ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Jessica Hagedorn is the author of Dogeaters, The Gangster of Love, Dream Jungle, Toxicology, and Danger and Beauty. Her work for the stage includes the musical Most Wanted (with composer Mark Bennett), and adaptations of Dogeaters and The Gangster of Love. She has also edited several major volumes of short fiction. In 1986, she co-created the performance trio Thought Music along with Robbie McCauley and Laurie Carlos, performing the multimedia piece Teenytown in venues on both coasts and appearing as guest artists with the dance company Urban Bushwomen.

Jeannie Hutchins worked and performed with Robbie McCauley in Sally’s Rape, in New York and on touring, from 1990 through 1998. Trained as a dancer, she was in the cast of the 1976 productions of Meredith Monk’s Quarry and of the Robert Wilson–Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach. Since 1978 she has created her own movement/text group and solo pieces and was a longtime member of Ping Chong and Company, most recently performing in his reconceived Lazarus at La MaMa in 2022.

Dael Orlandersmith is an acclaimed playwright/performer known for works such as Stoop Stories, Until the Flood, The Gimmick (winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), Yellowman (finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and nominated for a Drama Desk Award), and most recently, Spiritus. Performing extensively in the U.S. and Europe, she has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Doris Duke Award. She is currently working on a book of autofiction.

Carl Hancock Rux is a playwright, novelist, essayist and recording artist. The former head of the MFA Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts, he has taught at universities across the country. Rux is the author of the novel, Asphalt; the OBIE Award-winning play, Talk; and the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta. He has worked as a writer and guest performer with major dance, theater, and musical artists across the country. Rux is a co-artistic director of Mabou Mines.

ABOUT ROBBIE MCCAULEY

Robbie McCauley (1942–2021) was a playwright, director, performer, and leader of collective creations who made a significant mark on America’s theatrical and political landscapes. An early cast member in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway, McCauley went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad. Her play Sally’s Rape won the 1991 Obie Award for Best New American Play and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance. Other notable works include Sugar, Indian Blood, Mississippi Freedom, Turf: A Conversational Concert in Black and White, The Buffalo Project, and The Other Weapon. Conducting interviews and group improvisations, McCauley pioneered a form of community projects in which local people addressed long-buried racial tensions in their communities. Among them, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston, and Los Angeles, produced by The Arts Company. In 1998, her Buffalo Project, produced by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, was highlighted in the Village Voice as one of “The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments,” a roster that also included works by Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage. McCauley was a recipient of the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance and was selected as a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow. Her work has been widely anthologized, including the volumes Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics. McCauley taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, Boston College, Emerson College, and New York University Tisch School of the Arts.