 |
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Broadway Producers ALIA JONES-HARVEY & STEPHEN C. BYRD will receive the Riant Theatre's PIONEER OF THE ARTS AWARD
Monday, October 21, 2013
ASHTON PINA RECEIVES THE RIANT THEATRE'S YOUTH EMPOWERMENT AWARD
Ashton Pina has been awarded the YOUTH EMPOWERMENT AWARD by
the Riant Theatre, the award is given to an outstanding student enrolled in
college and includes a scholarship of $2,500, which Mr. Pina will use to
complete his thesis film THE BROTHERS TEXAS. Check out his campaign on
kickstarter to help him reach his goal. http://www.kickstarter.com/
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Play Submissions for the Strawberry Theatre Festival & Strawberry One-Act Festival (Deadline October 30, 2013)
The Riant Theatre's Strawberry Theatre Festival will be at the 160 seat Theatre at St. Clement's on 46th St. in Manhattan from February 12th - February 23, 2014,
and is now accepting submissions for Full Length Plays (between 55 - 90
minutes) and Musicals (not to exceed 120 minutes), Short Plays (40
minutes - 50 minutes) and Staged Readings. Plays selected for the
festival can perform between 3 - 5 performances and elect to share a
percentage of the box office by paying a theatre usage fee between $1 -
$9 per ticket to receive 10% - 100% share of the box office. To download
an application go to www.therianttheatre.com
or email us at RiantTheatre@gmail.com. The deadline to submit an
application is October 30, 2013. Late Submissions deadline is November
15, 2013. The participation fee for the STF is $400 for plays received
by October 30, 2013 and $500 for plays received after October 30, 2013.
The participation fee for Short Plays is $350. All submissions are done by email.
Also seeking submissions for the Strawberry One-Act Festival (February 12th - February 23rd) for plays with a running time from 15 minutes - 30 minutes. Plays can advance from Round 1, Semi-Finals, Finals and the Awards Show & Performance. The judges for the Finals will consist of (2) Artistic Directors, (1) Agent and (1) Casting Director. The 4 Best Plays will perform at the Awards Ceremony on February 23rd and have the option to do an Encore Performance at one of our Partner Theatre Companies. The participating fee for plays accepted into the festival is $300 for plays submitted by October 30, 2013 and $350 for plays received after October 30, 2013, which includes: an on-camera interview for your play, inclusion in our mailing brochures and the Riant Theatre Review Magazine, (1) ticket to our Launch Party and Screening of the Video Diaries Project: A Series of Short Films about the artists in the Strawberry One-Act Festival;
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Radio Interview with Kristen Seavey & Van Dirk Fisher on BOOK TALK with DJ Kory on Break Thru Radio
To buy the book go to http://www.therianttheatre.com/item.php?id=184
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Embracing the Spark: Orpheus Group Casting Founders Receive Pioneer of the Arts Award
Embracing the Spark: Orpheus
Group Casting Founders Receive Pioneer of the Arts Award
By Jane Rubinsky
By Jane Rubinsky
Ellyn
Long Marshall and Maria E. Nelson, the founding partners of Orpheus Group
Casting, receive the Riant Theatre’s Pioneer of the Arts Award in recognition
of their 27 years of uncompromising dedication to the arts of film, theater,
and television. Among the critically
acclaimed films enriched by their expertise are Girlfight (2000), Real Women
Have Curves (2002), Maria Full of
Grace (2004), and Amreeka
(2009). The pair have also worked with
respected theater companies such as INTAR, on Broadway, and at Lincoln Center.
A
native New Yorker born into a theatrical family (her father was the actor Avon
Long), Marshall studied acting before landing a job in casting at the Public
Theater back in the late 70s. “A regular
paycheck, health insurance, doing something I loved; I was in heaven,” she
recalls. She was casting for the Los
Angeles tour of Joseph Papp’s Pirates of
Penzance when she met Nelson, an agent for a musical theater company on
42nd Street, over the phone. “I just
found a really pleasant person on the other side of the phone,” says
Nelson. “And that’s basically how we
began this friendship.”
Nelson,
who was born in Costa Rica to a family of entrepreneurs, had become New York
State’s youngest licensed agent at age 23, after already having worked in the
fashion industry. She moved up the
ladder quickly, but her goal was to launch a production company – “completely
out of my forecast for my life,” laughs Marshall. But their tastes and values were in
sync. And as Marshall began seeing more
shows that were “terrible” – “not a lot of them, but just the concept,” she
recalls – the two decided it was time to open their own company in an office at
Kaufman Astoria Studios in 1987.
Initially
they focused on theater production. But
directors were also looking for help with casting, and the pair had a wide
knowledge of actors from their previous lives.
As the casting work “mushroomed,” says Marshall, the two eventually
moved into film with Above the Rim
(1994). Since then, they have been
playing an integral part in shaping independent features with multicultural
themes.
“People
often ask us, how do you decide what to work on?” says Nelson. “We’re totally script-driven; that’s the
deciding factor.”
“We
choose projects that are important to us, that introduce new ideas,” concurs Marshall. “And things that have an impact on society,
that the audience will come away from with something positive, regardless of
how dark the subject matter might be or how it’s presented.”
That
often means working on a project from the ground up, with lots of challenges –
from helping to find financing to steering someone to the right cinematographer
or director. Nelson recalls the Canadian
producer who confessed, once a project was under way, that she “needed a little
help” because she had never produced a film before. “I told her, ‘Well, you’re going to produce this one!’” says Nelson. “And of course we helped her, and talked her
through the process. Then there was the
film they had to cast in five different countries from New York City – with the
audition tapes in Arabic. “We were
arguing with the producers about using this actor or that actor, and I don’t
know if they even internalized the fact that we didn’t speak Arabic!” laughs
Nelson. “But we were lucky enough to be
right, and the particular actor got all the accolades in the trade.”
Singling
out a favorite project is hard, but Nelson says they are especially proud of Girlfight. “We worked hand-in-hand with the writer and
director, Karyn
Kusama, from the very beginning,” she
says. The casting was pivotal. “We’d been talking about this role with Karyn
for nearly a year,” recalls Marshall.
“She was very specific about what she wanted this person to be. We saw hundreds and hundreds of young
ladies. When we saw Michelle Rodriguez,
I just knew immediately that was the girl.
She had no credits, and came in off the street to an open call, and she
was fabulous.”
Current
projects include fully producing two films and working on an innovative
Broadway musical, as well as building a media arts center in Middletown, N.Y.
(where the Hoboken Film Festival was transplanted this year after the damage of
Hurricane Sandy).
Despite
rapid and sometimes unsettling changes in the industry, they remain
optimistic. Technology, maintains
Marshall, changes “not only the process, but also the creative part of the
brain. I think it has atrophied.” They also refuse to cave in to the pressure
to cast big names that have nothing to do with a script. “But recently, we’re getting these little
inklings from people who have this spark,” says Marshall. “I’m seeing that there are young people coming
up with good scripts, with good ideas, who need guidance. To be able to nurture that, and help them
find the money, that’s the challenge, and that’s specifically where our heads
are at right now.”
“We
who have the experience should be there to embrace this, to help it along,”
adds Nelson. “Because that’s our
responsibility. And I feel very
seriously about that. Personally, that’s
why I’m in this end of the industry – because I want to leave a legacy.”
Tickets are available for the PIONEER OF THE ARTS AWARDS, which will be presented at the Launch Party for the Strawberry One-Act Festival.
The event will be on Monday, July 29, 2013 at 7pm at the Tribeca Grand
Hotel - Cinema, located at 2 Avenue of the Americas, NYC. There will be a special
screening of the Video Diaries Project: A Series of Short Films About the Artists in the Strawberry One-Act Festival. For tickets go to http://www.therianttheatre.com/item.php?id=185
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Script Submissions Deadline is May 20, 2013 for the Strawberry One-Act Festival in Manhattan, NYC
Strawberry One-Act Festival in Manhattan, NYCThe Strawberry One-Act Festival – Summer 2013 will be held at
The Hudson Guild Theater, 441 West 26th St., NYC,
Between 9th & 10th Avenue
August 14, 2013 - August 25, 2013
The Strawberry One-Act Festival is celebrating its 24th season, the brainchild of Artistic Director, Van Dirk Fisher, is a play competition in which the audience and the theatre's judges cast their votes to select the best play of the season. Twice a year, hundreds of plays from across the country are submitted for the competition. Plays move from the 1st Round to the Semi-Finals and then the Finals. The playwright of the winning play receives $1,500.00 and the opportunity to have a full-length play developed by the Riant. The awards to be presented are Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress. Submissions are being accepted for the festival until May 20, 2013. To download an application click here or email us for an application at RiantTheatre@gmail.com. To submit full-length plays, musicals and staged readings click here for an application for the Strawberry Theatre Festival.
The Judges for the Finals of the Strawberry One-Act Festival TBA, they will consist of a Theatre Producer, Artistic Director of a Theatre Company, a Casting Director and an Agent.The Launch Party for the festival will be held at the Tribeca Grand Hotel Cinema on Monday, July 29, 2013 at 7pm. The Award Ceremony & Performance will be on Sunday, August 25th at 5pm at the Hudson Guild Theatre. In addition, some of the plays in the festival will be selected for publication in our anthology: The Best Plays From The Strawberry One-Act Festival: Volume 9.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
ONLINE NOW: The Video Diaries Project: A Series of Short Films About the Artists in the Strawberry One-Act Festival
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Jeremiah Milbauer: Renaissance Man, Literally By Kaley G Pillinger (The Observer Newspaper)
Jeremiah Milbauer, a 10th grader at Hunter College
High School, has fostered
an interest in theater from a young age. “Like any kid, I think I was always interested
in dressing up and parading around the house in costume, pretending to be some
character from my imagination.” It’s
been a long and prolific journey between his first role as a sunflower in a
play at day camp at age 8 and his current role as Giorgio Vasari, a young
apprentice in the current production of The
Faultless Painter, currently in rehearsal for the Strawberry One-Act
Festival by the Riant Theater.
While this is Jeremiah’s first
foray into professional theater, he’s participated in many productions both at
school and his synagogue. His favorite
roles include: Fagin in Oliver!,
Crank in Snow Angel, the title role
in The Odyssey as well as the
aggressive half of Caius Lucius in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.
The producer from The Faultless Painter saw Jeremiah as
Odysseus and remembered his terrific performance when it came time a year later
to cast the role of Giorgio Vasari. The characters in the play are all based on
real historical figures.
Young Giorgio is apprenticed to
the oft-overlooked Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto (played by Samuel
Muniz). The one act, which delves into
del Sarto’s inner conflict between his love for his unfaithful wife, Lucrezia
(Virginia Bosch), and his commitment to his art. The interesting historical note is that
Giorgio, who plays a seemingly insignificant role, turns out to become the
real-life biographer of del Sarto and the first ever art historian. “It will be interesting to see how I play the
character who ends up being the storyteller,” Jeremiah commented. But that’s not the only challenging part of
his role: the entire play is in verse.
Jeremiah is faring well with his
new environment, be it having his feet measured for Renaissance-style footwear,
working with a cast of all adults, or spending hours discussing the history
behind the characters and situation in The
Faultless Painter.
But walking around in Renaissance
shoes and a vest will be completely worthwhile, because “It feels great to be
able to say to yourself, ‘Jeremiah, you are in an Off-Off-Broadway show.’”
The Faultless Painter will be performed March 1st at 9 PM at The
Hudson Guild Theater, as part of Series B of the Strawberry One-Act Festival, 441 West 26th Street, NYC (between 9th and 10th Avenue)Tickets are available at 1-646-623-3488
or http://www.therianttheatre.com/item.php?id=156
Saturday, February 2, 2013
The Evolution of a Filmmaker: An Interview with Sam Pollard, a Riant Theatre Pioneer of the Arts Award Recipient (February 16, 2013)
The
Evolution of a Filmmaker: An
Interview with Sam Pollard
By Jane Rubinsky
Film and television editor and
documentary producer/director Sam Pollard receives the Riant Theatre’s 2013
Pioneer of the Arts Award for an extraordinary body of work that spans four
decades. His career encompasses both
feature films and documentaries, working in nearly every capacity within the
industry. He has collaborated with
filmmakers such as St. Clair Bourne and Spike Lee and won numerous awards.
He didn’t originally intend to be a
filmmaker. As a young man growing up in
East Harlem, he set his sights on becoming an electrical engineer before
deciding to study marketing at Baruch College.
Three years in, Pollard wasn’t at all happy. A college counselor steered him into a film
and television workshop at WNET/Channel 13, which had been started in 1968
after Dr. King’s assassination. An
effort to get more people of color behind the camera, the one-year program met
two nights a week, bringing in professionals to teach how to shoot and edit,
write scripts, and record sound.
Pollard, one of the youngest in the class, gravitated toward
editing. “It was the first time I ever
felt like I was creative,” he recalls.
He also realized that he “could make a mistake and put it back together”
without the scrutiny of being on location.
“As soon as I was alone in that editing room,” he says, “I knew I had
found something that was for me.”
The following year, in 1972,
Pollard was hired as an apprentice editor by Victor Kanefsky and worked as his
assistant for the next three years. “By
the time I was 25,” says Pollard, “one of his clients who couldn’t afford him
hired me to cut one of my first films.”
As a youngster, Pollard had loved
old Hollywood movies; once he began studying the craft of film, he says, “I
started to fall in love with Federico Fellini and Kurosawa and Robert Bresson,
foreign filmmakers. And then, as I
focused on editing, I really started to look at films for who the editors were,
and what they did in terms of bringing rhythm and pacing and storytelling
structure to the film through the editing process. Dede Allen, whose films like The Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde, Serpico,
and Dog Day Afternoon I thought were
phenomenally put together, was a big influence on me editorially.”
Pollard’s first project with
Kanefsky was a feature; his second was a documentary, and he was introduced to
a whole new world that he fell in love with.
“What I came away with after working with him for a few years on
documentaries,” says Pollard, “was how important the role of the editor was in
really being a surrogate director, and shaping the story and direction of a
film in the editing process. You really did that in documentaries, where you
didn’t have scripts; you had to really figure out – sometimes by yourself and
sometimes with the director or producer – the arc of a film and how to tell the
story.” Style Wars (1983), a documentary on graffiti culture that he
co-edited with Kanefsky for PBS and which won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in
1984, remains one of his favorite projects to this day.
He has collaborated with Spike Lee
for more than two decades, as editor on films such as Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle
Fever, and Bamboozled as well as
co-producer/editor on documentaries like the Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls (1997) and the Emmy and
Peabody Award-winning When the Levees
Broke (2006). Working with Lee is “a
really interesting kind of dynamic,” he says.
“It’s never been one where there’s a lot of open dialogue between us. He’s a very strong director; we will screen
the footage together and he’ll give me his notes and thoughts about what he
likes and doesn’t like, and I’ll take my own notes, and then I’ll shape the
sequences according to his notes and my notes.
Then I’ll show it to him again, and he’ll give me feedback, and I’ll go
back and change it again, and then show it to him again. When I used to edit films for the late St.
Clair Bourne, Saint and I would sit and philosophize and talk about sequences
and the direction of the film for hours. With Spike, we’d never do that.”
At the helm of his own project last
year, Pollard produced and directed Slavery
By Another Name (2012), shedding light on the little-known system of forced
labor that emerged after the abolition of slavery and which persisted until the
onset of the second World War. The
documentary was broadcast nationally on PBS and was nominated for a Grand Jury
Prize at Sundance. The editor on the film
was Pollard’s own son, Jason. “He’s been
coming into editing rooms ever since he was eight or nine,” says Pollard. “We’d worked together before on some smaller
projects, but this was gonna be a big one for both of us. I used to brow-beat him a little,” he
confesses, “but I don’t anymore. He
works hard and is a very creative editor; our relationship is one of
give-and-take.”
Pollard began teaching at Columbia
University in 1988 and has taught at New York University since 1994. “To tell you the truth, I always liked the
idea of giving back; I think that was one of the things that Victor taught me,”
he says. “It’s important to share what you have with the next generation of
people coming up in the business. I
really love looking at these young people and getting them excited. And the students just keep energizing me and
making me still feel excited about filmmaking.”
He is currently in pre-production
with WQED in Pittsburgh on a documentary for American Masters about the life
and work of playwright August Wilson, to be broadcast sometime in 2014. As filmmaking technology changes nearly every
day, says Pollard, things can be done faster; the look and feel is
different. “Now, we don’t edit with
physical film anymore; we edit with computers.
What people need to remember is, even though the technology has evolved,
the thing that’s really important in making anything creative is what’s in a
human being’s mind – what you think and how you view the world. It’s still what’s inside a human being that
informs how you make your films and gives them that vision.”
* * * * *
The Riant Theatre and the Founder & Artistic Director Van Dirk Fisher, will be honoring Sam Pollard with the PIONEER OF THE ARTS AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN FILM & ENTERTAINMENT at the Screening of the Video Diaries Project on Saturday, February 16, 2013 at the Tribeca Grand Hotel - Cinema, 2 Avenue of Americas, NYC at 3:45pm. For tickets to this event go to www.therianttheatre.com.
Friday, February 1, 2013
The Video Diaries Project: A Series of Short Films, Saturday February 16, 2013 at 3:45PM at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, 2 Avenue of the Americas, NYC
The Video Diaries Project: A Series of Short Films, Saturday February 16, 2013 at 3:45PM at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, 2 Avenue of the Americas, NYC
Short Documentary Films based on the following plays:
Screening of The Video Diaries Project: A Series Of Short Films
About the Artists in the Strawberry One-Act Festival
About the Artists in the Strawberry One-Act Festival
Saturday, February 16, 2013
At the Tribeca Grand Hotel
2 Avenue of the Americas, NYC
2 Blocks South of Canal St.
2 Avenue of the Americas, NYC
2 Blocks South of Canal St.
Screening #1 at 3:45 p.m.
Short Documentary Films based on the following plays:
Short Documentary Films based on the following plays:
- Nobody's Man
- Chip Bolcik - A Writer's Story about the play The Blizzard
- 4 Murders & A Suicide
- Ohio Bites Back
- Kate The Great about the artist in the play Hello, Red
- Dramatic Paws
- Saving Legs
- Behind Three Shots a film by Claude Isbell
Short Documentary Films based on the following plays:
- Robot Rising by Julia Rae Maldonado, about the artists in When Greenland Melted...The Robot Rose
- The G Train
- Perfect
- a tree without blossom by Sima Jafari. About the artists in A Love Story
- Follow the Red Lines to the Gates of Paradise
by Yvette King
- Three's A Crowd a film about the artist in the play Hunger
- Plastic Couch
- Trash Salmon a film about the artists in A Broken Liver and a Cataract
Award for Best Short Film will be
Presented at the Awards Ceremony & Performance
For the Strawberry One-Act Festival
Sunday, March 10, 2013 at 5PM
At the Hudson Guild Theatre
441 West 26th Street, NYC
Between 9th & 10th Avenue
Presented at the Awards Ceremony & Performance
For the Strawberry One-Act Festival
Sunday, March 10, 2013 at 5PM
At the Hudson Guild Theatre
441 West 26th Street, NYC
Between 9th & 10th Avenue
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)