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SHOTGUN THEATRE LAB PRESENTS

The Faith Project

Faith and religion are touchy subjects. With today’s headlines screaming of “Religious Extremists” from other countries who want to take our “freedoms” away and with the recent uproar over gay marriage and The Passion of the Christ, what are the boundaries of faith that exist in our own backyard? Where does religion stand in the midst of these struggles? How much is faith and religion a part of our daily lives? In difficult times, what – or whom – do Americans turn to? The world-premiere of The Faith Project, a multi-disciplinary theatre piece, investigates the place and context of religion and faith in America. Conceived and directed by Susannah Martin, choreographed by Krista DeNio, and created by an ensemble of dancers, singers, and performers, The Faith Project will open on Tuesday, August 31 and run Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8pm until September 15 at The Ashby Stage.

Theatre and religion are frequently linked. Countless are the stories we retell and revisit in our faiths and in our theatres. Using dance, music, text, and ceremony, The Faith Project embarks on a search for answers from an elusive God and a conflicted country.

Devised by a multi-disciplinary ensemble, The Faith Project draws on interviews, automatic writing exercises, and research into various faiths and faith practices. Personal stories, recollections of ceremonies, and audio interviews with priests, monks, scholars, and the average person on the street, combine to create a tapestry of American belief systems.

Director Susannah Martin is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is an award-winning director and the Joint Artistic Director of Paducah Mining Co., a San Francisco-based theatre ensemble that has produced acclaimed work by established playwrights and devised original pieces on complex material such as domestic terrorism, spousal abuse, and poverty in America. Ms. Martin has been honored with two Dean Goodman Choice Awards for directing in 1999 and 2002.

Most recently she performed in Paducah’s original piece, This World Is Not My Home, at the Dell’Arte Edge Fest, the San Francisco Fringe Festival, and at Venue 9 and directed a workshop production of Carol S. Lashof’s newest play, The Melting Pot, at Saint Mary’s College, and All’s Well That Ends Well for the California Shakespeare Theater’s Summer Lab.

Choreographer Krista DeNio creates, performs, and directs post-modern movement theater and has worked in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1997. Beside her own dance and theater work, she has worked with violent dwarf, Jo Kreiter and Flyaway Productions, Kim Epifano and Epiphany Productions, British dance-theater director, Angus Balbernie and 1000GreyBirds, Gabriel Todd and FreakSoulTribe, Rachael Lincoln, and others. Krista has received grants and support from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Theatre Bay Area, 848 Community Space, and the AIRspace residency @ Jon Sims Center for Performance. In 2002, she co-founded the Experimental Performance Institute at the New College of California, where she served as physical theater faculty, and administrative director. Krista is currently studying at the American Conservatory Theater's Summer Training Congress, and will begin her MFA in Contemporary Performance at Naropa University in Fall 2004.

The Shotgun Theatre Lab is a program dedicated to supporting collaborative ventures among 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.

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