Join us Saturday, February 18 from 11am-1pm ET for a free online experience led by C1 Resident Playwright Kirsten Greenridge with special guest artists Annalise Guidry and Gayané Kaligian.
This season, our Open Circuit programs — Field Work and Open Write — are focusing on Kickstarting Creativity. It's been a long few years, and for so many people it remains challenging to carve out time for imagination, creativity, and play. Join us for free, monthly, online sessions that offer space for reset and reconnection.
The first Open Write of 2023 features guest artists from the C1 Season 24 PlayLab Circuit Volt Lab! Playwrights Annalise Guidry and Gayané Kaligian will be in conversation with C1's Resident Playwright Kirsten Greenidge. Carve out some dedicated space to write while sharing in virtual community with other writers and partaking in exercises in writing using divination and meditative practices.
RSVP required; this is a Pay-What-You-Want experience with $0 minimum. All proceeds support C1's mission to build community at the intersection of art and social change.
>> About the Guests
Kirsten Greenidge (she/her)
Kirsten Greenidge’s work presents African American experiences on stage by examining the nexus of race, class, and gender. Kirsten is currently a Playwright in Residence at Company One Theatre in Boston Massachusetts, where she helps run Company One’s playwriting program, PlayLab. She is the author of Baltimore, a commission from the Big Ten Consortium at the University of Iowa, which toured to the National Black Theatre Conference; Bud Not Buddy, an adaptation of the children’s novel by Christopher Paul Curtis, with music by Terence Blanchard, which will be produced this winter at Metro Stage Company in St. Louis; The Luck of the Irish (Huntington Theatre Company; LTC3); and Milk Like Sugar (La Jolla Playhouse; Women’s Theatre Project; Playwright’s Horizons), which was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award and received an Independent Reviewers of New England Award, and San Diego Critics Award, and an OBIE Award. She is a 2016 winner of the Roe Green Award for new plays from Cleveland Playhouse for Little Row Boat; Or, Conjecture, a play about Sally Hemings, James Hemings, and Thomas Jefferson, commissioned by Yale Rep. Her play As Far As a Century's Reach toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August, after being part of the Royal Exchange’s B!RTH Project. She is a proud author of Audacity, part of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s EVERY 28 HOUR PLAYS, and she’s enjoyed development experiences at Family Residency at the Space at Ryder Farm, the Huntington’s Summer Play Festival, Cleveland Playhouse (as the 2016 Roe Green New Play Award recipient), The Goodman, Denver Center Theatre’s New Play Summit, Sundance, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Sundance at Ucross, and the O’Neill. Kirsten is currently working on commissions from Company One, La Jolla Playhouse, OSF’s American Revolutions Project, The Goodman, and Playwrights Horizons. She is an alum of New Dramatists, and has proudly graced the Kilroys list of New Plays by women and women identified Playwrights several years running. Her play Familiar`, a winner of the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival New Play Award, was presented by Harvard’s A.R.T. Institute this winter. She is an alum of Wesleyan University, and the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. She oversees the Playwriting Program at the School of Theatre at Boston University.
Annalise Guidry (they/them)
Annalise Guidry is a Black and Puerto Rican non-binary theatre artist from New Orleans, with a background anthropology. Inspired by indigenous ways of “knowing-together” and feminist notions of “communion,” Annalise emphasizes collaboration and union in all their work processes to combat systems of domination through art. Annalise’s work centers the storyteller to amplify diverse voices and stories that are not frequently heard or valued. Cultivated during their time at Marlboro College (VT) and Emerson College in Boston, Annalise works as a translator to make life (our stories, superstitions, experiences) and art (playwriting, directing, performance) commune with each other. They have directed or co-directed six plays, three of which were original works exploring the intersection of theatre, anthropology, and social change, including: 3 Women, 3 Myths (Edinburgh Fringe Festival); and Just a Thing (2021). Annalise is a teaching artist with Hyde Square Task Force, amplifying the power, creativity, and voices of Afro-Latine youth by fostering an ensemble to teach, direct, and co-produce original performances as gifts to the Latin Quarter in Boston.
Gayané Kaligian (she/her)
Gayané Kaligian is an actor, writer, and fight director from Boston by way of Armenia. After four years as a freelance entertainment news journalist, she turned to essays and playwriting as a way to link activism with the arts. Plays include The Freakshow Tunes In At Ten PM, Our Bloody Favorites, and A Table at Rocco’s, among others. Her work has been featured in Off the Cuff fashion & arts magazine, The Armenian Weekly, and the Armenian Student Association’s Trchnakir. Recent performing credits include The Salamander and the Impediment (BUCFA New Works Initiative); Richard II, Twelfth Night, and The Taming of the Shrew (BU Shakespeare Society), as well as the Student Production Award-winning music video “Ivory.”
>> About C1's Open Circuit Programs
C1's Open Circuit Programs are free, alternating monthly Saturday morning meetings open to all theatremakers dedicated to new work. Virtual Open Write months feature guest writers who lead attendees through exercises and writing time. Field Work months feature a professional development topic relevant to building a career as a civic-minded theatre artist, with guest artists providing a teach-in on that theme, and time for attendees work on their own materials.