We are excited to welcome the Red Thread Playback Theatre Companyfrom the Front Range for a performance on Saturday, September 21, at 7pm and a Sunday afternoon workshop on September 22.
Red Thread Playback Theatre is a company that performs a unique kind of improvisational theatre. Audience members tell stories or relate a moment from their lives and then watch our team of actors and musicians enact it on stage. This is theater where any story — ordinary, extraordinary, uplifting or difficult, might be told and immediately made into instant theatre. It’s fun, thought provoking and entertaining. But it is more than that. While people tell their stories, listen to others stories and watch the theatre that is created, a “red thread” of common experience begins to weave through the performance, building and strengthening our connections to each other as a community. It enables us to see each other in a new, often more compassionate light, especially across differences of background, experience or values.
Performance
Saturday, Sept. 21st at 7:00PM, tickets on sale at the door for $10.
Workshop
Saturday, Sept. 22nd from 1-5PM. Workshop is $30 (or $35 for Saturday performance and workshop). To reserve your spot at the workshop, please email info@historicutetheatre.com
Playback Theatre — Learn to Turn True Stories into Instant Theatre!
Different from standard improv forms, “Playback Theatre” bases its improvised scenes on the stories of the audience members. These stories can be amusing, moving, momentous or ordinary. “Playback Theatre” is performed in dozens of countries around the world. It was developed several decades ago by teacher, actor and innovator Jonathan Fox.
You will learn how to take an audience member's story where you know its outcome, and turn that story into compelling, fascinating, multi-layered theatre illuminating meaning and themes that might not have been visible or obvious in the original storytelling.
As a workshop participant, you will both tell stories and learn the techniques for acting/improvising stories of fellow participants. You will learn some of the short forms where audience members take brief moments from their lives as well as the long form where full stories are enacted.
Playback Theatre has many applications, including community building, social justice and just a fun way to deliver a meaningful performance!
About Playback:
Learn more: http://www.playbacktheatre.org/
About your workshop teachers:
Rosey Waters and Ira Liss are co-founders of Red Thread Playback Theatre and past long-time members of Boulder Playback Theatre.
Ira G. Liss, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, discovered his love for performing in an improv class more than 30 years ago at NYC's Original Improv Comedy Club with teacher Martin Harvey Friedberg, a former company member of Chicago's Second City.
He has performed standup comedy, played various characters in a murder mystery dinner theater company, performed improv comedy, spoken word, performance poetry, musical comedy. Ira served as actor, musician and assistant director in Boulder Playback Theatre for over 12 years.
Now, he hosts and produces his own music, art, variety, talk show, The Ira Liss Show.
Rosey Waters has been an actor and improvisor for over 35 years. Previous to her directing Red Thread, she spent 4 years as an assistant director and company member of Boulder Playback Theatre. She took the “Playback” Core Training, Conducting and Story as Discovery workshops at the Centre for Playback Theatre in New York.
As an actor, Rosey has tread the boards of numerous Denver stages in roles such as Toshia in "Cabaret Kaliscz" for Theatre O, Hattie in “18 Holes” for Next Stage, and the Sister Robert Anne in “Nuncrackers”. She founded Imagination Makers Theater Company, where she created, directed and acted in 26 original plays. The company toured locally, nationally and in the UK, performing at numerous venues in London.
For the past 35 years, Ms. Waters has been a teaching artist with a focus on teaching educators how to use theater in their classrooms as a way to teach their curriculum.