Friday, January 28, 2011

The Great Feast of March Fourth

Join We Players as we MARCH FORTH
into a new decade of site-specific performance adventures!

We Players annual Dinner Theater Fundraiser
Friday, March 4th, 2011

Let us tantalize your taste buds with five courses of delicious local fare, while you enjoy performance sequences, live jazz, an open bar, a silent auction, and the unveiling of exciting performance plans for 2011 and beyond.

Garden opens at 6:45; doors open at 7; dinner at 7:30.

TO MAKE A RESERVATION, CLICK HERE!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Join WE on Alcatraz this Saturday 1/29/11

Upcoming Events

The National Park Service and
We Players present:

The National Park Service and We Players are beginning the third year and final phase of our monumental collaboration on Alcatraz Island. This groundbreaking partnership has utilized site-specific performing arts programming to provoke critical thought and stimulate conversation on the themes of incarceration, isolation, justice and redemption. In addition to engaging the visiting public through site-specific rehearsals and performances, We Players and the National Park Service are creating lasting and transferable tools that use performance elements to augment Alcatraz interpretive themes as presented by the Rangers.

On Saturday, January 29th, We Players and the National Park Service will present live music, a presentation titled “ Proliferation” that includes screenings, and talks by the artist, Paul Rucker, in a gallery space inside the Alcatraz Cell House. Please join us to continue this conversation, inspired by the history and present life of Alcatraz.

PROLIFERATION

In May of 2009, Paul was honored to be part of a Prison Issues residency at the Blue Mountain Center, a working community of writers, artists, activists and musicians in the heart of the Adirondacks. Amazing artists and activists from around the world provided over two weeks of inspiration, knowledge, and camaraderie.

While doing individual research, he happened upon some maps created by GIS and CAD consultant Rose Heyer that showed the growth of the US Prison system. With that information, he was inspired to create Proliferation, an animated mapping of the US Prison system set to original music.

If you would like to receive a free copy of the Proliferation DVD, email your name and address to paulrucker@gmail.com. You may also view Proliferation on YouTube and copies will be available on Alcatraz.

Rucker is an interdisciplinary artist (cellist-bassist-composer-visual artist-creator of interactive sound/video installations) who has released two critically acclaimed CDs of his compositions. He composes new music presented in a way that allows the viewer-listener the opportunity to interact with the work (participants can trigger sounds with the wave of a hand, touch of a finger, or press of a button). Ruckers’ s pieces have been on display at high-profile galleries and conventions, and he has received numerous grants and has been awarded residencies to several prestigious arts centers worldwide. As a musician and director, Rucker plays in various situations from solo cellist to leading his large ensemble of twenty-two musicians.

Visit www.paulrucker.com for more information.

Saturday, January 29, 2011 @ 1pm
Guided walk with We Players and Artists talk with Paul Rucker

Meet at 1pm at Pier 33, Alcatraz Landing
Ferry departs at 1:20pm
Return to Pier 33 at 4:40pm

Reservations required; no charge; ferry passage included with reservation. For more information, please visit

We Players’.


http://www.alcatrazcruises.com/website/pprog-upcoming-events.aspx

Sunday, January 16, 2011

slideshows of Hamlet on Alcatraz

Enjoy photos!

We Players' production of:

Hamlet on Alcatraz
(October and November, 2010)



love, WE



Wednesday, January 12, 2011

collaboration with artists through SF Sheriff's Department


Below is summary text explaining the puppets and banners that Anna Martine Whitehead created with artists on probation, parole, or supervision through the San Francisco Sheriff's department, in collaboration with We Players' production of Hamlet.  Their work is presently on display in We Players' gallery in the cell house on Alcatraz.
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While We Players rehearsed Hamlet lines beat by beat over the demanding Alcatraz terrain, new and returning artists at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department spent Summer 2010 building giant puppets and banners that address Hamlet’s themes - including isolation, redemption, and loss. Over the course of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet finds himself more and more alone within a court of panderers, backstabbers, adulterers, andmurderers. He struggles with the moral question of how to avenge his father’s death, increasingly aware of the cycle of violence and limitations of reason. He becomes morose, and in the process loses not only his father, but his mother, a sense of family,  his love, and ultimately his own life.

These same themes of loss, isolation, and redemption are felt keenly by the 260,000 people incarcerated in California jails and prisons, and the over 446,000 California residents on probation, parole, or supervision. Setting the trend for the nation, incarceration has become an epidemic in California.

The artists who designed the work presented in the gallery are all on probation, parole, or supervision and a few have served time at San Quentin State Prison, directly across the Bay. They have experienced the loss of friends, family, childhood, social standing or a sense of self to violence, drugs, AIDS, and incarceration.

For those who repeatedly showed up to make artwork, several times a week for over twelve weeks, the manipulation of raw material into identifiable images of salvation and remembrance (ghosts, fists raised in the air, and crosses, among other things) was a critical step in their ongoing process of redemption and self-forgiveness. Their lived experience of these themes, as well as their commitment to the art of personal expression, was an important part of We Players’ generative process.