Naked Stages, was an intensive performance art mentorship program that gave artists the space to dig deeply into their creative process. Founded and developed by Eleanor Savage, Naked Stages was directed by Obie Award winning artistLaurie Carlos with administrative support by local artist Molly Van Avery. Naked Stages was designed to give artists a supportive environment for building their performance and production skills while creating an original performance art piece. The nine-month program culminated with a series of public performances, allowing artists the opportunity to debut their work and truly communicate their ideas to an audience.
Beginning in 2009, Naked Stages has found a new foster home at Pillsbury House Theatre (PHT). PHT's mission is to create challenging theatre to inspire choice, change and connection. We are pleased to develop this partnership and feel as though PHT is the perfect organization to support emerging performance artists through this nine-month creation process.
What is Performance Art?
Good question! No one agrees on an exact definition. Performance art is not simply the addition of video as an element into a traditional form such as theater or dance. Below is a lively summary adapted from the essay “Fluid Landscapes,” by Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine.
Performance art is not a singular form of art, but an umbrella term for work that pushes the boundaries of a diversity of disciplines. Whether challenging the orthodoxies of visual art, exploring the limits of theatricality, appropriating the idioms of mass culture, pushing the boundaries of choreographic conventions, or exploring the performativity of cyberspace, performance art practices converge all kinds of mediums in a provocative discourse. Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definition, asking questions, and activating audiences, performance art is a research engine where the limits of art and ideas are tested and new possibilities imagined.
2006
How does someone raised conservative evangelical fundamentalist Christian grow up to be a queer liberal vagabond artist? Has digital communication eroded genuineness and intimacy in human relationships? With media reinforced commercialization of the female body, how do we know true beauty? Beyond denial and shame, how can white people confront white supremacy? This series invited you to seek answers to these questions and more at two double bills of new work by untried but true artists.
PERFORMANCES
Autobiographia: everything that is by Kim Thompson
For Your Eyes Only by Elliot David Lynch
Dirty the Bones: On Being White and Other Lies by Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe
Mirror, Mirror
by Katie Herron
2007
PERFORMANCES
5:1 Meaning of Freedom; 6:2 use of Sharpening by Katie Ka Vang
Premium White Morsels by Mad King Thomas
Sugar, Sex, Sin & Spirit: One Woman's Journey by Crystalline Ruby Muse
The Survival Pages by Malia Burkhart
2008
Our 2008 Naked Stages series drew on four artists’ personal journeys of finding, nurturing, and celebrating their authenticity. Through the use of projected images, recorded music, scripted and improvisational text, the four performances explored the kaleidoscope of experiences that make up our lives. Naked Stages invites audiences to explore the spaces where life and art are not separate, where the work of an artist is to break themselves open and create bold new performances from the inside out.
PERFORMANCES
This Here Now by Byrd Shuler
Layer(s)
by Beverly Cottman
The Child's House by May Lee-Yang
Too Real 2B Free
by Juma B. Essie
Naked Stages was made possible with the support from the Jerome Foundation