Son of Semele Kicks Off 4th Annual Company Creation Festival Today

Award-winning Son of Semele Ensemble (SoSE) will present the 4th annual Company Creation Festival from today, January 8 to March 2, 2014 at the Son of Semele Theater in Silver Lake. The SoSE-curated festival promotes works developed through company collaboration or other less-conventional methodologies by providing Los Angeles theater artists with free performance space and marketing support.

This year's Company Creation Festival features works from four ensembles, including LA avant-garde favorites Poor Dog Group and a new company featuring festival alumnus Nathan Singh:

Bunk
presented by MaiM Theatre Company
SYNOPSIS: A job interview tasks two would-be construction workers - one Nigerian, one African-American - with building a bunk bed. To succeed, they must confront the misconceptions they have about each other's cultures and work together toward their common goal. Bunk is a confrontational piece that shows the intellectual and practical sides of both construction and culture as it provokes the audience to become a member of
the on-site crew.

MaiM Theatre Company, created by playwright Julie Taiwo Oni and director Nathan Singh, seeks to break down the boundaries between audience and artist, and to create stories that challenge expectations or assumptions about certain groups of people, or about what theatre ought to be.

Coldwater
presented by Blue Cube
SYNOPSIS: The trajectories of three characters intertwine as they drive toward Coldwater Canyon: an academic-turned-taxi driver trying to reconnect with society; an Ob/Gyn still haunted by her transcendental experiences in Afghanistan; and a Green Beret confronted with a crack in his reality. This mordant and mysterious play brings to light the surreal in our lives.

Blue Cube is a collective of artists based in Los Angeles, created by a Spanish lighting designer, an American actor and a Spanish playwright/director. Their goal is to create theatrical works that challenge conventional narrative and push the boundaries of the medium.

S.M.S. I. W.O.O.F. (SaveMySoul In a WorldOfOddFoices) or 8 bottles of vodka
presented by Poor Dog Group
SYNOPSIS: In a dreamlike reality, two crossed souls strive to find each other through texted dreams. Inspired by Dylan Thomas' radio play, Under Milk Wood, and their own chat room, PoorDogGroup attempts to catalyze the era of images into the age of text.

Poor Dog Group, founded in 2008, is a collective of diverse media and performance artists recognized for their rigorous critiques of history that speak to our current sense of being. www.poordoggroup.com

A Word From Our Sponsors
presented by Velvet Pile
SYNOPSIS: In a Burbank Olive Garden, Gina and Diane await a celebrity sighting to validate their existence. Their darkly comic vigil brings them face to face with the extent to which commercials have shaped their lives, wants and fears.

Amanda Barnes and Alexis Notabartolo are Velvet Pile, a two-woman performance group that works to tease out the absurdity of societal expectations and to blow apart the confines of gender. Using comedy as the vehicle and trust as the motor, Velvet Pile pushes people to question what they accept by laughing at the absurdly familiar.
www.velvetpile.com

Festival calendar:

January 8 - March 2, 2014
Wednesday-Saturday performances @ 8pm; Sunday performances @ 5pm
No performances 1/29, 1/30, 2/26 or 2/27
Visit www.sonofsemele.org to find out which shows perform which day.

Individual tickets are $18 ($16 for students, seniors and union members). Festival passes, which include one admission to each production, are $35. All tickets can be purchased through the SOSE website at www.sonofsemele.org or at the door for an additional $2.00. The box office opens one half hour prior to curtain. Son of Semele Theater is located in Silver Lake at 3301 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004 (one mile west of Alvarado).

About Son of Semele Ensemble: Son of Semele Ensemble (SoSE) is a Los Angeles-based ensemble theatre company comprised of 25+ actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs and producers. We believe the impact of a theatrical experience should resonate beyond the theater door. As an ensemble of artists, we integrate complex design and performance, producing theatre that embraces the friction between emotion and intellect. Through a process of discovery, collaboration and creative risk-taking, we illuminate and amplify universal questions. To that end, we make an earnest commitment to the artistic sustainability of the greater community.

In its 13-year history SoSE has been honored with two LA Stage Alliance Ovation Awards (nine total nominations), five LA Weekly Theatre Awards (eleven total nominations) and an NAACP Theatre Award (four total nominations). In 2011, Cyclops: A Rock Opera, a production created by Psittacus and which began at the Company Creation Festival, traveled the country and was nominated for a 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

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