Four CalArts Productions at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014

Pomegranate_Jam

'Pomegranate Jam: A Shadow Ballet' is now at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014. | Image: Facebook

the_intruder_edinburgh_A3_FINAL

'The Intruder, Pt.4' is at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014. | Image: Courtesy of Things from Before

Kaspar

'Kaspar' is part of CalArts Festival Theater at Edinburgh. (Image: Twitter)

For the 11th year, CalArts Festival Theater returns to Scotland to participate in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe—the world’s largest arts festival, which this year boasts a staggering 49,497 performances of 3,193 shows during its run (Aug. 1-25).

Four CalArts’ student- and alumni-initiated productions are being staged at Venue 13, with Jon Gottleib, CalArts School of Theater’s Head of Sound Design, serving as program director, and alumnus Ian Garrett (Theater MFA 08) returning for his seventh year as the contingent’s consulting producer.

The four CalArts shows running in repertory from Aug. 2-23 are:

• Yellow Fever, directed by Allison M. Keating (Theater MFA 13), is a multimedia drama featuring two characters, guitar and song. The show was created during a “cross-continent collaboration” between Keating and London playwright Simon Parker.
• Alexander Demers (Theater MFA 14) leads the LA-based performance collective Things from Before in The Intruder Pt.4, an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1890 play about a dysfunctional family awaiting death. The troupe updated the setting and shifted the tone from the absurd to dark comedy.
• Pomegranate Jam: A Shadow Ballet is a re-imagining of the Greek myth of Pesephone staged through the use of shadows, music, puppetry and dance. The production was created and developed by directors Megan Lewicki and Evangeline Crittenden, who are both currently in CalArts’ MFA acting program.
• Rounding out the official CalArts Festival Theater productions is Peter Handke’s 1967 classic play, Kaspar, helmed by Rafael Lopez-Barrantes, associate head of Performance at CalArts. The play is loosely based on the life of Kaspar Hauser, a young German who wandered into a small town, knowing only one sentence and claiming to have grown up in total isolation. 

Venue 13 was established in 1996 by the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to promote new Welsh theater talent. Now for more than a decade, in collaboration with CalArts, the stage features emerging talent from both California and Wales, exposing audiences to new, experimental theater pieces and artists—and vice versa.

Yellow Fever Teaser #3 from Allison M Keating on Vimeo.