This is an Announcement of a Showdown

. . . From the Personal to the Global . . .

GLOBESITY is the over consumption of all natural elements that create and sustain life on Earth – some of the most vital and visible being water, minerals, oil, and FOOD. Our approach to food and sustenance is destroying our personal and social health. Our Earth and our Bodies cannot sustain the beastly grind of consumption. This beast is Globesity. It has been named. Now is the hour of confrontation.

The GLOBESITY FESTIVAL is razor sharp performance, comedy, education, celebration and collaboration. With Theatre as our laboratory, we are cooking & cutting up ingredients for SOLUTIONS.

All participating artists will engage in a juice fast, during which they will conceive a theatrical performance in response to consumerism. Then, they will develop these conceptions to be premiered at the festival.

The Globesity Festival is FREE to Everyone.

(That Means You Don’t Pay.)

The Globesity Festival is inter-generational and cross-community collaboration. We are calling all the Elders, The Established, The Emerging artists, activists, instigators, agitators, innovators, entrepreneurs who with your words, ways, and wares dream into being SOLUTIONS to the climate of hyper-consumption and consumerism.People from across the city and worldwide are urged to fast in solidarity for solutions.

COME JOIN US for a Week of discussions, solutions, community building and PERFORMANCE.

All your questions answered: info@theglobesityfestival.org

A LETTER FROM FESTIVAL DIRECTOR PENNY ARCADE

When Robert Mac, creator of the Globesity Festival,called me from Australia and asked if I would be interested in being the artistic director of a performance festival about over-consumption, featuring artists who created work on that subject while undertaking a ten day juice fast, I had just completed a 15-day raw juice and vegetable fast.

Naturally, I said yes.

The Globesity Festival comes to New York at a time when even the arts have been beset by consumerism and careerism.

Amazingly, at the same time when nearly every graduating student in the arts -be it dance, theatre, music, literature or film -wants to have an ‘activist’ element in their work addressing social issues, we find ourselves in what the great German philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as “the last stage of consumerism in the arts”.

The great Jack Smith, source of everything considered experimental in American theatre, asked the question in 1979: “Could art ever be useful?”

In 2007, we are asking that question again as we set up a laboratory for the week of October 22-28 to present the inaugural experience of The Globesity Festival -a chance for seekers, activists, artists and just plain folks to come together in a spirit of camaraderie, a chance to experience what nearly everyone who ever came to New York wants to experience: Creative Community.

I have always maintained that New York became the great cultural capital that it has been because it was composed of one-third artists to two-thirds people who live an artistic life -people who will never get on stage, write a book or make a film, but without whom the world of artistic expression could not exist. They are the audience, the witnesses, and it is they who foster the environment in which important art movements are created.

My assistant artistic director Michael Premo and I have been ‘on the same page’ and have resonated with each others’ artistic and social values from the first 5 minutes we met. We have worked long and hard to create a festival that brings some of New York’s most important artists to comment on the problems and issues of Globesity, and we have found new, young voices who will bring us their points of view as well.

We are excited to announce that the great Dick Gregory will be Globesity Festival’s keynote speaker. Perhaps the original activist artist, Dick Gregory’s commitment to social issues while forging new forms of entertainment communication is without peer. Not only is Dick Gregory a phenomenal comedian who influenced every comedian that followed, he is also legendary for his use of fasting for spiritual insight and protest. See our section on Dick Gregory.

What is fasting? A good question! Fasting is whenever we abstain from some food or activity for a period of time. A fast may be total or partial. Fasting is practiced in many religious traditions and spiritual practices.

For our purposes at the Globesity Festival, a fast is undertaken to break our relationship with the ordinary and everyday, giving our artists a chance to reflect and create new material from a new vantage point. We invite you to join us, from near and far. There are many forms of fasting. Face it, if you eat Big Macs at McDonald’s everyday and stop for 2 weeks, that is a fast.

More than ever, we need community and we need solutions. That is what we are after with the Globesity Festival, and we want you to join us.

XXOO
Penny Arcade