MEET THE ARTISTS | RED

THE CAST

Andrew Grenier (Rothko) has had a theatre career that spans over fifty years as an educator, actor, director, and producer. In the winter of 2018, Andrew appeared in Chris Fisher’s Steel at the Erickson Theatre in Seattle. His most recent appearance at WICA was in February of 2015 when he directed, and played the role of Lyman Wyeth, in Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities. Previously at WICA, Andrew directed the Alan Ayckbourn Tony Award-winning trilogy The Norman Conquests, Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, and Doubt by John Patrick Shanley. Other acting roles include Charlie in Edward Albee’s Seascape and Ronald Brewster-Wright in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular.

Chad Sommerville (Ken) was most recently seen in The 14/48 Projects @ ACT: The World’s Quickest Theatre Festival. Other Seattle credits include The Totally True and Almost Accurate Adventures of Pinocchio (Geppetto) with The 14/48 Projects, As You Like It (Silvius and Charles) with Seattle Shakespeare Company, and Romeo and Juliet (Paris) with ACT Theatre. Chad recently graduated from Cornish College of the Arts where performed in Much Ado About Nothing (Claudius and Conrad) and It Can’t Happen Here (Shad LeDue). His Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts credits include You Can’t Take It With You (Tony Kirby) and Community Speaks! for Patriotism. He is currently acting as Production Manager for The 14/48 Projects.

THE CREATIVE TEAM

Vito Zingarelli (direction) served as Executive Director for WICA when it was first opened in 1997/98 and directed Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy for WICA in 2011. Vito has been program director at Hedgebrook since early 2007. Prior to joining Hedgebrook, Vito taught at NYU-Tisch School of the Arts, where he served as director of theatrical production for three separate but interdependent MFA departments; Graduate Acting, Design for Stage, and Film and Dance. He worked for over 30 years in North America as a Producing Director and Production Manager where he put together seasons and mounted over 150 productions of Classical, Contemporary, and Musical Theatre as well as championing new play development at the following theatres: the Guthrie Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Empty Space Theatre, Alaska Repertory Theatre, as well as North America’s largest resident theatre company, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada.

Dorit Zingarelli (costume design) has worked in various theatrical capacities including set and costume design, stage management, and costume and prop construction. Dorit has worked in professional theatre since age 17 starting at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Canada. Subsequently, she worked at the Manitoba Theatre Center, Magnus Theatre, Charlottetown Theatre, Vancouver East Cultural Center, Yeats Theatre Company London, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the International Solo Theatre Festival in Tokyo. She produced the Perth County Conspiracy prison tours in Canada, served as tour manager for Loreena McKennitt concert tour of Spain and Portugal, and was the production liaison for Plaza of Nations ceremonies at Expo ’86 World’s Fair in Vancouver, BC. She was also logistics stage manager for 100th Anniversary of United Way at the Kingdome. Other WICA credits include love is a place (scenic and costume design) and The Understudy (costume design and choreography).

David Gignac (scenic design), a New York native, has been designing, building, and painting sets since the early 1980's. After arriving on Whidbey in 1991, he began designing and building for Island Theater, Island Art's Council productions, and other groups. David has been involved in the WICA Theatre Series since it's first production, Bell Book and Candle, and is extremely excited to be designing and painting for Red, it’s 100th production. Over the years, he has designed for a number of fringe theaters in Seattle and was nominated for a Gregory Falls Award for Outstanding Scenic Design for When I Come To My Senses I AM Alive. More recently, he designed the 2017 and 2018 seasons for Island Shakespeare Festival while also serving as it’s Technical Director. In November 2019, David was honored to be named WICA's Resident Scenic Designer. Recent design credits include Prelude To A Kiss, It's A Wonderful Life, and contributing designer for SEX.

Patty Mathieu (lighting design) began her work at WICA ten years ago lighting The Understudy. Other WICA lighting designs include Doubt, Other Desert Cities, Becky’s New Car, Frost/Nixon, and November. Patty is the Production Manager at McCaw Hall at Seattle Center, home to Pacific Northwest Ballet and Seattle Opera. In addition to working with the Ballet and Opera, she manages events ranging from Gates Foundation All Staff to Seattle Men’s Chorus, Jim Gaffigan, Michael Bublé, and Dave Matthews. Over the past 30 years, she designed lighting for numerous shows for University of Puget Sound, Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival, Seattle Men’s and Women’s Choruses, Seattle Pacific University, WICA, Alice B Theatre, Seattle Children’s Theatre, The Village Theatre, Saint James Cathedral, and St. Mark’s Cathedral. Patty is a graduate of Whitman College and earned an MFA in Lighting Design and Technical Theatre at the University of Washington.

Jim Scullin (stage management) most recently appeared on the WICA stage as Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. Prior experience at WICA includes performing on stage, building sets, working in the booth and backstage, and acting as a rehearsal stage manager for multiple productions. Some favorite roles were in Our Town, Art, The God of Carnage, and The Laramie Project. An interesting note: Jim was the initial Stage Manager of, and built the set for the first show that WICA produced, Bell, Book and Candle.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: RED | FEB 07-22, 2020

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MEET THE ARTIST | MARK ROTHKO

One of the preeminent artists of his generation, Mark Rothko is closely identified with the New York school, a circle of painters that emerged during the 1940s as a new collective voice in American art. During a career that spanned five decades, he created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting.

Rothko's work is characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; yet, he refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms. He explained: "It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."

By 1949 Rothko had introduced a compositional format that he would continue to develop throughout his career. Composed of several vertically aligned rectangular forms set within a colored field, Rothko's "image" lent itself to a remarkable diversity of appearances.

In these works, large scale, open structure, and thin layers of color combine to convey the impression of a shallow pictorial space. Color, for which Rothko's work is perhaps most celebrated, here attains an unprecedented luminosity.

His classic paintings of the 1950s are characterized by expanding dimensions and an increasingly simplified use of form, brilliant hues, and broad, thin washes of color. In his large, floating rectangles of color, which seem to engulf the spectator, he explored with a rare mastery of nuance the expressive potential of color contrasts and modulations…

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EARLY CAREER: 1903 – 1948

CLASSIC PAINTINGS: 1949–1970

RELATED PROGRAMMING: RED | FEB 07-22, 2020

RELATED PROGRAMMING: ART TALKS: MARK ROTHKO | FEB 19, 2020

SOURCE: National Gallery of Art

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LISTEN | Muybridge: The Man Who Made Pictures Move

Eadweard Muybridge fundamentally changed how we think about photography. The images he produced in the late 19th century -- sequential photographs of men walking, or horses at a gallop, their movements broken down frame by frame -- have become iconic.

Muybridge's freeze-framed images of galloping horses made photography a medium about time and motion; in a series of images displayed in a grid, the animal is captured at split-second intervals, aloft and elastic.

Because the animal's movement was too fast for the human eye to register, there was a huge scientific debate in the 1870s over the question of whether all four hooves of the horse ever left the ground simultaneously. Muybridge's astonishing photographs settled the debate, though some remained skeptical.

Muybridge displayed images like the ones in his galloping horse by projecting them through a brass and wood contraption he invented called a zoopraxiscope. (The word is taken from Greek and means "animal action viewer.")

Eadweard Muybridge, Nature Photographer

Muybridge got his start in the late 1860s by taking pictures of trees and rocks. His exquisitely composed landscapes of the Pacific Northwest's ethereal waterfalls and shadowy mountain ranges inspired Ansel Adams to photograph Yosemite Valley.

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer is a 1970s documentary by filmmaker Thom Andersen that follows Muybridge's journey. The film, narrated by actor Dean Stockwell, relates how Muybridge, who traveled with a wagon outfitted with a darkroom -- he called it his "flying studio" -- and used the name "Helios" when displaying his photographs, "undertook a systemic survey of the wonders and curiosities of Western America."

Muybridge traveled widely, at a time when travel itself was changing dramatically: from horsepower to iron and steam. As trains cut down the time it took for people to move through space, he ventured beyond even the new boundaries, rappelling into treacherous crevasses and hauling his equipment to remote Alaskan villages.

Muybridge was tall and athletic -- Andersen's documentary notes that when his packers refused to follow him, he would carry his equipment himself -- but also willful and strange. In San Francisco, he married a girl half his age. She began an affair with an explorer named Harry Larkyns; when Muybridge discovered the affair, he shot Larkyns dead.

Muybridge was acquitted in court, but after the episode he abandoned his child in an orphanage and ran off to Central America to shoot pictures. His wife became sick and died.

In 1982, Philip Glass premiered an opera about the tragedy called The Photographer. The opera mimicked themes -- including musical repetition and incremental changes that carry great meaning -- running throughout Muybridge's work. He has influenced countless artists, from Degas to Sol Lewitt. The bands U2 and the Crystal Method have based music videos on Muybridge's work. Even contemporary filmmakers using the latest technologies still crib from his textbook; the breaking down of motion in The Matrix comes directly from the animal locomotion project, where one moment in time is depicted from different angles.

His Masterpiece

At the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge began work on a series of photographs that would make up a sort of encyclopedia of motion. According to Andersen's documentary, Muybridge's encyclopedia "encompassed 20,000 positions assumed by men, women and children, clothed and naked, and by birds and animals."

Muybridge borrowed dozens of exotic animals from the Philadelphia Zoo, including elephants, antelopes and zebras. He set up as many as 30 cameras and took over a Philadelphia racetrack. He shot them strolling, cantering and running on the track. He photographed people -- wrestling athletes, legless amputees struggling onto chairs, ordinary folks opening umbrellas. His idea was to break down motion so it could be studied by scientists.

Andersen says that Muybridge bridged the gap between science and art. Andersen's documentary notes that he "made no attempt to spare his models from embarrassment or discomfort. He had them walk on all fours, crawl on their hands and knees."

Even if we can't read Muybridge's Victorian mind, something about his work feels very contemporary. Maybe it's the strong graphic appeal, the contrast between organic animal and grid. Maybe it's because his photos are from a moment, not unlike ours, when conceptions of time are in flux. Suddenly, now you can send snapshots by cell phone in seconds across the world.

There's a common story here, one about human animals making their way through rigid modern structures that restrict and define their flow of movement. In a sped-up world, perhaps the work of the man who stopped time and then put it back in motion makes some kind of sense.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: THE PHOTOGRAPHER | MAR 20-22

SOURCE: NPR

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MEET THE ARTISTS | VILLAGE BY THE SEA STORYTELLING FESTIVAL

Deborah Harris-Branham

Doug Banner

Anne Rutherford

Norm Brecke

Rebecca Hom

Deborah Harris-Branham | Weavin’ and tellin’ tales for more than 30 years in a variety of settings, Debra brings stories to life in an energetic, dramatic, and toe tappin’ style. She specializes in sharing African and African-American folktales filled with tricksters, humor, participation and thought provoking themes.

Doug Banner | Co- founder of the Bellingham Storytellers Guild, Doug Banner has been a leader and promoter in the storytelling community in Northwest Washington for over 20 years. Recognized as a World Folklorist, he has been part of a cultural exchange storytelling team working in Gengcun, China and a national educational reform team in Aruba.

Anne Rutherford | Anne delights audiences nationwide with funny, touching performances that include tales of personal adventure, Pacific Northwest folklore and prize-winning lies. Her singing and mandolin playing add to the fun, along with vivid vocal and physical characterizations such as her Wild West alter-ego, the adventurous Clementine Ryder.

Norm Brecke | Before becoming a full-time storyteller, Norm was an award-winning teacher who told stories in his classroom and taught storytelling skills to students. He’s told stories professionally from Oregon to South Carolina, LA to BC; his extensive repertoire includes traditional tales, personal narratives, historical tales, and stories in song.

Rebecca Hom | Rebecca is a seasoned performance storyteller, has traveled across the US and onto six continents sharing, gathering and creating life stories. Around a campfire, on a couch or in a crowded theater, Rebecca takes listeners from hilarious to heartfelt in a heartbeat.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: VILLAGE BY THE SEA STORYTELLING FESTIVAL | Mar 14-15, 2020

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BIOGRAPHY | PHILIP GLASS

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas – Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously.

He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School, and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson, and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty five operas, large and small; twelve symphonies; three piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: THE PHOTOGRAPHER | MAR 20-22, 2020

SOURCE: PhilipGlass.com

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