Guest Artists

Spring 2005

Nic Ularu

Nic Ularu is an international scenographer and professor. He designed sets and costumes for theater, opera, TV and film in Romania, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, and the US. He served for four years as a member of the board of the European League of the Institutes of the Arts, and as the vice–president of the OISTAT Romanian Center. He has taught scene and/or costume design in Romania, Germany, Sweden, UK, Italy, Denmark and Hong Kong.

Since 1997, he has taught design and work as a professional scenographer in the USA.

In 1998 and 2003 his design works were included in the USA entries at the Prague Quadrennial Scenography Exhibitions.

Nic was a recipient of an Obie award for 2003. The special citation for outstanding achievement in Off–Broadway theater was awarded May 19th, for set designs of the Talking Band's, Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, presented at La MaMa in January 2003.

Currently Nic Ularu is the Head of M.F.A. Design Program at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Throws Like A Girl Festival Artists

An historic event not to be missed! Throws Like A Girl is a provocative performance festival that celebrates the contributions of original female theatre artists to our cultural landscape while promoting women's voices in the American theatre. The triumphant return of TLAG in 2005 features five of the nation's most influential female performance artists bringing works never before seen in Austin. The performance line–up this year was curated to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the WOW Café – the legendary OBIE Award winning NYC performance space collectively owned and operated by women for women. Founded in 1980 by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, WOW (Women's One World) Café has served as the experimental playground and performance home to an entire generation of female theatre artists, including each of this year's TLAG performers. The UT Department of Theatre & Dance and Rude Mechs are thrilled and honored to provide our community with the rare opportunity to see the work of these celebrated artists right here in Austin.

In addition to these unforgettable performances, the festival will also include many Open Forum events that are Free and Open to the Public, including talkbacks, Meet the Artist Q&A sessions, lectures by leading academics, and Performance Workshops with each visiting artist.

Deb Margolin

Deb Margolin is an internationally recognized playwright, performance artist and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company whose work has influenced feminist theatre in the U.S. since the early 1980's. As the author of six full–length solo performance pieces that have toured throughout the United States, Deb is the recipient of a 1999–2000 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Her solo performance pieces include O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms, which was commissioned by the Jewish Museum of New York, Critical Mass which premiered at PS 122 in New York, and Bringing the Fishermen Home was part of the New Work Now Festival at The Public Theater and premiered at The Cleveland Public Theater. Index to Idioms premiered in workshop at The Kitchen Theatre's Bring in the Spring! Performance Art Festival this past April. She has appeared on both Comedy Central and HBO Downtown. A book of Deb's performance pieces and plays, entitled “Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO” was published in 1999. Deb has lectured extensively at universities throughout the country, has been artist in residence at Hampshire College and University of Hawaii, and writer–in–residence at Tulane University. She is currently a faculty lecturer in Playwriting and Performance in Yale University's Theater Studies Program.

Carmelita Tropicana

Carmelita Tropicana, a Cuban board writer/actress won the 1999 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance. In 2004, she wrote and starred in With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? at New York's Intar Theater, which the New York Times described as "a deliciously outrageous solo piece." She is the author of the lambda nominated book “I, Carmelita Tropicana – Performing Between Cultures,” which includes her plays Milk of Amnesia, Chicas 2000, as well as a short story entitled “The Social Visit” and the essay “Food for Thought.” Her film “Your Kunst is Your Waffen” (Art is Your Weapon), co–written with film director Ela Troyano, won Best Short at the Berlin Film Festival. She has appeared in Off–Broadway shows, including the solo Late Night Catechism, which she translated into Spanish. She is one of the recipients of the prestigious “Anonymous Was A Woman” award for 2004. As a comedian, she has appeared at Joe's Pub, Gotham Comedy Club, and on TV in the PBS Special “Out in New York.” Her commercial credits include Lancome, Dr. Pepper and Febreeze.

Marga Gomez

Marga Gomez was born in Harlem to a Cuban comedian and a Puerto Rican dancer. With parents like these, she acquired a taste for comedy, drama and fried bananas. Marga now tours nationally as a stand–up comedian and as the writer/performer of seven solo shows. She is the recipient of the 2004 GLAAD Award for Off–Off–Broadway theater and the 1994 ‘Theatre LA's Ovation Award’ for her performance with Culture Clash at the Mark Taper Forum. Margas' solo shows include A Line Around The Block, Memory Tricks, Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty & Gay, jaywalker, The Twelve Days of Cochina, Marga Gomez's Intimate Details and Los Big have been produced Off–Broadway at The Public Theater, The Whitney Museum, Performance Space 122, La Mama Theater, Dixon Place, nationally at The Kennedy Center, Museum of Contemporary Arts Massachusetts, Boston Center for the Arts, San Diego Repertory Theater, Highways Performance Space and The Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles,) The Marsh and Theater Rhinoceros (San Francisco,) and internationally at The Montreal Comedy Festival, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, London ICA and Amsterdam's Triple X Festival. Marga's career is profiled in the 2003 documentary “Laughing Matters.” Her acting credits include Off–Broadway and San Francisco productions of The Vagina Monologues and featured roles in Sphere, Batman Forever and HBO's Tracy takes on… Selections from Marga's work have been published in several anthologies including “Extreme Exposure”, “Out, Loud & Laughing”, “Contemporary Plays by American Women of Color” and “Out of Character.” Marga was one of eight playwrights to be commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum's Latino Theater Initiative as part of 2004's Amor Eterno project. For more about Marga visit www.margagomez.com

Peggy Shaw

Actor, Playwright, and Producer Peggy Shaw has received three OBIE Awards for her work with the legendary lesbian theatre company, Split Britches, which she founded with Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin in 1980. She won the Obie Awards for her performances in Dress Suits To Hire, a collaboration with Holly Hughes, Belle Reprieve, a collaboration with the London–based theater troupe BlooLips, and Menopausal Gentleman, directed by Rebecca Taichman. Among her celebrated works are You're Just Like My Father, Lust and Comfort, Upwardly Mobile Home, Lesbians Who Kill, and the Jane Chambers Award–winning play Split Britches. Peggy is a 1988 and 1995, and 1999 New York Foundation For The Arts award winner for Emerging Forms. She received the 1995 Anderson Foundation Stonewall Award for excellence in "making the world a better place for gays and lesbians," and Split Britches is a two–time nominee for the Cal Arts Herb Alpert Award. Peggy received the 2000–2001 Rockefeller MAP Grant to create her new show To My Chagrin. In addition to her work with Split Britches, she played Billy Tipton in American Place's production of Carson Kreitzer's The Slow Drag, she was a collaborator, writer, and performer with Spiderwoman Theater and Hot Peaches Theater and co–founder in 1980 of the Obie–Award Winning WOW Cafe in New York City. Split Britches teaches Performance in residence at various colleges including Hampshire College, University of Hawaii, University of Northern Iowa, U.C. Davis, Cal Arts, U.C. Riverside, Harvard, M.I.T., and William and Mary. Peggy has taught Solo Performance at Vassar, Smith,Wells, U.Mass, Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Hampshire College. Routledge Press has released a book simultaneously in London and New York on the Company entitled “Split Britches: Lesbian Practice, Feminist Performance,” edited by Sue Ellen Case, which includes seven Split Britches' plays.

Lois Weaver

Lois Weaver is a performance artist, director, writer, teacher, and curator. Lois is a co–founder of the legendary theatre company Split Britches and the OBIE award–winning performance space in NYC, WOW Café. She also co–founded Spiderwoman Theatre and was the Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop Theatre in London. She has toured the U.S., U.K. and Europe with Split Britches productions, Anniversary Waltz, Upwardly Mobile Home, Little Women – The Tragedy and Lesbians Who Kill. Other landmark collaborations have included Dress Suits to Kill and Bell Reprieve. In addition to her collaborations, Lois has also toured her one woman shows Faith and Dancing and, most recently, What Tammy Needs to Know. Her directing credits include Peggy Shaw's To My Chagrin and Holly Hughes' Preaching to the Perverted. She is involved in Staging Human Rights, an initiative that uses performance practice to explore human rights in women's prisons in Brazil and the U.K. Lois has taught Contemporary Performance Practice and the California Institute of the Arts and been a lecturer at Queen Mary and Westfield College.

Michael Arthur

Michael Arthur (Ph.D. in Theatre History & Criticism, 1999) is an artist living in New York. He specializes in drawing the intimate rehearsals of dance and theatre, capturing the creative process in pen and ink. He uses no pencils and no rough drafts in his work.

Mr. Arthur has worked with American Ballet Theatre, The Parsons Dance Company, The Martha Graham Company, the Buglisi/Foreman Dance Company and the Drama Dept. On Broadway, his drawings have chronicled the rehearsal processes of Stephen Sondheim's Follies, Neil Simon's 45 Seconds From Broadway and the 2003 revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. In 2002, Mr. Arthur spent three months chronicling in drawings the final rehearsals and performances of Prima ballerina, Susan Jaffe, during her farewell season with ABT at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Mr. Arthur's original drawings are in the collections of Whoopi Goldberg, August Wilson, Charles S. Dutton, Caroline Rhea, Kevin McKenzie, Susan Jaffe, Frederick Franklin, Georgina Parkinson, Robert Hill, Neil Simon, Joan Rivers, Brooke Shields, Blaine Trump, Jerry Zaks, Iris Cantor, Angel Corella, Marian Seldes and others.

Visit Michael Arthur's website and view some of his work.

Delfos Contemporary Dance

Delfos co–artistic Directors Claudia Lavista and Victor Manuel Ruiz will be in residence January 26 – February 4 to teach master classes, conduct outreach activities in the Austin community and create a new work for Dance Repertory Theatre.

Delfos Contemporary Dance was founded in 1992 by the Mexican dancer/choreographers Victor Manuel Ruiz and Claudia Lavista and is recognized as one of the most important dance companies of Latin America. It is the resident dance company of the Angela Peralta Theater in Mazatlán, Mexico as well as a member of the Cultural Promoters Network of Latin America and the Caribbean. Delfos is a laboratory of images and emotions in movement whose aesthetic vision has given the company its own stamp of individuality. In Fall 2004, the company completed its first major U.S. tour, including performances at the Joyce Theatre in New York, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the University of Arizona. Its work has also been presented in Canada, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Greece, Korea, Venezuela, Colombia, Panamá, Bolivia and Mexico. Along the way, Delfos has won numerous awards: The Mexico en Escena program support, the National Dance Award in 1992, 1997 and 2002, the Best Dance Company in Mexico, and the Brazilian Artistic Merit Award. Since 1998, the company has operated with the support of the Mazatlán government and the Mazatlán Professional School of Dance that currently features 50 students from 5 countries. The school constantly tries to inspire professional training and growth of new generations of dancers and to educate the public on the appreciation of dance.

Victor Manuel Ruiz
Co–Artistic Director

Mexican dancer, choreographer, teacher and lighting designer, Victor Manuel Ruiz has been praised by national and international critics for his interpretation and choreography. He studied in the National School of Dance and in the Superior Center of Choreography in Mexico. In Venezuela, he was a dancer with Danzahoy for 7 years. In 1992 he founded Delfos Contemporary Dance Company with Claudia Lavista, receiving the National Dance Award that same year. He has also designed lighting for many productions, and in 2002 won the award for Best Lighting Designer at the National Dance Awards. FONCA (National Foundation of Culture and Arts) honored him repeatedly with the following scholarships: Young Creator (1994), Best Interpreter (1998), on 2 occasions won state scholarships through the Cultural Co–inversion Project. He currently has a scholarship for Stage Production from FOECA (State Arts and Culture Fund). Since 1999, he has been part of National System of Art Creators of FONCA. His choreographic works have been praised for their poetic quality and clarity and have been presented in many countries. As a teacher, he has taught classes in Mexico and abroad. Currently he is Co–Artistic Director, choreographer and dancer with Delfos Contemporary Dance and is also Co–director and teacher at the Mazatlán Professional School of Contemporary Dance. He continues to implement, along with Claudia Lavista, the project of de–centralization, promotion and dance education in Mazatlán, Mexico.

Claudia Lavista
Co–Artistic Director

Dancer, choreographer and teacher, Claudia Lavista, started her studies of music and theater at the age of 8, later she studied dance at the National System for the Professional Teaching of Dance and with Maestro Federico Castro in Mexico. In 1987, she joined the group U X Onodanza and later danced with the company Danzahoy in Venezuela for 4 years. In 1992, she founded Delfos Contemporary Dance along with Victor Ruiz and won the National Dance Award that same year. She has received many awards for her outstanding artistic works such as Best Female Dance Interpreter at 1998 and 2002 National Dance Award and through FONCA (National Foundation of Culture and Arts) was honored with the following scholarships: Interpreter (1994), VII Special Projects Concourse (1996) and Young Creator (2002). Through FOECA (State Arts and Culture Fund) she won a fellowship for “Recognized Artist” in 2001. She has taught classes in Mexico and internationally and her choreography has been praised by critics in more than 10 countries and presented by 7 dance companies, among them the prestigious Mexican National Dance Company. Currently she is Co–Artistic Director, dancer and choreographer of Delfos Contemporary Dance and Co–Director and teacher of the Mazatlán Professional School of Contemporary Dance. She serves as the Mazatlán representative of the Cultural Promoters of Latin America and the Caribbean Network.