, Tales for a Decent Man; as well as many essays and articles for various magazines and newspapers. In 2003, he released his first solo album, “ON.”

Sangare’s ground-breaking initiative embodies the goals of Williamstheatre, the producing arm of Williams College Department of Theatre, chair  The Department of Theatre combines artistic practice with scholarly inquiry, inspiring students to engage simultaneously in craft and context, creativity and critical thinking. Believing that students learn by doing, it strives to create situations where the unique talents of each can coexist with mentorship and expert artistic guidance. Continuing its mission to contextualize arts within scholarly inquiry, the Center presents an impressive body of work that sets student work side-by-side with professional artists. This season will challenge traditional forms, engage with the larger political dialogue, and allow students to explore diverse modes of expression.  Not content to merely present popular work, the professional performances, workshops, and students productions are designed to invite the entire academic community to engage, debate, and celebrate the experience of both witnessing and creating live art.