Announcing Our Night of New Works Participants

Savage Umbrella is pleased to announce the 2015-16 participants of the Night of New Works project development series:

• David Hanzal and Katharine Sherman, co-founders of Collective Unconscious Performance, with their piece, SPUN SUGAR
  
• Katie Kaufmann, an actor/creator focused on devised work and new plays, with her piece, KEEPER OF THE LIGHT
  
• Harrison Rivers, playwright, with his piece, LYDIE
  

Through the Night of New Works series, Savage Umbrella will offer support to emerging theater makers interested in creating new work for the stage through collaborative processes. These three participants will be paired with a Savage Umbrella co-pilot, who will provide their participant with critical response and conversation as well as reflection in the form of artist-to-artist feedback.

In addition to the artistic sounding board, participants will have access to Savage Umbrella’s technical resources, set, costume and prop stock, and rehearsal space, as well as a split of the total box office profits.

“Our Twin Cities community is brimming with talented, emerging theatre makers, and we are thrilled to help support the continuation of new work in our community,” says Artistic Director Laura Leffler-McCabe. “We value collaboration, fresh voices and new plays, and want to create a supportive structure to make those things happen through the Night of New Works program. The projects that Harrison, Katie, and David and Katherine proposed are exciting and also reflect our values of sensitivity to social, environmental, and historical context. We can’t wait to see what happens.”

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​David Hanzal is a Twin Cities-based director/designer/adapter and the co-founder of Collective Unconscious Performance. Previously, his stage direction has received awards from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre National Festival and the University of Iowa. He completed his Master of Fine Arts in Theatre Directing at the University of Iowa, where he regularly developed and directed premieres of new plays and devised work with writers from the nationally-recognized Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop. David has also intensively trained with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, Kari Margolis and the Margolis Brown Adaptors Company, Czech master puppeteer Miroslav Trejtnar, and the Wesley Balk Opera/Music-Theatre Institute. Currently, David teaches at Metropolitan State University, White Bear Lake Area High School, Stages Theatre Company, and Youth Performance Company.

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​Katharine Sherman is a Minneapolis-based playwright and co-founder of Collective Unconscious Performance. Her play will you still love me, tomorrow was commissioned by the Red Eye Theater in 2014, and her play ondine will be a part of Cutting Ball Theater’s 2015-2015 season. christopher marlowe’s chloroform dreams and like the night were both produced by Lunar Energy Productions in 2012 and 2009, respectively. She has had two plays developed as a part of Cutting Ball’s Risk is this...festival, and has been a finalist for the Jerome Fellowship, the National Playwrights’ Conference, and the Heideman award. She holds a B.A. from Bowdoin College and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from the University of Iowa.

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Katie Kaufmann is an actor/creator focused on devised work and new plays. She trained in physical theatre, clown, commedia dell’arte, mask making, mask performance, mime and melodrama at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre. In 2001 she moved to the Twin Cities for a performing apprenticeship with Theatre de la Jeune Lune where she performed in four shows. She has worked with many other theatre companies in the Twin Cities including Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Guthrie Theater, Walking Shadow, Red Eye, Off­Leash Area, Sandbox Theatre, Skewed Visions, 20% Theatre, Joking Envelope, Theatre Unbound, Jon Ferguson, Alan Berks, and The Playwrights’ Center. She has also created and self-­produced three shows: a solo mask performance entitled What If (2004) using 6 masks she made for the project, a collaborative ensemble clown piece about tsunami victims entitled Aftermath (2007), and a two­-person show about underemployed people forced to take jobs as sign holders entitled Everything Must Go (2010). Katie holds a BA in Drama and Italian from Colorado College. She and has also studied with The National Theatre Conservatory, Pierre Byland, Chris Bayes, Giovanni Fusetti, the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and the British American Drama Academy.

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​Harrison David Rivers is the winner of a GLAAD Media Award, a McKnight Fellowship for Playwrights, a Many Voices Jerome Fellowship (Playwrights’ Center), a Van Lier Fellowship (New Dramatists), an Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship (New York Theatre Workshop) and the New York Stage & Film’s Founders Award. His plays/musicals include WHEN LAST WE FLEW (Sundance, FringeNYC, Diversionary, About Face, TheatreLAB), AND SHE WOULD STAND LIKE THIS (P73, Drama League, PRELUDE, 20% Theatre Company), LOOK UPON OUR LOWLINESS (The Movement Theatre Company), SWEET (Public Theater, NYTW, The Black & Latino Playwrights’ Conference, Great Plains Theatre Conference), THE BANDAGED PLACE (Global Age Project, Classical Theatre of Harlem, Harlem Stage), AND ALL THE DEAD LIE DOWN (The Playwrights’ Center, Pillsbury House, New York Stage & Film), WHERE STORMS ARE BORN (Labyrinth), THE LAST QUEEN OF CANAAN (Northern Stage, Theatre Latte Da, National Alliance for Musical Theatre) and FIVE POINTS (Musical Theatre Factory). Harrison is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop and an alumnus of the Emerging Writers’ Group at the Public Theater. He received his BA from Kenyon College, and earned an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University.

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The public is invited to the final presentations of the participants’ work, to be held at Savage Umbrella’s SPACE, 550 Vandalia St Suite 306 in St. Paul, MN, on April 7, 8, 9, 14, 15 & 16, 2016. ​