Penny Arcade Festival Director
Penny Arcade is one of the most influential theatre artists in the world and her work has influenced countless generations of theatre artists seeking to bring their own voice to the stage. Penny is one of America’s most prolific, articulate and outspoken independent artists. She is a tireless artist’s advocate and an outspoken advocate of free speech and all the quintessential democratic American values.
Penny Arcade’s contributions to American experimental theatre began in her teens and she has left her mark on every decade from the 60’s to the 2000’s and many of her theatrical devices have passed into narrative mainstream theater.
Penny Arcade AKA Susana Ventura debuted at 17 with John Vaccaro’s explosive Playhouse of the Ridiculous. Born to immigrant Italians in the factory town of New Britain, Connecticut, she wrote her first play at 14 while incarcerated at Sacred Heart Academy for Wayward Girls. A teenage runaway, she joined Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous, the seminal, glam and glitter, rock and roll, political theater that influenced everyone from Charles Ludlam to Hair to Rocky Horror Picture Show to David Bowie.
At 18 Penny Arcade became a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s factory featured in the Morrissey/Warhol film “Women In Revolt” now available in video. Penny Arcade worked with and collaborated with many of the greats of American experimental theatre including Vaccaro, Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, Charles Ludlam, H.M.Koutoukas and Tom O’Horgan among others.
HM Koutoukas referes to Ms Arcade as “The Little Sister of The Avante-garde” because of her long apprenticeship to the major architects of the counter culture and experiemental theater.
After her 15 year apprenticeship in the work of other major theatre makers, Arcade began creating her own solo work in 1982 and becoming one of the most original voices in contemporaery thetare and one of a handful of New York artists who defined performance art in the 80’s and 90’s. She began creating group work in 1989. She has written 10 full length performance plays, numerous solo shows as well as poems, spoken word pieces and essays.
“BITCH !DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE!’ Her 1990 sex and censorship show began as an audit for a solo fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts during the Helms-NEA censorship crisis in 1990. The initial four day run at Performance Space 122 segued into two months which by public demand went on to a year long run (1992-1993) at the legendary Village Gate. “B!D!F!W!” a blend of political humanism, freedom of expression and erotic dancing, has toured the world twice as both an international festival and commercial hit in 22 cities around the world including two tours of Australia and left an international burlesque movement in it’s wake that still looks to Arcade as the master of combining political content and erotica, never stooping to the vulgar or sensationalistic. Penny Arcade’s theatre writing has been commissioned by Austria, England, Brazil, and Mexico.
In the early 90’s Quentin Crisp publicly named Ms Arcade as his soul mate and anima figure in the London Telegraph Magazine. Their friendship then become professional as Ms Arcade undertook a series of interviews with the legendary Edwardian raconteur and they performed together many times. Penny Arcade created “The Last Will and Testament Of Quentin Crisp”in 1996 which they performed together up to his death in 1999.
Penny Arcade has a long history as a Lower East Side activist beginning in her teens working with Abby Hoffman in the Yippies at the Lower Eastside Suicide Hotline (1967) and all the way to the present having spent August 1996 thru January of 1998 hosting a 3 hour radio show for the Lower Eastside pirate radio station Steal this Radio 88.7. She continues to lend her artistry to numerous socio- political endeavors.
In 1989, shortly after the death of theatre great Jack Smith, Penny Arcade created and formed the Jack Smith Archive, fulfilling Mr Smith’s death bed directive. The Plaster Foundation, the complete archive of Mr Smith’s work was founded in the mid 90’s with the help of Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman.
In 1997 she formed The Sheyla Baykal Archive to preserve and promote the work of Lower Eastside Photographer Sheyla Baykal.
In 1999 Penny Arcade along with her collaborator, Steve Zehentner formed The Lower East Side Biography Project, A much emulated video oral history project that broadcasts every Wednesday at 10:30 pm on channel 34 Time /Warner as well as on RCN . It also cybercasts at the same time at www.mnn.org
In Spring of 2008 Semiotext Press will publish a partial collection of Penny Arcade’s scripts along with the first published book of the photographs of Sheyla Baykal.
Visit Penny’s website at www.pennyarcade.tv
For more information on her work or to contact her .
Michael Premo Associate Festival Director
Michael Premo is committed to collaborating on, devising, and performing in performance projects that seek to enact or inspire positive progressive social change. In Cape Town, South Africa he co-devised, Living with HIV. . . a drama commissioned by the University of Cape Town. The play which directly engaged and relied on participation from the audience, toured the townships of the Western Cape, exploring community developed strategies to living with HIV. With the Company One ensemble Michael performed Before My Eyes, a play that staged conversations with Israeli Soldiers and unsuccessful Palestinian suicide bombers. As an actor, Michael has performed throughout New York and New England with companies including Theatre Espresso, ACT Roxbury, Capitol Repertory Theater, Medicine Show Ensemble and The Dorset Theatre Festival. He also works with the Hip Hop Theater Festival.
Michael is a founding board member of Direct Arts, an ensemble company founded to develop and produce theater projects and films, which explore the intersection of history, culture and mythos between different ethnic and social groups.
Michael is also a facilitator for StoryCorps, a national oral history project recording in sound stories of everyday people across the county. It is a unique project celebrating the brilliant beauty of our shared humanity and the monumental importance of stories, that in the noise of celebrity culture, might otherwise seem mundane. Stories are archived at The Library of Congress and The Smithsonian. StoryCorps stories broadcast twice weekly on “News and Notes” and “Morning Edition” on National Public Radio and iTunes Podcast.
Robert Mac Creator / Producer
Robert Mac is a filmmaker, writer and art instigator. His breakthrough
Documentary work was The Small Poppies, commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Robert shadowed Academy Award Winning actor Geoffrey Rush onto the stage at the Dublin Theater festival and created a mesmerising documentary about the creation and staging of a play about childhood.
All of Robert’s projects involve deep interest in events that use original theatricality to promote insight and community harmony. In his career beginnings an avatar of the short film (Sundance, Montreal, Hamburg) his working scale has expanded to marathon events. He is the founder and director of the world’s first “writing marathon” Once Upon A Deadline, and has created and produced an annual Yogathon, a 24-hour vigil and official world peace day event aimed at harnessing spiritual concentration to empathise with the homeless and quell the urge for conflict. The Globesity Festival is his latest creation where theatre and Holistic body science is the arena for education and human insight.