For Immediate Release: February 22, 2006
Media Contact: Diane Eacret, Brat Productions, 215.636.0601

At ten years of age, the spunky Brat Productions is in transition. As Founding Artistic Director Madi Distefano plays at the Walnut (Lost in Yonkers), Deborah Block shepherds the company's first production of 2006, an anthology of new work by Philadelphia area artists against slavery in the 21st century. Called Causeway, the two-week series, Wednesdays through Sundays , March 8 through March 19 at the Christ Church Annex, 20 N. American St., brings together an eclectic array of six different artists and ensembles, masters and mistresses of spoken word, monologue and poetry, traditional play craft, commedia dell'arte, and movement-based, site-specific performance as well as installation art. It is the first offering in what is intended to become an annual series of works that share a common theme and a strong social conscience.

Distefano wishes to confer on another the top job at the company she started with a backyard production of Shakespeare and energetically developed into one of the city's more popular and critically acclaimed young theaters. Causeway will be a big part of her legacy. She conceived Causeway as a means for performing artists to make a stand for social justice while doing what they do best. Just as the geographic feature for which the series is named serves as a land bridge across a body of water, it is Distefano's intention that Causeway will connect artists with the world in a politically meaningful way. The inaugural series is being presented in association with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, Free the Slaves, the organization that is leading U.S. work against contemporary slavery. Brat will donate a portion of ticket receipts to Free the Slaves.

Two different bills of three short shows are planned for each week. In addition, Jody Sweitzer is adapting her interactive film and sound installation "Booth," recently seen at Nexus, to the Annex for the series.

The Causeway series opens with Yellow Rage, the rapid-fire, spoken-word duo of Korean- and Laotian-American artists Michelle Myers and Catzie Vilayphonh, in "On the Other Side," three related pieces, one on child slavery; Bethany Formica and Mark O'Maley's performance collective, Reactionaries, in a "visually motivated" piece, "Dying to Leave," inspired by a PBS Wide Angle documentary as well as images by Jacques-Jean ("J. J.") Tiziou, a photographer well known to the many Philadelphia performers whose work his camera has captured, and Tribe of Fools, a troupe of Dell'Arte School of Physical Theater alums who explore the mutual dependency of slave and master in a play they have dubbed "The Slightly Brown Girl."

Week two features academician, anthropologist, playwright and poet Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon whose piece, "Whose Body Am I, Anyway," looks at the political economy of human trafficking in the contested field of body politics when, as she notes, the body in question is that of men, women and children who are treated as commodities. Subcircle, a collaboration of performer Niki Cousineau and designer Jorge Cousineau, is creating a work titled "Selective Sight," about our ability to close our eyes to the horror of others' suffering. Ed Shockley, long a dominant figure in theater locally and nationally, is writing a play, "Sacred Space," that he describes as a "movement-based ritual" drawn from actual case histories.

Tickets are $20, $15 for students, seniors and artists with ID. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Series tickets may be purchased online for $35.

A panel discussion with artists, activists, abolitionists and others will be held mid-series on Sunday, March 12, at 4:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

For tickets and information: 215-627-2577 or www.bratproductions.org.

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