NEW YORK CITY: Rattlestick Theater has announced its fourth annual Global Forms Theater Festival (GFTF). The festival will be held June 1-11 with a theme of Green Theatre.
Projects at this year’s festival include The Discarded (Working Title) by Tianding He, Yuexing Sun, Qingan Zhang, and Xiaoyue Zhang of China; Steppe by Mariia Makutonina of Ukraine; and The Sacrifice of Cassamba Becker by Joа̃o Victor Toledo of Brazil.
The Discarded (Working Title) is an experimental work-in-progress that combines live theatre, object performance, and multimedia installations to shed light on the impacts of waste and migration. Inspired by Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, the piece explores the intertwined journeys of a piece of garbage used by a New Yorker and sold to an Asian developing country and an Asian immigrant working as a garbage collector in New York.
Steppe is a one-act play that tells an intergenerational story of an unexpected friendship against the backdrop of an ecological disaster. The play is inspired by the war in Ukraine’s effects on the Chalk Flora Nature Reserve and follows Dmytro, a 50-year-old environmentalist who was taking care of a reserve until the war forced him to leave Ukraine, and Daryna, an economics student.
The Sacrifice of Cassamba Becker is a monologue written and performed by Toledo that follows a grande dame of a Brazilian theatre that made a dump on a beach her home. The piece rethinks the present moment to transform the garbage of the world into housing and sacrifice into freedom.
This year’s festival, which is presented in partnership with New York Theatre Salon, will be the first to have 100 percent immigrant artist employment. The exploration of sustainable theatre practices is supported by the Ford Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts, and is managed by lead producer Yue Liu. All events will be open to the public.
The Global Forms Theater Festival is dedicated to showcasing the work of international and immigrant theatre artists living in the United States and abroad. GFTF hosts workshop presentations, panel discussions, and knowledge-sharing sessions, and has collaborated with 300 artists from over 40 countries since its founding in 2020.
Founded in 1994, Rattlestick Theater is an off-Broadway theatre in New York’s West Village. The theatre seeks to produce provocative works that are essential, urgent, and necessary to artists and audiences in NYC and the global community. Rattlestick’s current budget is approximately $1.5 million.
