FALL 2020 AUDITIONS

Beyond The Wound Is A Portal is an invocation and live performance that utilizes video and 3D-digital design to create multi-dimensional portals into worlds that circle away and back again around this prompt: “Dream Beyond the Wounds” (Brown). In conversation with the landscapes of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, we will think of the ‘Wound’ and the ‘Dream’ as physical and psychic locations to explore, weaving original material inspired by images, letters, memories, and visions of our past, present, and future selves that both honor our wounds and dare to look beyond them. We will create original music & song, choreography that’s both for our physical bodies and our digital avatars, and invest in a social, interactive ritual that will guide the audience through these uncharted portals.

Those interested in innovating, engaging with a live theater process for digital space, and exercising their artistic voice and power through playwriting, devising, and collaboration are highly encouraged to audition. We are looking for performers who are collaborators first and foremost; who are drawn to creating new works of theater and are committed to a creative process that will integrate live performance with digital realms. We are particularly interested in folks who consider themselves dreamers, innovators, resisters, healers, guides, and disruptors. We invite those who love to sing, move, perform, and create, and find joy and pleasure in sharing themselves and their artistic practice with and for a community.

 Stanford TAPS seeks to build a diverse cast for this production and encourages members of any race, gender identity, and ability to audition. If any accessibility accommodations are needed please email tapsinformation@stanford.edu for assistance.

HARUNA LEE (TAPS MOHR VISITING ARTIST 20-21) is a Taiwanese-Japanese-American theater maker whose artistic process is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. Their plays are often portals into personal and collective stories navigating transcultural experiences and memories, as well as conflicts that arise when grappling with the simultaneity, contradictions and pluralities of those lived experiences. Through different artistic and teaching modalities, they promote arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through process-based collaborations that directly challenge coloniality and legacies of power. Between 2010-2019, Lee helmed the work of their company harunalee, an ensemble of theater makers and designers who created experimental plays and performances written and directed by Lee. With an eye for handmade and craft objects, they often created epic visual landscapes and immersive environments together. Lee’s standalone play Suicide Forest (Bushwick Starr & Ma-Yi Theater Company) was published by 53rd State Press and hailed by the New York Times as “Vivid, haunted, heart-stingingly tender and explicitly personal…A wild ride of a production” (NYT Critic’s Pick) and appeared on New York Magazine/Vulture’s top 10 shows of 2019. Other plays include plural (love) (New Georges, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab), and Memory Retrograde (The Public’s Under the Radar Festival Incoming! Series, Ars Nova Makers Lab, Brooklyn Arts Exchange). Lee is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, A Map Fund grant, Lotos Foundation Prize for Directing, a New Dramatists Van Lier Fellowship, and has received support from the Mental Insight Foundation, FCA, NYSCA, and the NEA. As a performer, they’ve worked with Aya Ogawa, Minor Theater, The Drunkard’s Wife, Taylor Mac, Mac Wellman, Rachel Chavkin, César Alvarez, Kate Benson & Lee Sunday Evans, and Anohni- among many others. They were a member of the 2019 artEquity cohort, a national facilitation training for artists and activists. Lee has taught playwriting and performance at the Experimental Theater Wing and Playwrights Horizons at NYU, PACE, CUNY, and Abrons Arts Center. They received their MFA from Brooklyn College for Playwriting, and a BFA from NYU Tisch Experimental Theater Wing. harunalee.com

STEP #1 | HOW TO AUDITION

Auditions for Beyond The Wound Is A Portal will be held via video submissions. Video submissions and a completed audition form are due by the NEW DEADLINE, WED JULY 1 at 10PM PT.

Videos can be submitted by sending a Google Drive link to tapsaudition@gmail.com. Please make sure that your video link is “viewable by anyone with the link” to ensure it can be viewed by the director, choreographer, and music director. Because your video should contain accompaniment you CANNOT submit via YouTube, Vimeo, or other 3rd party video hosting sites, as videos can be flagged for copyright and deleted/muted before the Artistic Staff has a chance to view/download.

Videos should contain the four parts described in the “WHAT TO PREPARE” section.

STEP #2 | WHAT TO PREPARE

The video should contain 4 components:

| SLATE COMPONENT |

In the video, please introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, class year, and a recurring dream you have.

| ACTING COMPONENT |

Please prepare a contemporary monologue of your choice and/or any piece of text (poem, literature, etc.) that you feel emotionally connected to. You must be off book and memorized. Keep it short, and have fun/feel free to experiment.

| SONG COMPONENT |

• Please share the titles of your two song selections.
• Sing selections from two contrasting songs (ie. one uptempo, one slower) of up to one-minute each. There is no requirement that either of your selections be from a musical theater show. 
• One song should be sung a cappella, and the other with accompaniment.
• Accompaniment may be live or pre-recorded (if at all possible, consisting of piano or guitar only — YouTube or similar may be a good source). Please do what you can to ensure a balance of your voice and the accompaniment on the recording, and please feel free to contact Music Director Sheela Ramesh at sheelarameshmusic@gmail.com if you cannot find workable accompaniment.
• If you play an instrument, you may sing to your own accompaniment. If you play an instrument, we’d love to hear a short sample, up to 1 minute. This can be a preexisting song, but if you are comfortable improvising, we’d love to see that!
• Please make sure the video contains adequate lighting and includes your full body if possible (or at least from the waist up), rather than a close up of your face. 

 | DANCE & MOVEMENT COMPONENT |

Inspired by the theme of self-expression, choose a song, set up your camera so that it can capture your whole body in motion, and dance for 45-seconds to one-minute. Your dance can be set, improvised, or a combination of both. How does your body move when you are expressing yourself? What movements and styles or dance training express who you are? Include, if possible, levels (jumps, movement on the floor) and a range of energy making sure you share your most expressive moves or movement qualities. There is no wrong way to do this assignment, we just want to see you moving like you!

STEP #3 | CALLBACKS

For callbacks you will receive other instructions. Callbacks will be held digitally over Zoom at a TBD date.