The Generic Ensemble Company

GenEnCo Receives Open Meadows Foundation Grant!

2011-11-01T19:30:00.003-05:00

Just got the letter awarding GenEnCo with an Open Meadows Foundation grant toward developing our full-length show, "The Experiment." Hooray!
"The Experiment" is about the connection between sexual and scientific experimentation in the contexts of colonial histories. Set in a laboratory/sanatorium in both the future and past, "The Experiment" asks: what does it mean to be human when everything we encounter takes that humanity away? Co-written by GenEnCo Producing Artistic Director, kt shorb and award-winning writer, Ana-Maurine Lara, "The Experiment" will premiere in Austin in Spring/Summer 2012.

Before This Was Texas--In Progress

2011-09-14T16:09:00.002-05:00

Fri & Sat, September 23 & 24; 7pm: Visual Arts Center
FREE and Open to the Public

Using collaborative ensemble work to create dramatic movement based on poetry by Austin-based poet Kimberly Alidio, Before This Was Texas explores bodies crossing borders and our relationship to this land called Central Texas. The Generic Ensemble Company stretches the boundaries of both form and content through a collaborative process that presents bodies that are still marginal in U.S. theatre and dance today in performance. Featuring performances by kt shorb, Saray De Jesus Rosales, and Krysta Gonzales, this iteration of Before This Was Texas will include guiding the audience through the Visual Arts Center Galleries in a site-specific exploration of space and time.

The Generic Ensemble Company makes the invisible visible through bold, socially relevant, body-centered performance. We embrace experimental approaches in both the rehearsal room and public performance by asking complex theoretical questions based on rigorous scholarship. We believe that creative work is a source to mine profound discourse and strategies for social change. Theory, praxis, and aesthetics are interconnected and equally integral to create a powerful, successful work.

Before This Was Texas is made possible with the support of the University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History and the UT-Austin Engaging Research component of the University Co-op Cohen New Works Festival. This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com.

For more information about the performances and the Visual Arts Center are here and here.

Info on directions are here.

"The Experiment", an in-progress reading

2011-07-22T13:19:00.005-05:00

Thursday, August 11 at 7pm at

The Vortex Repertory Company

The Experiment

Written by Ana-Maurine Lara and kt shorb

Featuring: Krysta Gonzales, Saray De Jesus Rosales, and Julianna Wright.

What does it mean to be human? The imaginations and desires of Dolly the Cyborg and Lucy the Mutant come together in a laboratory ruled over by Dora the Attendant. The Experiment explores historical legacies of colonialism, world's fairs, and scientific inquiry by drawing from personalized stories of queer and racialized resistance. This staged reading will showcase an in-progress script written by co-founders of the critically acclaimed Stamp Lab, Ana-Maurine Lara and kt shorb.

Donations encouraged, but none turned away for lack of funds.

GenEnCo Presents: "Before This Was Texas" - an in-progress showing

2011-03-17T15:16:00.002-05:00

presents

"Before This Was Texas"

an in-progress showing
with kt shorb, Saray de Jesus Rosales, Krysta Gonzales, and Carole Metellus

With poetry by Kimberly Alidio

Monday, 2/28 at 8:15; Kayim Atrium (Trinity Street entrance to the Visual Arts Center in the Art Building on University of Texas at Austin campus)

Part of the Engaging Research component of The Cohen New Works Festival presented by the University Co-op.

GenEnCo Presents: Una Corda (A Ritual)

2010-08-10T14:56:00.009-05:00

The Generic Ensemble Company presents the world premiere of

Una Corda (A Ritual)

written and performed by
kt shorb

directed by
Yvan Greenberg

Where: The Blue Theatre
916 Springdale Road, Austin, TX 78702

When: Friday, September 10th, 8 pm

Saturday, September 11th, 2 pm

Saturday, September 11th, 8 pm

Sunday, September 12th, 2 pm

Tickets are $15, $12 for students, seniors, and starving artists.

Click the showdate above to reserve your tickets now!
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Una Corda (A Ritual) focuses on the emotional ties that we forge with the people who grapple with a terminal disease and the moments that are shared in the space occupied between life and death. It's a ritual meditation on the spiritual and emotional effects of cancer and the experience of witnessing the destruction and loss caused by ...the disease. This solo show is an original rite, using rigorous physicality and stream-of-consciousness text based on shorb’s experience nursing three women undergoing cancer treatment. Blurring the line between ceremony, happening, and autobiography, Una Corda asks the question: How do we not lose sight of ourselves when surrounded by loss itself?

Created by performer/writer kt shorb in collaboration with director Yvan Greenberg, Una Corda uses Greenberg’s signature layering of choreography, text, imitation and indeterminacy alongside shorb’s explorations of intimacy, failure, and frenetic action to create visceral movements, objects, and atmospheres. Drawing influences from Noh theatre, Bugaku, and Japanese Buddhist ceremonies, the ritual takes place in the liminal spaces between life and death, presence and oblivion, redemption and loss.

The piece also includes scenic painting by Sarah Sage, costuming by Irene Roderick and poetry by Kimberly Alidio.

What people are saying about the artists’ work:

shorb:
"I love what kt shorb does and how she does it, both onstage and off. Whatever she is up to is not to be missed." –Anne Bogart, Artistic Director of the SITI Company

“…entertaining, controversial, memorable…”–Emily Ascolese, The Oberlin Review

Greenberg:
“...ironic, weird, experimental, anti-dramatic, and compelling...” –Alisa Solomon, The Village Voice
“Inane, insane, mundane...esthetic purity under the guise of the absurd.” –Amanda MacBlaine, NY Press
“Yvan Greenberg’s choreography [is] a strange brew of awkward gestures and simple but evocative movement phrases.” –Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

kt shorb is a director, performer, writer and founder of the Generic Ensemble Company. She has trained in Suzuki Actor Training and Viewpoints with the SITI Company and Zen Zen Zo. She was a founding member of Stamp Lab, winner of the 2008 ArtSpark Festival and the 2009 FronteraFest “Best of Fest.” Acting credits include: “Sadako” in Relativity, “Nina” in T.A.G., “Claude/Ventriloquist” in HUSH, “Reverend” in Why Koreans Don’t Hug, and in the solo show of chicks, dicks, and chinks. Directing credits include: Eagle Woman Poems, Stuck on Gee-Dot, Drawn and Quartered, Piri!, and by a quiet sea. shorb has presented her work on multiple college campuses, including Oberlin College, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Texas at Austin.

Yvan Greenberg founded Laboratory Theater in 2001 and has since directed the ensemble in eleven original pieces. His work has been presented in New York by PS 122, HERE Arts Center, The Brick Theater, Dixon Place, The Tank, chashama, TIXE, New Dramatists, The Performing Garage, The Knitting Factory, and Movement Research, among others. In February 2007, Laboratory Theater was the first Artist-in-Residence at Dixon Place, helping them establish an on-going residency program. Greenberg was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2006. In addition to his work with Laboratory Theater, he directs Murphy, an experimental music-theater piece by composer Corey Dargel and playwright Honor Molloy, which was awarded the New Dramatists’ 2007 Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theater. Laboratory Theater will premiere their newest piece, GIT ALONG LIL DOGGIES, October 14–30 at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn, NY. Greenberg is also an associate of The Wooster Group. www.laboratorytheater.org

GenEnCo Presents: Eagle Woman Poems at The VORTEX

2010-07-07T10:07:00.010-05:00

I am afraid of eagle
But keep clutching at her.
Sometimes,
I want to rip this eagle from my neck.
___

Join us for one night only at The VORTEX!

The Generic Ensemble Company presents

Eagle Woman Poems

written and performed by
Natalie Goodnow

directed by
kt shorb

an in-progress showing
July 21st, 8 p.m.

The Yard @ The VORTEX (outdoor stage)

$8 suggestion donation, none turned away for lack of funds

___

Natalie Goodnow is a teatrista, teaching artist, and cultural activist from Austin, Texas. She performs, writes, and directs; she's been doing some combination of these things for the past 16 years, and began teaching about and through those forms seven years ago. She is the Associate Artistic Director of the Generic Ensemble Company, an Artistic Associate at Theatre Action Project, and a member of the Austin Project. Previous original, solo performances include Muntu: a word that means tree and person, and Mud Offerings.

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Use of The VORTEX is made possible through the support of VORTEX Repertory Company.

This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division.

What People Are Saying About GenEnCo...

2010-04-07T21:21:00.002-05:00

http://austinlivetheatre.blogspot.com/2010/01/stuck-on-geedot-generic-ensemble.html

http://www.outcastaustin.com/episodes/2010/item/2-volume-91-01-26-2010

http://thepopularpodcast.com/?p=3932

SOLD OUT!

2010-01-29T14:23:00.001-06:00

Come early to our remaining performances to sign up for our waiting list!

We'll try to make room for you, but know that we might have to ask you to sit on the floor!

Thanks,
GenEnCo

Make your reservations here!

2010-01-05T12:28:00.003-06:00

Stuck on Gee-Dot: A site-specific, devised play by The Generic Ensemble Company

Directed by kt shorb
Additional Direction by Natalie Goodnow
With Saray Rosales, La'arni Ayuma and Natalie Goodnow
Dramaturgy by Kimberly Alidio
Design by Camille DePrang
Stage Managing and Event Logistics by Kai Bumpus

DeeDee and GohGoh’s ride needs fixin’. Who knew you could find a good mechanic at a surprise party? They just have to wait for her to show up.

An all-women-of-color adaptation of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." Set in a deserted house, DeeDee and GohGoh are two queer youth who are waiting for Gee-Dot, She Who Fixes Things.

shorb, Goodnow, and Rosales are recipients of the 2009 FronteraFest "Best of Fest" for their work in the short play, "T.A.G." by Stamp Lab: A Performance Group. This is the premier work of the Generic Ensemble Company, a new theatre group that foregrounds marginal bodies in performance.

To make your reservations for Stuck on Gee-Dot use the link provided (click on the post title!), fill out the form, and wait for the confirmation email.

The Lemon Peel Lounge is a private residence so seating is limited to 15 people per performance.

Any questions should be directed to: genericensemblecompany@gmail.com

Look forward to seeing you at the show!
GenEnCo