SWEET CHILD OF MINE, HAYMAKER, TMLMTBGB and More Set for Neo-Futurists' 2013-14 Season

The Neo-Futurists announce their 2013-14 season to include Sweet Child of Mine, created by Bron Batten and presented in collaboration with The Last Tuesday Society (Australia), The Sovereign Statement by Bilal Dardai, and Haymaker by Trevor Dawkins. Also on the books is another great year of the smash hit, Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind.

Prime Time shows run Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. at The Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland (at Foster) in Andersonville. Tickets are $20, $10 for students/seniors with ID, or pay-what-you-can on all Thursdays. For tickets or information, visit www.neofuturists.org or call The Neo-Futurist Box Office at 773-275-5255.

Sweet Child of Mine
U.S. Premiere
created by Bron Batten and presented by The Neo-Futurists, in collaboration with The Last Tuesday Society (Australia)
Preview: Thursday, September 5, 2013
Opening Night: Friday, September 6, 2013
Performances continue through Saturday, September 21, 2013

Sweet Child of Mine is an exciting U.S. premiere, featuring Australian performer Bron Batten and her 60 year-old parents live onstage, discussing art, theater and what Bron actually does for a living. Their insights are earnest, poignant and at the same time, painfully hilarious, as they ask themselves and the audience, what exactly is the point of art? Sweet Child of Mine is an inter-generational performance investigation combining theatre, modern dance, stand up comedy, audience participation and visual digital media. These elements combine to create an innovative style of post-dramatic performance that is honest, real and uniquely Australian - whilst also transcending cultural boundaries to speak to a universal experience.

Winner of the Best Experimental Performance at the 2011 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Sweet Child of Mine has since toured nationally to Sydney, Adelaide and Perth Fringeworld Festival where it was also nominated for Best Theatre Production. This U.S. premiere is supported by Arts Victoria and The Australia Council for the Arts.

Bron Batten is an Australian theater-maker and performer. Her work has been seen at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Next Wave Festival, The Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Perth Fringe World, On Edge Festival, The Village and The Falls Music Festival. She has been the Creative Producer of the successful independent theater event The Last Tuesday Society since 2008, which provides regular performance opportunities for emerging and established artists. The Last Tuesday Society has been presented at venues and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. In 2010, Bron was awarded funding through the Ian Potter Foundation to attend academic conferences in Hong Kong and Switzerland on the significance of humour in the arts, where she presented papers on the intersections between art, theater and comedy. Bron was selected as one of 15 artists in an Australia-wide callout to participate in the 2011 Splendid Arts Lab residency, collaboratively conceptualizing installation work for the 2012 Splendour in the Grass Festival. Bron recently received funding from The Australia Council for the Arts to undertake professional development residencies and improvisation training in Chicago and New York and is currently a performer with renowned children's theatre company, Polyglot.

The Sovereign Statement
World Premiere
Created by Bilal Dardai
Previews: Thursday, October 17 through Saturday, October 19, 2013
Opening Night: Monday, October 21, 2013
Performances continue through Saturday, November 23, 2013

Using the genre conventions of political thrillers and procedurals, The Neo-Futurists explore the strange phenomenon of "micro-nations" by attempting to establish their theater as an independent state in its own right, utilizing the audience as citizens of the endeavor. Featuring rapid-fire dialogue and interlocking, simultaneous narratives taking place throughout the space, each evening Dardai and his cohorts proceed to build the basic trappings of a modern nation while fighting against intrigue, paranoia, misinformation, politicking, and revisions to the play itself. The Sovereign Statement examines not only the birth of nations, but also the circumstances that lead to their fracture and collapse. Can the new Neo-Futurist nation survive? And if so, should it?

Bilal Dardai has been an ensemble member with The Neo-Futurists since 2004. He has also served as the company's Booking Coordinator and Social Media Coordinator, and since 2012 has been one of the company's two Artistic Directors. In addition to writing and performing in The Neo-Futurists' ongoing production of Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, he has served on the creative teams for the company's productions of Alice, Contraption, The Dean Evans Show, A Very Neo-Futurist Christmas Carol, Crisis: A Musical Game Show, 44 Plays for 44 Presidents, and It Came From The Neo-Futurarium! He also wrote a number of plays for the late New Leaf Theatre, including Vox Pandora, Redeemers, and The Man Who Was Thursday (Joseph Jefferson Award-nominated, Best New Work - Adaptation). Other plays of his have been produced in Los Angeles; New York; Washington DC; Helsinki, Finland; and Nottingham, UK. He is also an occasional actor around Chicago and a contributor to live-literature events Write Club and The Paper Machete. Mr. Dardai graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BA in Rhetoric/Creative Writing.

Haymaker
World Premiere
Created by Trevor Dawkins
Previews: Thursday, May 22 through Saturday, May 24, 2014
Opening Night: Monday, May 26, 2014
Performances continue through Saturday, June 28, 2014

Trevor examines his fascination with physical combat by staging Tears of Shanghai, an action movie he wrote when he was 12 years old. Casting himself as Russell Dakota, a grizzled maverick evading the Nazis, Trevor attempts to create a world where the line between right and wrong is clearly defined. Within the Neo-Futurist aesthetic, Haymaker is a platform to explore our urge to fight. Expect intricate staging and visceral choreography, as well as elements of high risk.

Trevor Dawkins grew up in Hastings-On-Hudson, New York. In 2009, Trevor graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a B.F.A in performance. Trevor is an ensemble member of The Neo-Futurists. He regularly writes and performs two minute plays for the long running late night hit Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Trevor has also written for and/or performed in several prime time shows for the Neos, including Daredevil's Hamlet, Chalk and Saltwater: The Ladder Project, and Analog. Around Chicago, Trevor has performed at the Wild Party Variety Hour and has written and performed original work for The Alluvium Group.

ONGOING SHOW
Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind: 30 Plays in 60 Minutes
Every weekend except December 19-21 & December 26-29, 2013
Best of 2013 performances: December 6-8 & December 13-15, 2013
Special New Year's Eve performance: December 31
Fridays and Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. (doors open 11:00 p.m.)
Sundays at 7:00 p.m. (doors open at 6:30 p.m.)
Tickets: $9 plus the roll of one six-sided die, or $10-15
Reservations accepted via www.neofuturists.org

The Neo-Futurists' signature show, performed since 1988, is the longest-running production in Chicago history. Too Much Light... is an ever-changing attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. Each week the ensemble adds between two and twelve new plays to the menu. Every performance creates an inimitable, living-newspaper collage of the comic and tragic, the political and personal, the visceral and experimental.

The Neos go pro-choice with Roll-Back Refunds! You choose - buy your tickets in advance or take your chances at the door. Starting April 5, 2013, half of all tickets to every performance of Too Much Light... are available on a pre-sale basis for $20 with a Roll-Back Refund at the door. Pre-sale patrons can guarantee their seats for the performance while still getting the chance to roll the die receiving $1-6 cash back, effectively making their price between $14-19! All tickets available via neofuturists.org.

The Neo-Futurists, performers of Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind and creators of over 60 other original, full-length productions, are a collective of wildly productive writer/director/performers who create immediate, non-illusory, interactive and head-slappingly affordable performances.

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