Behind the Scenes

Playwright, performer and composer Alva Rogers is deeply versed in the uses of enchantment, drawing inspiration for her plays from the Surrealist painters and magic realist writers. Dramaturg Christine Sumption calls Rogers “a visionary playwright whose rich poetic language and kaleidoscopic theatrical aesthetic challenges audiences to reexamine their understanding of what theatre can be and do.” ​ Rogers, a Lucas Literary Arts Fellow, has been in residence at the Lucas Artists Programs twice in the last year, and will return in August. In the brilliant morning light on the patio of her LAP studio, Rogers’ days begin with the rich…

RADIOEE.net. Aguas Atlas . Miami, Florida. 2017 Donna Conwell: What is RADIOEE.net? RadioEE: RADIOEE.net (Radio Espacio Estación) is an online nomadic multilingual radio station. We travel the world hosting 24-hour marathon broadcast events on mobility and movement. Often transmitting while on the move, our broadcasts open a channel for local conversation, music, storytelling, and sonic experiments, which are then shared with a network of over 5000 global listeners. Each broadcast generates an audio portrait of a place in time. RADIOEE.net. Aguas Atlas . Miami, Florida. 2017 DC: RADIOEE.net's broadcasts always focus on some aspect of mobility. For example, in April…

By Margarita Kompelmakher, PhD ​ Photo: Triad Stage Over the past year, the Lucas Artists Residency Program welcomed an inaugural group of playwriting Fellows. It has been my pleasure to spend time with this talented and diverse group of artists and observe how the discipline of theater makes a home for itself at Montalvo. The following is Part 1 in a series of audio-blog portraits that discuss their playwriting projects and topical questions about the theater—past and present, here and elsewhere. ​I am struck by a number: 15. The number corresponds to the years that Preston Lane has served as…

By Margarita Kompelmakher, PhD ​ Photo (left, right): Simón Hanukai, DATAPRINT (Kaimera Productions) In this second installment of a series of interviews with Lucas Artists Fellows working in performance, I chat with Co-Artistic Director of Kaimera Productions Simón Adinia Hanukai about his new installation project, DATAPRINT , which will premiere this weekend at the Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose, California. Working with a group of collaborators across the disciplines of data science, video game writing and data ethics, Simón is taking some major risks with a project that sits on the cutting edge of new media installation work. Listen…

By Margarita Kompelmakher, PhD ​​ Photo (left, right): Jennifer Johns. LIV: A Ritual for Humanity. 2018 . ( 2018 Art on the Grounds: We the People ) ​Photo: David Gonzalez In my third installment of interviews of artists at the Lucas Artists Programs working in performance, I interview singer-songwriter-performer Jennifer Johns before the premiere of her new performance work LIV: A Ritual For Humanity at the Art on the Grounds: We the People event in July 2018. One month later, we meet again to discuss how it went. Listen along in this before-and-after audio-blog journey as we discuss Johns’ courageous…

By Zeyn Joukhadar , Lucas Artists Literary Arts Fellow   On the evening of September 29, 2018, Lucas Artists Visual Arts Fellow Matteo Rubbi and I painted a projection of the night sky on Montalvo's Nissan Altima using professional grade glow-in-the-dark paint. We projected a live view of the night sky onto the car using the Stellarium program and the LAP’s video projector, and then painted each star and planet by hand. We first painted the passenger side of the car (including hubcaps and tire sidewalls), then turned the car around and painted the driver’s side. Finally, we painted the…

Creation is unpredictable. It’s a non-linear process. Filmmakers, poets, visual artists often set out on a new body of work without knowing quite what’s coming. What is it like to navigate that uncertainty? At the Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo, artists of all disciplines work in their studios on the quiet hillside. They tell stories of creations that snuck up on them, a film that took an unexpected right turn, poems that wanted to be maps, characters that changed their minds, paths that refused to be taken. On February 25, Joie Lee , Simon Pettet and Zeinab Alhashemi engaged in…

Photo: Isaiah Plaza Listening to poets talking among themselves is a rare pleasure. On their last day at the LAP, after a rainy winter, poets Julian Talamantez Brolaski and Ariana Reines sit down and consider the question: What can poets do? Ariana takes a deep breath and begins. " This just came to me yesterday, so I still have to try it out... " What ensues is a remarkable moment of a poet working something out in conversation with another. Listen to an excerpt of the conversation here . ​You have to be at the very edge of what can…