Roxane Gay, Ty Defoe, Raja Feather Kelly & More to be Feature in Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Inaugural Quills Fest

Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in partnership with Artizen and Museum of Other Realities, will present the first-ever Quills Fest, an annual two-day immersive digital festival at the intersection of live theatre and Extended Reality. This milestone event for O!, OSF's digital stage, features world-premiere Virtual Reality commissions, behind-the-scenes exhibitions, and panel discussions featuring groundbreaking artists and producers from around the world. Quills Fest can be experienced in two ways on November 19-20, 2021: via VR headset within the Museum of Other Realities and the interactive Quills Fest website. Quills Fest offerings are accessible to audiences around the world 24/7. Panels will be available on-demand after their live presentations. For a full schedule of events and to purchase tickets ($15), please visit quillsfest.com.

Quills Fest was conceived by OSF Artistic Director Nataki Garrett as part of her vision for OSF to engage artists and audiences at the cutting edge of theatrical innovation. The first-of-its-kind event is produced by Associate Artistic Director and Director of Innovation & Strategy Scarlett Kim and Associate Producer, Innovation & Strategy Ken Savage, alongside Artizen producers Ana Brzezińska and René J. Pinnell.

Nataki Garrett says, "Theater is considered by XR artists to be one of the oldest forms of immersive experience. I created Quills Fest to explore the intersection between the power of live performance and the expansiveness of virtual reality. With Quills Fest, in our partnership with Artizen and Museum of Other Realities, we are matchmaking artists and XR technologists to make work for the next generation of audiences and tear down the boundaries of what liveness can be, how and where it can be experienced, and how we can participate in it."

Scarlett Kim says, "Nothing like Quills Fest exists right now. We are bringing together performance and XR through the lens of liveness and in the context of theatre. Multiplicity and hybridity are often considered additive, but here, they are simply our MO. We're centering what is seemingly on the edges or outside of what theatre companies normally do. In doing so, we seek to invite a radically expansive audience-base to collaborate with our artists in crafting the future of theatre."

OSF is thrilled to welcome Roxane Gay, The New York Times best-selling author and visionary thought leader, as the plenary speaker for Quills Fest 2021 who will be in conversation with Nataki Garrett.

The World Premiere VR Commissions feature works by three international teams of theatre artists and VR creators, who have been matched together for a two-month accelerator. The collaboration between artists hailing from across continents and artistic disciplines sparked bold, boundary-defying experiments in the Virtual Reality space. Dede Ayite collaborates with filmmaker and VR creator Joel Kachi Benson (Winner of the Venice Lion 2019) and director Michael McQuilken (Director of the Pulitzer Prize winning opera, Angel's Bone) on Guardian of the Night, a Virtual Reality experience that immerses the viewer in a forest, through which they're guided by spiritual guardians from West African mythology. Ty Defoe's Anakwad, created with immersive artist and creative co-director Dov Heichemer (Recipient, Sundance New Frontier Grant) and XR creative developer alpha_rats brings to life an Anishinaabe tale in an Indigiqueer dreamscape. Raja Feather Kelly's Ordinary Gesture, written by Kelly and co-directed with creative producer Illya Szilak (Director, Queerskins), in collaboration with Art Director, Technical Director & Lead Developer Cyril Tsiboulski (Creative Director, Cloudred), surrealizes the experience of empathy, in a virtual reality work that combines theatre, meditation, and movement.

Performed by The Roots founder Black Thought (Tariq Trotter), Oa??a??-Dogg: An Angeleno Take on Othello is co-directed by Shariffa Ali and Brisa Areli Muñoz. This moving piece reimagines Shakespeare's Othello during the five days of the L.A. Riots in 1992. The piece's many collisions-of genres and forms, classic theatre with hip-hop and spoken word, canonical narrative and painfully real recent history-adds layer upon layer to this chilling investigation of race and class in America.

Another component of Quills 2021 is Behind-the-Scenes Exhibitions, featuring process-focused looks at five exciting projects from around the world that radically expand the bounds of live performance. In Laila, an interactive work created by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Paula Vesala, Tuomas Norvio and the Ekho Collective for the Finnish National Opera, music and visuality evolve and change in interaction with the audience. Satore Studio's Cosmos Within Us delivers a sense of hope and understanding to anyone affected by Alzheimer's. Dazzle by Gibson/Martelli + Peut Porter, recreates the optimistic, rebellious spirit of the 1919 Chelsea Arts Club 'Dazzle Ball'. POV by GRX Immersive Labs is a hyper-digital sci-fi virtual reality series immersed in a near future Los Angeles where personal data is the new currency and weaponized A.I. Police drones enforce the law. Finding Pandora X by Double Eye Studios is a modern take on an ancient myth that shifts the perspective on a narrative that has long been misinterpreted. Visitors are encouraged to step into bespoke exhibition spaces in VR and on the Quills Fest website to explore the guts and wires of these visionary projects.

Live, interactive Conversations will feature Creators' Forums with Quills Fest artists, Immersive Social Events across VR and the Quills Fest website, and Panel Discussions with iconic creative leaders across industries, including Sarah Ellis (Royal Shakespeare Company), Alton Glass (GRX Immersive Labs), Josh Nelson (JuVee Productions), Lauren Ruffin (Crux, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), and Loretta Todd (IM4 Lab). These engagements will reveal and demystify the inner-workings of this dynamic and ever-evolving field, and enable global artists and audiences to connect across geographical barriers.

Full line-up and schedule will be announced shortly on quillsfest.com.

QUILLS FEST WORLD PREMIERE VIRTUAL REALITY COMMISSIONS

Guardian of the Night

Dede Ayite - Lead Artist

Michael Joseph McQuilken - Lead Artist

Joel 'Kachi Benson - Lead Artist

Michael Thurber - Composer and Sound Designer

Jennifer Harrison Newman - Movement

Tyler Alexander Arnold - Set PA

Costumes Built by The Public Theater Costume Shop in New York

Within a number of West African traditions, there is a belief in spiritual guardians known as Zangbeto, Coumpo or Kwagh-hir. These beings act as spiritual guardians and emerge in a whirlwind of energy during festivals to speak to the people.

This project creates a virtual reality experience that immerses the viewer in a dark, unfamiliar forest. A guardian will appear and through dance and movement, illuminate and guide the viewer.

Raffia and a variety of recycled materials (solid worldly materials) are used to create the body of this otherworldly guardian, who appears only for a brief moment to reflect our existence back to us, and in so doing help us find our way.

This experience is an exploration of movement, and an embodiment of our oneness with the earth and nature.

Anakwad

Ty Defoe - Creative Director

Dov Heichemer - Creative Co-Director

alpha_rats - Developer

Clara Luzian - 3D Artist

Suzanne Kite and Devin Ronnenberg - Music

An Anishinaabe tale brought to life in an Indigiqueer dreamscape summoning the shapeshifter queer ghost as it nullifies linear time and learns to unlock syllabic truths to regain balance in the destructive destiny of now.

Ordinary Gesture

Raja Feather Kelly - Lead Artist, Writer, Co-Director

Illya Szilak - Co-Director, Creative Producer

Cyril Tsiboulski - Art Director, Technical Director, Lead Developer

Christoph Mateka - Sound Design & Score Composition

Ordinary Gesture is a Virtual Reality Theatrical experience that intersects theatre, meditation, and movement. The experience seeks to surrealize the experience of empathy by situating the player in 5 scenes that expand from their body to space-time (the universe) and back again. Inspired by the movies Magnolia, Melancholia, Waking Life, the poem "You Are Never Ready" by Nicole Blackman, and the writing of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, Ordinary Gesture asks the player to contemplate existence, suffering, compassion, and gesture as both ingredients to create theatre and a means to perhaps better understand empathy.

O-DOGG

An Angeleno Take on Othello

Performed by Tarik "Black Thought" Trotter

Executive Produced by Nataki Garrett for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Kirkaldy Myers, Shariffa Ali in partnership with Artizen & the Museum of Other Realities

Creative Producers: Joe Brewster & Michèle Stephenson, Rada Studio

Production Company: AliAlea Productions

Producer: Adrian Alea

Line Producer: Emma McSharry

Co-Directors: Shariffa Ali and Brisa Areli Muñoz

Writer & Dramaturg: Alex Alpharaoh

VR Engineer: Sagar Patel

Costume Designer: Tanaka Dunbar Ngwara

Sound Designer/Composer: Josh Horvath

Performer: Tarik "Black Thought" Trotter

Director of Photography: Kris Pilcher

Assistant Director of Photography: Kevin Laibson

Sound Mixer: Christian Guiñanzaca

Video Editor: Micah Stieglitz

Teleprompter Operator: Rudy Dedominicis

Production Assistant: Tanéyah Jolly

In this immersive experience, users are launched into a cacophony of chaos during the 1st night of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Unable to look away, the participant is forced to contend with a city divided along race, class, and immigration lines as revolt fills the city, provoked by the acquittals of four White LAPD police officers who beat and nearly killed Rodney King. From Shakespeare to Shakur, Black Thought to Alpharaoh, these poets and lyricists have a visceral way of speaking honestly about the history of our times with critical precision. This piece, effusive as much as it is restrained, offers a heated conversation about race, colorism, bias, and culture in America through liberatory practices of hip hop, spoken word, lyricism, rhythm, and flow, inspired by Shakespeare's well known Othello.

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