Upstream Artists' Collective and Brooklyn Yard present THIS ONE TIME IN NATURE

Gathered around a small fire, Upstream Artists' Collective, Brooklyn Yard, and Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) invite audiences to contemplate our relationship with the larger things in life while sipping cocktails and noshing on s'mores. With work from artists curated by the CCTA and from Upstream and Brooklyn Yard, audiences will spend a fall evening in a backyard in Bushwick with music, letter writing, and theater-like things.

A full list of the work includes:

Bare Spaces by Angella J. Emurwon*; an earthly greeting

Great Great by Benjamin Weiner; an interactive memorial to the future

Gaia by Hiro Kanagawa*; a musical poem about heaven

This One Time in Nature written and performed by Eliza Bent; a comprehensive list of things found

Playwrights marked with an asterisk are presenting work as part of CCTA.

Three performances will take place on: Friday, October 20 at 7pm and Saturday, October 21 at 7pm

Sunday, October 22 at 7pm. Admission is $15 for general admission and $10 for low-income patrons. Cocktails and food will be available for purchase. Tickets can be purchased at http://thisonetimeinnature.bpt.me. The location of the backyard in Bushwick will be revealed upon ticket purchase.

More information can be found on www.upstreamartistscollective.org or on social media.

Directed by Keith Paul Medelis. Featuring Eliza Bent. Additional cast to be announced.

Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) is a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented biennially in support of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP meetings). CCTA 2017 is a collaboration between the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, NoPassport Theatre Alliance, The Arctic Cycle, Theatre Without Borders, and York University.

Upstream Artists' Collective is a group of interdisciplinary artists making theater with an environmental conscience, seeking to reexamine what it means to be human on a global scale. Upstream develops new work via conventional and devised processes, and reimagines existing work with an eco-arts aesthetic.

Brooklyn Yard is both an arts incubator and a traveling pop-up venue, committed to staging simple, well-executed productions of new plays by emerging playwrights in unexpected venues around the borough.

Eliza Bent is a playwright and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Bent is currently a New Georges Audrey Residency artist and has been a SPACE on Ryder Farm Working Farm resident writer, a MacDowell Colony fellow, a Target Margin Institute Fellow, the recipient of an LMCC Process Space grant, a Bay Area Playwrights Finalist, and an alum of Project Y Playwright's Group and TerraNova's Groundbreakers group. Bent is a former senior editor at American Theatre magazine, where she still writes, a frequent performer with the Obie-award winning company Half Straddle, and an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College where she received an MFA in playwriting.

Angella Emurwon is an award-winning playwright, stage director, and filmmaker from Uganda. She recently completed her first full-length stage play, Strings, that has received dramatic readings at the Kampala International Theatre Festival and the PEN World Voices International Play Festival. When she is not dreaming and writing in small town Tororo, she is a screenwriting mentor for the Maisha Film Labs (East Africa) and a willing odd-jobs doer.

Hiro Kanagawa is a Vancouver-based actor and writer. His distinctions include Jessie Richardson Awards for both acting and writing, an Asians on Film award, and numerous other nominations. Although best known as an actor, he was a story editor on several critically-acclaimed Canadian television series: Da Vinci's Inquest, Da Vinci's City Hall, Intelligence, and Blackstone. His plays Tiger of Malaya and The Patron Saint of Stanley Park have been performed across Canada. His most recent play,Indian Arm received the 2015 Jessie Award for Outstanding Original Script.

Keith Paul Medelis is a theater maker, teacher, and arts journalist. As a theater director, he is the Creative Director of Upstream Artists' Collective in Brooklyn, NY and former Artistic Director of The New Theatre Project in Ann Arbor, MI. He has directed several new works regionally and in New York. Stage and company management credits include Off-Broadway: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, Turn Me Loose; New York: New York Stage and Film Powerhouse Theater, LaMaMa for Superhero Clubhouse, Bushwick Starr, The Flea Theater, and Elastic City. As a teacher Keith has taught at Brooklyn College, Mercy College, the Professional Performing Arts School, Waterwell, Manhattan Youth, The Play Group Theatre and Pioneer High School. As an arts journalist, Keith is the producer of ELEMENTAL, a podcast series investigating art making in this urgent political moment and the upcoming Now. More Than Ever, a podcast and live series coming this fall. Additionally, Keith writes for Theatre is Easy. MFA: Brooklyn College. keithpaulmedelis.com

Benjamin Weiner is a Brooklyn-based playwright, composer, and educator. He is writer-in-residence at Upstream Artist Collective, with whom he presented his new play, The Noise, at Dixon Place. He is developing a new eco-play with Upstream and a new historical musical commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in partnership with Ensemble Studio Theater. He has been selected for a Core Apprentice fellowship from the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, the National Winters Playwrights Retreat from the HBMG Foundation, and developed original theater with the Onassis Foundation. He was recently the winner of Best Play at the Equity Library Winter Plays Festival. He also writes musicals with students from Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights. benjaminweiner.com. His music for children with his talking backpack is at princessbackpack.com.

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