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The Place Project Update:

Friends,

We are done with our first location of the Place Project. The Artist's Laboratory Theatre produced a performance lab in a residential home during June. Through collaboration, and throughout several weeks, we created several vignettes that focused on ideas and characters which we found related to Place.

Kasper Hauser - A boy without language, because he had no place in the world.

Myrtle Kindle - A weekly columnist for The Westville Reporter, a small town newspaper.

Len - A former resident of Picher, OK.

The Runner - Inspired by a Radiolab podcast titled the same.

The Debris - A video of Joplin debris projected on a familiar kitchen. "If you command the reality of Impermanence, you don't get attached- you don't get upset."

Him and Her - your guides for the evening. "I will take you places. Will you take my hand?" Like paper children cut-outs, they led two groups of five down corridors, into rooms, and onto lawns in the shadows of dusk into night.

We discovered so many things, mostly useful for the Place Project. We know now how different it is to be that close to each other. And how much we like it . We used the performances as a means of asking questions. We started with basic ideas. They opened up more more questions that, I believe, will lead us to the next thing.

Also, we learned that we must eat together at the end. Breaking bread on the living room floor and talking for an hour afterward is the BEST WAY to end an experience.

The next thing. We dream and dialogue and ask more questions and find more places. We have a few locations in mind and heart, but let us know if you have any ideas.

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ALT’s Place Project brings theater home … literally

The Place Project

We begin a new performance lab in June, the Place Project, a long-term project with many short-term goals:

• To create site- specific work sprung from questions regarding Place.
• To stage performances in surprising and provocative Places.
• To investigate as an ensemble (and sometimes through public performance) the reading of plays, which ask questions of Place, or are of interest and relevance.
• To investigate the relationship between place and thought and self- awareness.
• To ask scientific questions about place and apply research to performance experiments.
• To be mindful of our Place in the world, and observe through given stories the multiplicity of existence, which in turn, may challenge us to participate more fully in the world.
• To create many intimate, theatrical experiences for our community, which are not limited to narrative traditional structures.
• To provide a Place, a venue for an experience of awe and wonder. We aim to get to close with our community.

We started the Place project at the end of summer. We visited Picher, OK, the most toxic place in America- the first field trip in a series of several Superfund sites we will visit in the course of our project. We were lucky to sit on a porch with one of seven families that remain in Picher. We were pleased to learn that people will talk, but don't always give over personal information to strangers easily. We did record an interview with a current Picher resident woman. She shared her porch with us and patiently and pleasantly obliged us the list of ten or so questions I had prepared. We also got in touch with a man who hadn't lived in Picher since 1973 and he obliged us a recorded hour- long phone interview. He was lovely and full of stories. We talked of home and leaving home. And he talked of denial—what it's like when a community is infected with it.

We plan on Place Project lasting some time. Please follow our process so you can get there with us.

The Artist’s Laboratory Theatre cheerfully embraces the challenges of poverty. We agree totally that suffering builds character, and so we absolutely revel in our martyrdom -- but we could use some help if we are to continue to work.

Please, contact us if you can help in any of these ways:

1. We need an empty house with at least two bedrooms. We want to occupy the house temporarily and create theatre in it. Both as a performance laboratory and performance space. We will need it for June and July. And then we will slip away, leaving no evidence of our work. We are careful and insured.
2. Cold hard cash. Or check. We have to pay for lots of little things and some big things, ie insurance, rent on a temporary house, utilities, operational expenses in general. It adds up. Money is always deeply appreciated.
3. Airfare. Got mileage? We are bringing Joseph Fletcher (Fletch) back from New York to work on the summer lab. Fletch was our lab director last summer and is coming back for more art making in Fayetteville, AR this June. Help us bring him here!

The Artist’s Laboratory Theatre is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of The Artist’s Laboratory Theatre may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.