Residency #142
JUNE 27 - JULY 17
(Application Deadline: March 25, 2011)
HEATHER WOODBURY, playwriting
 Her latest serial saga AS THE GLOBE WARMS is both an online and live theatre work and ready to tour near you.
A native of Northern California, she moved to NYC at the age of seventeen and became involved in the East Village performance art scene. There, she originated sixteen solo pieces, two plays and wrote the screenplay for the indie film HOLLOW VENUS:DIARY OF A G0-GO DANCER. Throughout these years she lived in several NYC neighborhoods, founded the alternative performance space CAFÉ BUSTELO, was employed as a go-go dancer, barmaid and cater waiter and criss-crossed the country several times by car, train, bus, and thumb. All of this served to inspire the trans-American "performance novel," "WHAT EVER:An American Odyssey".
This started out as as an underground performance serial in the back of an East Village bar (THE FORT) and went on to tour internationally as a critically acclaimed epic (8 part) solo play -from Chicago's Steppenwolf to London's Royal Festival Hall. The NY TIMES describes it as having "the scale of a Dickens serial and the melodramatic punch of the "Young and the Restless "It is, along with Lily Tomlin's 'Search for Intelligent Signs of Life' and Danny Hoch's 'Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop', one of the masterworks of the solo form."
As a radio-play, WHAT EVER was hosted by Ira Glass, featured on PRI's "This American Life", and broadcast on NPR affiliates in Chicago, Seattle, Albuquerque and Boston . It is now published as a novel by Faber/Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
In 2001, Heather received an NEA/TCG playwright's fellowship and was awarded a grant from Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays to develop her next big project TALE OF 2CITIES: AN AMERICAN JOYRIDE on MULTIPLE TRACKS in residence at the Public Theater in NYC. There she generated material through a series of one-time-only performances to form a multi-actor play and new "living novel". This piece, which went on to win a 2007 OBIE and is now published as a book by Semiotexte, is a six-part, bi-coastal, multi-generational saga inspired by the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers' move to LA.
Heather is artistic director of Fomenting ARTS Unlimited, Inc. She currently resides in Los Angeles and teaches, curates and performs throughout the U.S.A. in Europe and Australia.
Residency Statement
In order for the originator of solo work to successfully captivate and hold an audience, rigorous demands must be met but also unique opportunities for invention are offered. During the residency we will explore how solo performance methods - of conjuring character, inventing natural speech and locating the stories inspired by place, passion and imagery - can be applied to generating vital writing and to infusing performance with live-wire authenticity.
For playwrights, solo show originators, actors, and writers of fiction, memoir and drama, this is writing on the tongue and stage, as an addition to, and rejuvenation, of writing on the page.
Writers will generate and refine material, performers will perform a 10-minute piece for solo performance
Application Materials
All materials must be received at jkeller@atlanticcenterforthearts.org by Wednesday, May 25 at 3 PM.
- Resume (and website if you have one)
- A brief bio
- A short paragraph on why you are drawn to this residency, and what potential you see in it for yourself
- Ten pages total from one or two manuscripts and a few sentences providing context for the sample.
- A short paragraph on the most fun you’ve ever had as an artist.
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