The LAB at A.P.E.
The LAB is a research and residency program, in collaboration with Serious Play Theatre Ensemble. The LAB offers time, space, mentorship, and collaborative dialogue for emerging local, national, and international multidisciplinary performance makers/designers.
This year's LAB artists and their collaborators come from the Pioneer Valley, Washington, North Carolina, New York City, Vermont, and Brazil.
Lead LAB artists for 2022-23 are:
Isabelle Bushue
Kandra Dunan Herman-Parks
Marcia Gomes
Jackson Pelz
Marina Zurita
If you are interested in supporting the LAB, you can make a donation HERE
The LAB is a research and residency program, in collaboration with Serious Play Theatre Ensemble. The LAB offers time, space, mentorship, and collaborative dialogue for emerging local, national, and international multidisciplinary performance makers/designers.
This year's LAB artists and their collaborators come from the Pioneer Valley, Washington, North Carolina, New York City, Vermont, and Brazil.
Lead LAB artists for 2022-23 are:
Isabelle Bushue
Kandra Dunan Herman-Parks
Marcia Gomes
Jackson Pelz
Marina Zurita
If you are interested in supporting the LAB, you can make a donation HERE
2022-23 LAB Artists + Projects
Isabelle Bushue + Jackson Pelz • Plant
Isabelle Bushue is a Chinese-American actor, dancer and singer-songwriter who recently graduated from UNC School of the Arts. Performance credits include American Players Theater, Children’s Theater of Madison, Western Washington University and Fairhaven Summer Repertory. During her time at UNCSA, Isabelle spearheaded the first Asian American main stage production and began working as the vocalist and co-lyricist in the band Pennies for Breakfast. Isabelle has acted in award winning short films and was nominated twice for her performance in Caprice. As a singer-songwriter, Isabelle has composed music for productions at UNCSA, Seattle and NY and has released two EPs of her music on SoundCloud.
Jackson Pelz comes from a family of musicians in western North Carolina and spent his middle and high school years rehearsing and playing gigs or acting in shows at the Flat Rock Playhouse. He started to play guitar at the age of ten, which he continued even as he attended UNC School of the Arts to study theater. After three years of studying acting, Jackson took time off to pursue interests beyond theater, specifically, songwriting, philosophy, and evolutionary biology. He spent his final year at school working with artists across multiple disciplines, researching sound recording, song structure, musical improvisation, and the relationship between language and music. After graduation Jackson moved to New York, where his current goal is to take in, interact, and make as much art as possible while still paying rent.
Isabelle and Jackson's project Plant is an absurdist music comedy. The story deals with the insomniac, Sylvia, and her spiritually confused foliage, an unnamed houseplant who slowly gains consciousness through an infatuation with its caretaker. Using song structure, “everyday” knowledge, religious belief, and the relationship between language and mathematics, Plant underlines the barriers that cause people saying the same thing to completely misinterpret each other.
Jackson Pelz comes from a family of musicians in western North Carolina and spent his middle and high school years rehearsing and playing gigs or acting in shows at the Flat Rock Playhouse. He started to play guitar at the age of ten, which he continued even as he attended UNC School of the Arts to study theater. After three years of studying acting, Jackson took time off to pursue interests beyond theater, specifically, songwriting, philosophy, and evolutionary biology. He spent his final year at school working with artists across multiple disciplines, researching sound recording, song structure, musical improvisation, and the relationship between language and music. After graduation Jackson moved to New York, where his current goal is to take in, interact, and make as much art as possible while still paying rent.
Isabelle and Jackson's project Plant is an absurdist music comedy. The story deals with the insomniac, Sylvia, and her spiritually confused foliage, an unnamed houseplant who slowly gains consciousness through an infatuation with its caretaker. Using song structure, “everyday” knowledge, religious belief, and the relationship between language and mathematics, Plant underlines the barriers that cause people saying the same thing to completely misinterpret each other.
Kandra Dunan Herman-Parks • All the boxes we live in
photo by Sherrie Nickol
Kandra is an embodiment facilitator and dancer based in Burlington, VT. She helps people to bring more embodied practices, breath work and internal transformation into their day to day lives. Kandra completed a BA at Hampshire College in 2019. There she studied dance, sustainable agriculture, social movements, and finally somatics and embodied practices. Her thesis project was an embodied research lab, titled “How Is patriarchy Held In The Body?” which consisted of an eight week workshop series for a group of 12 white or white-passing men and non-binary people (ages 19-63) that culminated in a small public performance.
Having engaged in more than a decade of various movement practices–dance, theater, Shaolin Kung Fu, yoga, meditation, and trainings in somatic practices–she draws from an abundance of knowledge to introduce unlearning harmful social patterns. Currently, Kandra is in the Embodied Social Justice Certificate program hosted by Rev. angel Kyodo williams and Dr. Sara King.
Kandra's project "All the boxes we live in" questions how the trans experience of unlearning societal gender norms might be a road map for unraveling other systems of oppression and privilege in society, particularly in spaces that are predominantly white, college educated, liberal and middle class. This work seeks to offer a narrative on how we can shift from regularly giving lip service to social justice to actually partaking in it, and the personal transformations we each need to go through to be part of halting the ongoing harms of U.S. culture today. Collectively with other trans artists, Kandra Dunan Herman-Parks will explore how the subjects of white supremacy (imperialism, capitalism), patriarchy, and transphobia live in our bodies and minds, by moving, playing, analyzing and creating together. This process will culminate in a collaborative performance piece and essays to share our discoveries with our broader communities.
Having engaged in more than a decade of various movement practices–dance, theater, Shaolin Kung Fu, yoga, meditation, and trainings in somatic practices–she draws from an abundance of knowledge to introduce unlearning harmful social patterns. Currently, Kandra is in the Embodied Social Justice Certificate program hosted by Rev. angel Kyodo williams and Dr. Sara King.
Kandra's project "All the boxes we live in" questions how the trans experience of unlearning societal gender norms might be a road map for unraveling other systems of oppression and privilege in society, particularly in spaces that are predominantly white, college educated, liberal and middle class. This work seeks to offer a narrative on how we can shift from regularly giving lip service to social justice to actually partaking in it, and the personal transformations we each need to go through to be part of halting the ongoing harms of U.S. culture today. Collectively with other trans artists, Kandra Dunan Herman-Parks will explore how the subjects of white supremacy (imperialism, capitalism), patriarchy, and transphobia live in our bodies and minds, by moving, playing, analyzing and creating together. This process will culminate in a collaborative performance piece and essays to share our discoveries with our broader communities.
Marcia Gomes
Born into a family of several generations of gifted musicians, Marcia Gomes's home was always filled with music. Her soulful originals are inspired by jazz, gospel, Latin, and R&B. Her musical influences are rich and diverse and her lyrics have been described as deeply soulful and moving. Marcia’s haunting melodies explore themes of faith, redemption, and social justice.
Marcia has performed with a number of Boston bands including Straight Ahead, MaShanDi Jhazz, Sistahs of the Yam, and Move. As an actor, Marcia was a principal cast member and composer for the play S.I.N.G: Silence is Never Golden and Lady in Purple in Serious Play Theater Ensemble's production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf.
Marcia is a Cleo Laine vocal scholarship recipient and graduate of Berklee College of Music, studied guitar with Richard Schumacker, and acting and theater at The School of Fine Arts at Boston University.
Marcia moved to Western MA ten years ago where, when not writing or performing, she teaches chorus and music to her favorite age group—middle school students. She also teaches voice at the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls at The Institute for the Musical Arts founded by June Millington and Ann Hackler. Her debut CD of original music, Overcome: Songs of Faith, Love, and Justice, was produced by June Millington and released in April of 2020.
For the LAB, Marcia Gomes is working to create a theater performance exploring the journey from intergenerational trauma and its legacies toward healing and liberation through the voices of four generations of Black American women. Great Grandmother, Grandmother, Granddaughter, and Great Granddaughter share their stories through poetry, dance, and original music proving faith, resilience, resistance and love are powerful tools strong enough to break the cycle of pain and transform it into joy.
Marcia has performed with a number of Boston bands including Straight Ahead, MaShanDi Jhazz, Sistahs of the Yam, and Move. As an actor, Marcia was a principal cast member and composer for the play S.I.N.G: Silence is Never Golden and Lady in Purple in Serious Play Theater Ensemble's production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf.
Marcia is a Cleo Laine vocal scholarship recipient and graduate of Berklee College of Music, studied guitar with Richard Schumacker, and acting and theater at The School of Fine Arts at Boston University.
Marcia moved to Western MA ten years ago where, when not writing or performing, she teaches chorus and music to her favorite age group—middle school students. She also teaches voice at the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls at The Institute for the Musical Arts founded by June Millington and Ann Hackler. Her debut CD of original music, Overcome: Songs of Faith, Love, and Justice, was produced by June Millington and released in April of 2020.
For the LAB, Marcia Gomes is working to create a theater performance exploring the journey from intergenerational trauma and its legacies toward healing and liberation through the voices of four generations of Black American women. Great Grandmother, Grandmother, Granddaughter, and Great Granddaughter share their stories through poetry, dance, and original music proving faith, resilience, resistance and love are powerful tools strong enough to break the cycle of pain and transform it into joy.
Marina Zurita • RIVEN
Marina Zurita (she/her) is a theatre director born in São Paulo, Brazil, and based in New York City. Among her credits are For The Time Being (by Ana Moioli) produced at the NY Winter Festival in 2020 and at Dixon Place (reading) in 2019 and Goosey (by Marina Zurita) awarded Best Play at the 2018 StrasbergWorks Fest. Marina has directed several full length plays at the University of North Carolina School of The Arts (UNCSA) where she graduated with a BFA in Directing. Her UNCSA credits include, Love & Depositions (co-directed with Acadia Barrengos and Mollye Maxner); Heroes of the Fourth Turning (by Will Arbery); and Yerma (by Simon Stone). Marina’s most recent project is titled Riven (formerly Mother Tongue), an original piece based on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children and interviews with Brazilian waste pickers. The first iteration of the piece was presented at UNCSA 21-22 MainStage season. Marina is a recipient of the Kenan Institute Artpreneur Grant, and has twice received award from the Semans Art Fund. She is currently a Directing Fellow at Et Alia Theater Company as well as a trainee at Manhattan Theater Club. In the fall Marina will be joining the Directing Fellowship program at The Kennedy Center (DC), and the LAB at A.P.E in Northampton (MA), where she will continue the development of Riven.
photo by Wayne Reich
Riven is a documentary theater piece based on characters of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children and interviews with Brazilian waste pickers (commonly understood in the US as informal garbage collectors who pick, sort, and sell recyclables as a way of living). The research behind this piece asks questions around motherhood, accumulation of waste, and our relationship to the unwitnessed lives of those who collect our discards. The world of the play centers on a waste picking cooperative in the city of São Paulo, where a community of pickers work under the guidance of TIA. Riven is interested in the different languages of motherhood depicted in the stories of the waste pickers interviewed for this process and in the text of Mother Courage and Her Children. This piece is also interested in examining the unpredictable nature of lives governed by poverty and war, and on the ways in which we, humans, manage to keep each other afloat in the midst of our own crisis.
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The LAB at A.P.E. is made possible in part by a grant from the Northampton Arts Council and sustained support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council |
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