Shotgun Players | Break it Down

Maintained and
hosted by
Oak City
Graphics

Shotgun Theatre Lab presents
CRY DON’T CRY

opened Tuesday, November 8, and ran
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays through November 17th

The muertos and the mystics knew it; the Buddhists and the Babalaos knew it; even your grandmother knows something we've forgotten: you can't laugh without crying, you can't live without dying. In Cry Don't Cry, multi-disciplinary performing arts ensemble Balé Techlorico and director Christine Young put on nightshade-colored glasses to look at the world in a whole new way.

Instead of looking to the experts and the books, the collaborative team that comprises this latest Shotgun Theatre Lab Project turned to ancestors and ancestry, to culture and tradition, to look not so much for answers, but reassurance that we will make it through dark times. Humans have done it for centuries, well before Gutenberg published the Tibetan Book of the Dead or your therapist explained the Bhagavad Gita.

Cry Don't Cry re-examines and re-interprets traditions, songs, rituals and stories in an effort to peel away the lead paint of our mitigated daze to reveal a world more vibrant, colorful, noisy, full of joy and sorrow than we thought we could handle. So hold on for the ride, and trust that you don't need experts to tell you when to stomp your feet, shout for joy and cry in grief.

Balé Techlorico, a multi-disciplinary ensemble that blends traditional and folkloric performance forms with urban sensibilities, has performed at the SF Fringe Festival, Intersection for the Arts, the OMI International Festival and Punch Gallery. Click here to visit the Balé Techlorico website.

Balé Techlorico is the heart-child of Greg Beuthin, a playwright, percussionist and performer. His work has been seen at the NYC Hip Hop Theatre Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Greg has performed as an Afro-Caribbean percussionist for over a decade, and has recently combined his skills to perform in theatrical works such as the 2004 Hybrid Project at Intersection for the Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; The Old Man and the Sea with Theatre of Yugen; and in CultureWorks' IRS at Brava Theatre.

Christine Young is a director and dramaturg, whose passion is developing new work for the stage. Recent projects include: Executive Order 9066 with Lunatique Fantastique (for whom she is also resident dramaturg), a tale about the internment of Japanese Americans told through object-puppetry, Smoke x 7, a new opera composed by Joshua Brody and co-authored by Erik Ehn and members of the Tenderloin Opera Company, and the world premiere of Two Birds & A Stone, by Amy Wheeler at the Capitol Hill Arts Center in Seattle.

The Shotgun Theatre Lab is a program dedicated to supporting collaborative ventures between local artists to create new work. In the spirit of a "lab", emerging artists are mentored by Shotgun Company Members and supported administratively as they experiment with theatrical form and explore new avenues of storytelling. The lab projects culminate in six short performances with talkbacks following each show.