2017-2018 Season,Rude Mechs: CRUSH AUSTIN

Rude Mechs is proud to present its 21st Season of New Works

10 events • 10 districts • 10 months
 
 

Rude Mechs is proud to announce crushAustin, our 21st season of creating and producing new works for the stage. In response to losing our performance home of 18 years, The Off Center, Rude Mechs will be taking the work out to the districts. We will host one event in each of the 10 city council districts:

Here's what we're planning:

July 29 - Replacement Tapes - District 10  Hosted in a private home, 30 people just like you will be audience and actor as they come together to perform this new play by Kirk Lynn.

August 27 - Grageriart - District 4 Lana Lesley & Peter Stopschinski are Grageriart. They will perform 45 minutes of their noise & music excavation of your favorite home shopping catalogue.

September 24 - Stand-Up Comedy Workshop - District 1 Stand-up comedian and company member Hannah Kenah will lead this workshop culminating in a short set by YOU, and a drink on Lana Lesley.

October 21 - The Eye Ball - District 3 It's our annual fundraiser party. It's one of the best things we do.

November - Gin & Tonix - District TBD Thomas Graves and Jennifer Kidwell are making something. They'll do it somewhere. I'm sure it will be cool.

December - Christmas Karaoke - District 9 We'll be looking to you, once again, to do the performing. It's our version of A Christmas Carol, but it's really your version.

January - Salon in a Salon - District TBD We have so many brilliant academics in our community, we want to make them use their heads for art. This year will be based on our experience talking with NESCent scientists at Duke. Art & Science!

February - Off Center On Screen - District TBD The Off Center is gone, but we can still share all the stuff we made there. We'll screen our play from 2003, El Paraiso, and feed you popcorn.

March - Fixing Troilus & Cressida - District TBD It's the third installment in our Fixing Shakespeare series by Kirk Lynn. Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw is set to direct this in a most unusual venue. 

April - Perverse Results - District TBD We're leaving this slot open for inspiration. It might be the 3rd episode of our Perverse Results series. It might be a book launch for Lana's new book. We don't know. Can you live with the uncertainty?

May - Grageriart - District TBD - Paul Soileau will join Peter Stopschinski and Lana Lesley to build a theatrical version of the voice & synth wonder that is Grageriart.



What does crushAustin mean?

Rude Mechs will bring our unique voice and signature style of theatre-making to each of the 10 districts in Austin. We will share everything from fully staged productions, to workshops, to salons. What each district gets from us is wholly contingent on what kind of space we can find to work in that month.

We spent the last 18 years building a home for Austin artists, The Off Center, but a couple of months ago, we were priced out. In the face of this change, we are launching crushAustin, and we are going to do exactly that—CRUSH IT, really really good. The kind of crushing that is so good it is transformative. We want to insert creativity into every nook and cranny of Austin with the very best new independent cultural productions. Not palatable fare, but the kind of shit that curls your toes and takes your breath away and makes you lose your mind. We want to scour its backside for inspiration in sites of actual cultural production and join forces with others in making work that matters. We want a forum for conversations between artists and audiences about the shape of things to come

crushAustin will focus on “the city” as a collective and as a collaborative structure. Austin has raised us, made us who we are, but now it needs some looking after, some care and attention as Austinites try to figure out what kind of city we want to be, what we value, and what our civic life should look like. 

When space is valued in dollars and cents, when the future is reduced to capital accrued, then our most important contribution as an arts organization is to provide alternative ways of engaging in the now. 

And while we are at it, we will reclaim the term “creative” and remind people that it is an adjective, not a noun. It describes risk-taking, not risky investment. It is a dance that makes others laugh, or a confession that draws us together, or a challenging idea that threatens to offend with the boldness of its proposal.Based in Austin, Texas, Rude Mechs has been championing the collaborative creation of new work for twenty years through ambitious ensemble-based experimental theatre productions; the management of our performance lab space, Rude Studios ; our education, outreach and community programs; and a strong creative relationship with our audience and artistic community in Austin and around the country.

 

About Rude Mechs

Rude Mechs is an Austin-based collective theatre company that has created a genre-averse cocktail of over 30 original plays, most of which were produced at our former venue, The Off Center, in Austin, TX, since 1999. And when we are lucky, we get to tour our work nationally and internationally. Our most recent productions include Stop Hitting Yourself, which premiered in Lincoln Center Theatre in New York in January 2014, toured to Dallas and San Francisco 2015, and Now Now Oh Now, a National Theatre Pilot selectee which recently wrapped up its tour to Duke University, Yale University, Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and Miami Light, Fringe arts in Philly, and The Method Gun, which has toured to such far-flung destinations as New York City, Los Angeles, New Haven, Columbus, Boston, Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Brisbane (Australia) and just got back from its tour to Houston in May 2016. In addition to new play-making, we conduct Off Center Teens and we run Rude Studios, a suite of rehearsal, work and meeting rooms offered to Austin artists at the cheapest rates in town.

Since our first season in 1996, we’ve received over a billion awards and nominations (mostly nominations) for artistic excellence, including a 2013 BESSIE nomination for our re-enactment of The Performance Group's Dionysus in 69,  and the prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award for Shawn Sides 2015. Rude Mechs was honored with an induction to The Austin Arts Hall of Fame in 2013, and featured in a nationally aired PBS documentary called Arts in Context: Rude Mechs.
 

“Rude Mechs take a funky, down-home, no-nonsense, Austin, TX approach to theatre and then they kick ass. The Rudes prove that you don’t have to live in NYC to create cutting edge theatre.” – Mark Russell Director of Devised Theater Initiative / Under the Radar Festival, The Public Theater, New York City
 
Rude Mechs, a full company of 28 members, is led today by four of its co-founders, Darlington, Lesley, Lynn and Sides, along with Thomas Graves, who joined as Co-Producing Artistic Director in 2008 after four years of company membership. Two decades into this experiment, we remain a woman-led organization that has outlasted housing bubbles, tech bubbles, the Intel shell, the “sharing economy,” and Uber. We’ve survived as an experimental theatre company based in the State of Texas, in the face of its prohibitive policies on everything from education to reproductive rights, and in spite of its profound lack of public and private funding for the performing arts, and we are crazy proud of that.
 
IN TWENTY YEARS, RUDE MECHS HAS:

  • collaboratively created and produced 27 original full-length plays;
  • toured 49 times around the US and abroad with nine of our productions;
  • produced six plays written/created by other people;
  • co-presented shows by 23 solo-performance artists in our Throws Like a Girl series and Crossing Borders;
  • co-produced 24 shows in our Rude Fusion and Second Stage series;
  • hosted Black Arts Movement Festival for four years and Fusebox Festival for ten years;
  • managed a multi-disciplinary arts and culture venue in the heart of East Austin, providing the most affordable rental rates in town for 17 years;
  • served as the venue for over 120 independent performances per year by local Austin theatre and dance companies and performers, with an annual audience total of roughly 16,000.
Rude Mechs has proved that collaboratively created work can have a singular vision, that a collective organizational structure can be fruitful, and that world-class art can come from outside the traditional American theatre capitals. Our collective structure demands participation, outreach, generosity, inquiry, humor and collaboration. Our endurance as a collective and our deep commitment to collaboratively creating new works from scratch have contributed to a resurgent interest in ensemble-based work and devised work nationwide.
 
 
Rude Mechs is supported in part by The Texas Commission on the Arts and the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.