National Asian American Theater Festival Held June 23-26

The Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists' 3rd National Asian American Theater Festival will feature ten works from around the world-and four partner productions from local companies-that feature Asian Americans performers and stories.

The presenters will hail from all areas, including New York, Massachusetts, the Bay Area and reaching as far as Munich, Germany. The festival will feature an eclectic array of multidisciplinary arts that include traditional theatre, dance, multimedia, storytelling, aerial arts and spoken word. The festival will take place June 16-26 in Los Angeles, with the core of the performances happening June 23-26.

The core participating performers of the festival are:
The National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO)
RasaNova Theater
Performance Artist Denise Uyehara
Navarasa Dance Theater
Performance Duo: Aerial Artist/Actor Kennedy Kabasares and Multidisciplinary Performance Artist Traci Kato-Kiriyama
Multidisciplinary Artist Soomi Kim
Post Natyam Collective
Writer/Performer Jason Magabo Perez
Comic Duo: Writer/Performer Prince
 Gomolvilas and Singer/Songwriter Brandon Patton
Writer/Performer May Lee-Yang

The core participating performers will present their productions in alternating performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, June 23-25, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. and Sunday, June 26, at 2 p.m and 4 p.m.

"We are thrilled to be showcasing a diverse array of theatrical forms, cultural heritage, and intergenerational voices through the Asian American theater festival," said Leilani Chan, Artistic Director of Teada Productions and Los Angeles Festival host. Chan continued, "With all the theatrical events happening around Los Angeles during the month of June, you should experience as much as you can."

"Imagine all the theater events in Los Angeles as this buffet, or expanded menu. You'll want to try everything and step outside of your comfort zone for this performance feast. The Asian American Theater Festival will give you a taste of something specific but altogether, you will have sampled this rich global stew," said Tim Dang, Producing Artistic Director of East West Players and Los Angeles Festival host.

The selection panel for the festival participants were: Dr. Lucy Burns, PhD.UCLA; Philip Chung, writer; Sheetal Gandhi, performing artist; Dr. Velina Hasu Houston, PhD. University of Southern California, playwright; Nobuko Miyamoto, Founder and Artistic Director of Great Leap, Inc.; Jon Lawrence Rivera, Artistic Director of Playwright's Arena; and Kristina Sheryl Wong, Artist.

The two theatrical productions include NAATCO's presentation of A Number by Caryl Churchill-when Bernard learns that he was cloned he confronts his father who knew all along-featuring an all Asian American cast, and RasaNova Theater's presentation of Dancing on Glass by Ram Ganesh Kamatham. This dark comedy is an eloquent response to the rapid changes in the cityscape of Bangalore in 2004, in the thick of the outsourcing buzz.

Three of the shorter performance pieces will be presented together in one time-slot. Denise Uyehara's Archipelago: Islands of Land, Water and Legend will utilize video, monologues, music and ritual to narrate the origin myths of Okinawa and Native people of the American Southwest. Navarasa Dance Theater will use dance to explore the different kinds of ways people Encounter each other in contemporary human life. And in Pull Kennedy Kabasares and Traci Kato-Kiriyama will blend monologues, recorded interviews and aerial arts to tell stories of people's obsessions.
The growing use of projection in theatrical story-telling will be featured in three festival pieces. Soomi Kim's new work Dictee is a multi-media dance theater performance based on the text of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's seminal literary collage. Post Natyam Collective's Sunoh! Tell Me Sister layers video, dance and theater to bring to life subversive stories of women's erotic power and resistance. Jason Magbo Perez's The Passion of El Hulk Hogancito is a transdisciplinary, multi-media, literary performance that is a semi-autobiography of Perez's life.

Comic story-telling will also be highlighted by two performances. Comic duo Prince Gomovilas and Brandon Patton's Jukebox Stories is a critically acclaimed story-telling, song-singing, bingo-playing performance that has toured nationwide. In May Lee-Yang's Ten Reasons Why'd I'd Be a Bad Porn Star, she employs comedic storytelling, on-site sex toy demonstrations and some cultural competency training as she explores relationship and taboo topics.

In addition, there will be performances by four partner organizations. East West Players will present its new hip-hop musical Krunk-Fu Battle Battle. The Geffen Playhouse will presents the world premiere of Extraordinary Chambers. And two of the winners from 2008 East West Players' Pacific Century playwriting competition will be presented; The Colony Theatre Company will presents the 3rd place winner Year Zero and The Company of Angels will present the 1st place winner Sun Sisters.

National Asian American Theater Festival and Conference attendees will be able to attend these partner organizations' performances for a discounted rate on June 16-26. Performance dates and ticket prices may vary.

The National Asian American Theater Festival was first initiated in 2007 in New York City when six of the top Asian American theater groups (Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, East West Players, Ma-Yi Theater, the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), Second Generation and Mu Performing Arts) met in June 2004 to discuss the state of Asian American Theater.

Funding for the 3rd National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival is being provided, in part by, National Endowment for the Arts, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the California Community Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Additional sponsors are the Japanese American National Museum, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and Inner-City Arts.

The Miyako Hotel and Spa is the Official Hotel of the National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival.

LA Weekly is a media sponsor for the National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival.
FESTIVAL TICKETS for the 3rd National Asian American Theater Festival are $15 for general admission and $12 for students and seniors. Tickets for performances at partner organizations range from $20 to $76. The festival runs June 16-26. $80 Festival Passes are available and give access to all core festival performances. $300 ConFest passes are available and give access to all core festival performances as well as all panels, opening and closing receptions to the National Asian American Theater Conference. The conference runs June 20-22. Festival and ConFest Passes can be purchased online at www.caata.net, by phone at (213) 625-7000 or in person at the East West Players' administrative office.

LOCATION: The 3rd National Asian American Theater Festival will host core performances at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (Tateuchi Democracy Forum) at 111 N. Central Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles at the Alameda exit off the Hollywood (101) Freeway in Little Tokyo, part of the Japanese American National Museum, and at the Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater at 720 Kohler Street in Downtown Los Angeles between E. 7th St. and E. 8th St. Parking is available off Judge John Aiso St. between E. Temple St. and E. 1st St.

ABOUT CAATA: The Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists envisions a strong and sustainable Asian American Theater community that is an integral presence in national culture-evocative of our past, declarative of our present, and innovative towards our future. Our mission is to advance the field of Asian American Theater through a national network of organizations and artists. We collaborate to inspire leaning and sharing of knowledge, and resources to promote a healthy, sustainable artistic ecology.

CAATA BOARD OF DIRECTORS: Andrea Assaf, Leilani Chan, Tisa Chang, Carla Ching, Tim Dang, Gayle Isa, Mia Katigbak, Dipankar Mukherjee, Duy Nguyen, Jorge Ortoll, Rich Shiomi
THE PERFORMANCES
A Number
by Caryl Churchill
The National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO)
National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (Tateuchi Democracy Forum)
7 p.m. June 23 and 9 p.m. June 25

OBIE Award-winner and 2010 Theatre Hall of Fame inductee, Caryl Churchill explores the human experience, the essence of personality, and nature versus nurture as a man confronts his father after discovering that he has several siblings-each, one of his clones. Since the arrival of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned in the late-90s, the possibility of human cloning has sparked controversy. This Asian American production with James Saito and Jon Norman Schneider draws attention to the fact that despite the fabric of American life is being made up of diverse and complex cultural threads, American theatre is woefully behind the times in reflecting this on stage.

Dancing on Glass
by Ram Ganesh Kamatham
RasaNova Theater
Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater
9 p.m. June 23 and 7 p.m. June 25

A dark comedy that takes a look at the flip side of the fast-paced, globalized, technological world. In the thick of the outsourcing buzz, the play is an eloquent response to the rapid changes in the Bangalore cityscape and its effect on two young working professionals-Megha, a Call Center employee, and Shankar, a software engineer.

"...a scorching drama of love in the time of the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) buzz..." - India Today

Archipelago: Islands of Land, Water and Legend
Denise Uyehara
Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater
7 p.m. June 23 and 9 p.m. June 25
(Performed with Encounter and Pull)

A new multi-disciplinary work directed and performed by Denise Uyehara in collaboration with video artist Adam Cooper-Terán, with appearances by Natalie Brewster Nguyen and Marcos Najera.
Archipelago harnesses the cultural resonance found on "islands" -islands situated in the desert and islands found in the ocean. It investigates the metaphor of water that winds through early origin stories, citing narrative, iconography and deities from Ryukyu kingdom and various tribes of the American Southwest: the Yaqui, Navajo, Huichol and Tohono O'odham nations. The performance also sheds light on how these cultures have survived as islands-geographic or metaphoric in nature-in the midst of colonization from surrounding forces.

"Compelling...as graceful and agile on stage as she is on the page...Uyehara is definitely one to watch." - Los Angeles Times

Encounter
Navarasa Dance Theater
Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater
7 p.m. June 23 and 9 p.m. June 25
(Performed with Archipelago: Islands of Land, Water and Legend and Pull)

Encounter explores the different kinds of encounters in contemporary human life: encounter of the human soul with the divine, encounter with self, encounter with lover, encounter with gravity and encounter with the military.

"...modern dance, Indian martial arts, aerial dance, Bollywood's pop influences-all with an eye for originality and a skillful use of space, sending dancers into eye catching floor patterns." - Boston Globe

Pull
Kennedy Kabasares and Traci Kato-Kiriyama
Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater
7 p.m. June 23 and 9 p.m. June 25
(Performed with Archipelago: Islands of Land, Water and Legend and Encounter)
Pull incorporates monologues, recorded interviews, and aerial arts to tell stories of people's obsessions, from the mundane to the supernatural. Pull examines the effects they have on people's lives and relationships. When do we pull them back?

Dictee
Soomi Kim
Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater
9 p.m. June 24 and 2 p.m. June 26

Dictee, a new work, is a multi-media dance theater performance based on the text of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's seminal literary collage. Through interchangeable disciplines of spoken text, movement, music, experimental sound and video, performing artists Soomi Kim and Jen Shyu share the stories of brave women who are ordinary, revolutionary, and extraordinary in their common experiences of suffering and transcendence of suffering.

"Soomi Kim is a commanding presence as Bruce Lee. It takes mere seconds to see beyond her gender, and she convincingly portrays one of the most popular male action stars of the 20th Century. Bruce Lee would be proud." - nytheatre.com, Jason S. Grossman on the piece

Lee/gendary
Sunoh! Tell Me Sister
Post Natyam Collective
Inner-City Arts Rosenthal Theater
7 p.m. June 24 and 4 p.m. June 26

In a fluid layering of video, live dance, and theater, Sunoh! Tell Me Sister brings to life subversive stories of women's erotic power and resistance. This multimedia storytelling and dance piece is an excavation of seldom heard South Asian female voices from the historical dancer-courtesan of the Indian subcontinent to the contemporary survivor of domestic violence. Sunoh! Was developed in collaboration with AWAZ, the violence prevention group of the South Asian Network.

"Talk about fusion-not only did Bollywood meet rap meet performance art meet modern dance and bharata natyam but there was humor, depth and beauty to burn." - Victoria Looseleaf, Los Angeles Times

The Passion of El Hulk Hogancito
Jason Magabo Perez
National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (Tateuchi Democracy Forum)
9 p.m. June 24 and 2 p.m. June 26

A semi-autobiographical, interdisciplinary, multi-media, literary performance. Jason, the supposedly fictional narrator, wrestles with authorship and obsession, loses the Third Grade Show and Tell showdown, muses on the mentorship of WWF wrestlers, investigates the history of his crybabyness and explores the trauma of the FBI's 1970 racist criminalization of two recently immigrated Filipina nurses, one of whom happens to be his mother.

"As horrifying, deeply American, kinda maybe David-Lynch-meets-hip-hop narratives go, this one is a doozy." - SF Weekly

Jukebox Stories
Prince Gomolvilas and Brandon Patton
National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (Tateuchi Democracy Forum)
7 p.m. June 24 and 4 p.m. June 26

This critically acclaimed story-telling, song-singing, bingo-playing, comic duo features writer/performer Prince Gomolvilas and singer/songwriter Brandon Patton. The performance has toured extensively nationwide at theaters, colleges, bars, Comedy Clubs, and other weird performance spaces.

"Jukebox Stories takes a classic idea and gives it a modern spin. Fun, fresh and decidedly untheatrical. Jukebox Stories is a sturdy piece of post-modern cabaret, and Gomolvilas and Patton nicely fill their roles as hip, urban troubadours!" - The Oakland Tribune

Ten Reasons Why'd I'd Be a Bad Porn Star
May Lee-Yang
National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (Tateuchi Democracy Forum)
9 p.m. June 23 and 7 p.m. June 25

May Lee-Yang employs comedic storytelling, on-site sex toy demonstrations, and some cultural competency training as she explores marriage, porn, romance novel fantasies, and how to talk about sex in the Hmong culture (a definite no-no).

Krunk-Fu Battle Battle
Book by Qui Nguyen
Lyrics by Beau Sia
Vocal Music by Marc Macalintal
East West Players
David Henry Hwang Theater
May 12 - June 26

Under the guidance of Sir Master Cert, young Norman Lee battles the baddest b-boy crew at Sunset Park High for respect, honor, and the heart of sweet Cindy Chang. A hip-hop musical extravaganza!

Extraordinary Chambers
by David Wiener
The Geffen Playhouse
Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater
May 24 - July 3

As the Khmer Rouge once again attracts international attention, this world premiere play gets to the heart of the headlines. When Carter, an American telecom executive, brings his wife Mara on a business trip to Cambodia, he never imagines that the ghosts of this beautiful country will find a way to haunt their lives. As business deals unravel and personal negotiations brim with political consequences, Carter and Mara must decide if the salvation of one life is worth sacrificing the justice of many.

Year Zero
by Michael Golamco
The Colony Theatre Company
The Colony Theatre
June 1 - July 3

How do you move forward in life when you're stuck where you are? In Long Beach, CA, two young Cambodian-Americans search for an answer. Vuthy is a lonely 16-year-old who loves hip hop and Dungeons & Dragons. His ambitious older sister is starting to veer from her steadfast path to higher education and assimilation. With great humor and a modern sensibility, Year Zero sensitively explores how to escape a painful past while honoring the legacy of one's own history. It's a contemporary comedic drama about reinvention, redemption, and finding where we belong.

Sun Sisters
by S. Vasanti Saxena
The Company of Angels
Company of Angels
July 30 - August 28
(There will be an open rehearsal on June 22nd for National Asian American Theater Festival attendees.)

A daughter's love. A mother's final blessing. Jessica's homecoming forces past and present to collide as she learns to understand intolerance and tolerate her mother's lack of understanding. Sun Sisters is a play about unspoken desires and how even silence cannot prevent their realization.

National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) - An OBIE Award-winning company now in its 21st season-was created to provide opportunities for Asian-American theatre artists, actors, directors, designers, etc.-to do work in Western works they might not ordinarily be cast in or hired for in traditional circumstances. To that end, NAATCO has presented a host of classic works and new plays with all Asian-American casts, including last season's Drama Desk nominated A Play on War and the critically acclaimed The Seagull.

RasaNova Theater was founded by Vidhu Singh, director of Dancing on Glass, to produce bold new plays from South Asia, its diaspora and other world theater traditions. She earned a Master's degree in Dramatic Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a doctorate from the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Asian Theater Program. As part of her doctoral research in India, Vidhu became part of a nation-wide experiment documenting regional theater companies that blended Indian and Western actor-training techniques in their work.

Denise Uyehara is an award-winning performance artist, writer and playwright whose work has been presented in London, Tokyo, Helsinki, Vancouver and across the United States. A pioneering performance artist whose work the Los Angeles Times hails as "mastery [that] amounts to a'coup de theater," Uyehara was one of the first to explore Asian American queer subjectivity through performance. She is the recipient a COLA Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, as well as support from the Asian Cultural Council and Arizona Commission on the arts.
Navarasa Dance Theater has a wide repertoire of solo and group works in classical and contemporary dance and theater. Inspired by Indian classical and folk dance forms, theater, world music, martial arts (kalari ppayattu), aerial dance, yoga, live singing and storytelling, Aparna Sindhoor, Anil Natyaveda and S M Raju have created work is dynamic, radical, and original in style and content. Navarasa Dance Theater is known for its work with themes that deal with human issues in a meaningful way that makes audiences enjoy and be touched at the same time.
Kennedy Kabasares is an aerial artist, actor and writer. He has worked with a diversity of theater companies, including Tongue in a Mood Theater, East West Players, Center Theater Group, performance trio zero3, and Kinetic Theory Circus Arts. An almost chance encounter with a circus school in Los Angeles led to several years of training with world-class coaches such as Eric Newton (Cirque du Soleil, Quidam), Karyn and Sara Steben (Cirque du Soleil, Saltimbanco) and Rachel Walker (Cirque du Soleil, Kooza).

Traci Kato-Kiriyama is a multi-disciplinary performing artist, arts educator, director/founder of the Tuesday Night Project and recent author of book of poetry, signaling, Traci previously toured with Kennedy Kabasares in their inter-disciplinary theatrical show, Zero3: Stage and Spoken Word Superheroes. She is currently touring with her book and just launched a new community documentation and arts project called Generations Of War with the support of the Aratani CARE grant and Professor Glenn Omatsu's Asian American Social Movements course at UCLA.
Soomi Kim is an actor/multidisciplinary artist based in NYC. In October 2008 her original play Lee/gendary (based on the life of Bruce Lee-written by Derek Nguyen and directed by Suzi Takahashi) ran for 3 weeks's at HERE Arts Center's mainstage. This production (produced by and featuring Kim as Bruce Lee) garnered 6 IT Awards nominations and received the award for 2009 Outstanding Production of a Play. Lee/gendary was also presented at the First National Asian American Theater Festival (FNAATF) held in New York City in 2007.

The Post Natyam Collective is a multinational community of dance artists, scholars and organizers critically and creatively engaging with South Asian dance forms and aesthetic concepts. The members of the collective are Sandra Chatterjee (Munich/New Delhi), Cynthia Ling Lee (Los Angeles), Shyamala Moorty (Los Angeles) and Anjali Tata (Kansas City). Every Post Natyam Collective member is steeped in South Asian and other movement forms, but the training of each member is unique. Collectively, their training includes Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Kuchipudi, yoga, and contemporary dance.

Jason Magabo Perez received his MFA in Writing & Consciousness from the now defunct New College of California in San Francisco. An alumnus of the VONA Summer Writing Workshops and a featured artist for the New Americans Museum, Perez has performed at various university campuses and at venues such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Asian Art Museum SF, and the La Jolla Playhouse. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals such as Witness, Tayo, and In the Grove. Currently, he is writing for a dance-theatre collaboration and has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Prince Gomolvilas is a Thai-American playwright whose plays include Big Hunk O' Burnin' Love (East West Players, Los Angeles, 1998), The Theory of Everything (co-production between Singapore Repertory Theatre, Singapore & East West Players, Los Angeles, 2000), Bee (Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, San Francisco, 2001), and the stage adaptation of the Scott Heim novel, Mysterious Skin (New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco, 2003), which have been produced around United States, in the UK, and in Singapore.

Brandon Patton is a songwriter and instrumentalist. His solo album Should Confusion was nominated for Album of the Year by the Independent Music Awards. He plays bass under the pseudonym BL4k Lotus for MC Frontalot, progenitor of "nerdcore hiphop." MC Frontalot's band and its first national tour was the subject of the documentary Nerdcore Rising. Patton composed the songs for Love Sucks: The Musical, a Shakespearean take on the punk rock of the 1970s, which won Honorable Mention at the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival.

May Lee-Yang is a playwright, prose writer, poet and performance artist living in Saint Paul, MN. Despite no experience and bad acting, she got her first gig at eighteen. Since then, she has gone on to perform her writing as a solo artist as well as a member of the spoken word group, FIRE. She's a two-time winner of the MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant, a two-time winner of the Playwright Center Many Voices Fellowship, a winner of Intermedia Arts' Naked Stages performance art program and a recipient of a National Performance Network Creation Fund.
East West Players has been producing work since 1965. Productions range from popular Asian American works, Asian American World Premieres, Mainstream Musicals & Plays with an Asian American twist and community performances. As the nation's premier Asian American theatre organization, East West Players produces outstanding works and educational programs that give voice to the Asian Pacific American experience.

The Geffen Playhouse has been a hub of the Los Angeles theater scene since opening its doors in 1995. Noted for its intimacy and celebrated for its world-renowned mix of classic and contemporary plays, provocative new works and musicals, the Geffen Playhouse continues to present a body of work that has garnered national recognition.

The Colony Theatre Company is a 37-year old organization dedicated to bringing the finest-quality theatrical productions to Los Angeles. Named "LA's Best Live Theatre" by readers of L. A. Daily News and named one of "25 Notable US Theatre Companies" by Encyclopedia Britannica's Almanac 7 years in a row.

Company of Angels is dedicated to creating theater that is deeply connected to its community. Theater in Los Angeles is largely disconnected from the vast majority of residents. This is especially lamentable given the ability of theater to create a shared experience, illuminate societal struggles, and provide a vehicle to express and discuss ideas. We aim to share and help give voice to the many stories that exist in our community.

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