(RE)FOCUS FEST

Kaleid Theater

Titles are for Little Witches: The Salem Bitch Trials

The bitches are coming. Tall bitches, crazy bitches, bitchin’ bitches, frigid bitches. We hear them as their broomsticks rustle the air and their legs slap in the wind. We rush to close shutters, lock doors, and clear porn out of our search histories. Still they come for us. Rippling up through our blood, tingling up over our skin, bursting out of our own throats.

They invite us – tempt us – compel us to look at the tweets that twisted them, the hearts that sustained them, the politics that rewrote them, the families that made them. Here are the tests we devised for them, the judgements we passed out, and the way the dangling ropes could never be final.

We look at them like we look in the mirror, and fumble towards honoring ourselves. With them, we ask: what is power? Where does it live in us? How do we reclaim it?

Ensemble

Becca Khalil - Creator/Performer

Daniel Ison - Sound Designer

Kaitlin Davis - Creator/Performer

Minou Pourshariati - Creator/Performer

Rachel O’Hanlon-Rodriguez - Creator/Performer

Ro Gauger - Lighting Designer

Sarah Mitteldorf - Creator/Director

Valerie Giacobbe - Promotional Photography

Kaleid Theatre (as in kaleidoscope, as in collide) is a multiracial, physical theatre ensemble dedicated to exploring the questions that our communities are asking right now. We are interested in how language, movement, music, and sound can come together to explore questions that are not easy to talk about through one sense alone, to reflect the complexity of human experience, and to shift our lens so that we can learn new things about our world.

Kaleid Theatre is a program of CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia, a charitable 501(c)(3) organization supporting diverse cultural practices in the Philadelphia region. CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia provides a charitable home and affordable shared management resources for arts and heritage programs of diverse disciplines and cultural traditions

Support provided in part by The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pratima Agrawal

Voided

Voided is a solo theatre performance inspired by the true story of Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian female astronaut in space who died in the 2003 Columbia accident. Through the lens of racial representation and feminism, Pratima explores her struggle to “fit in” on her own terms as a performer in the City of Brotherly Love. What is it to exist in the world yet not exist in a community, what is it to be marginalized when seeking out unique roles or only find stereotypes, and what does it mean for our histories to become invisible after we’re gone?

Ensemble

Pratima Agrawal - Creator-Performer/Sound Designer

Sarah Mitteldorf - Creator-Director

Anula Shetty - Video/Projection Design

Ro Gauger - Lighting Designer

This piece was created as part of the Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists (PAPA) mini-residency program in partnership with Asian Arts Initiative (AAI).

Alma's Engine

Publik Private

A physical and poetic exploration of the inner lives of the Publik Universal Friend y la Monja Alferez and the conviction that these two unique historical figures had to their authentic genders.

Ensemble

Eppchez! - Creator/Performer

Evelyn Swift Shuker - Lighting Design

Mila Romero - Puppets

TS Hawkins

Cartons of Ultrasounds

The societal machine churns embryos, girls, and womyn, into seclusion; waterboarding their freedom and manufacturing their wombs with assembly-line legislature. Prisoners to their gender, society has become the parasitic conjoined twin of the dogmatic cycle extending life sentences of female identified invalidation. With scantily clad images, pejorative song lyrics, and abusive homes heightening the maltreatment of the female form, we teach womyn to be the missing, the raped, and the forgotten.

Ensemble

TS Hawkins - Writer

Cheyenne Barboza - Director

Iman Aaliyah - Actor