Cassandra Victoria Chopourian is a performing artist and director, primarily occupied with the creation of new works and exploration of unused/ual forms. She recently developed and performed in Shelly’s Spherical Journey, which premiered in the 2012 New York International Fringe Festival. She directed Lovesphere 17: Bubbles: A Communo-Phenonemological Manifesto, an improvisation-based theater work presented at Theater for the New City (2012), and co-directed Margaret Mead’s Islands of Passion with the Conscientious Mythmakers in Leipzig, Germany (2011). She is currently developing and performing in the long-term project Tender Buttons, based on Gertrude Stein’s masterpiece, which has been performed in various stages in New York, Houston, and Leipzig. Other current work includes VRC’s Impossible Interviews (2009), and LiveFeed’s Surprise!. She has also performed with Medicine Show Theatre, Brooklyn Theater Company, Lake Ivan Performance Group, Proto-Type Theater, as well as with Resistance Theater, which she co-founded and ran until 1999. She received her BFA from the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana and additional training at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, with SITI Company, and others. She plays trumpet, sings and writes music with the band Fist of Kindness.

Lauren Farber has been doing movement work since 1958. Since she receiving a scholarship to American Ballet Theater in 1968, she has performed with Margolis Brown Adaptors, Joan Merwyn's Sound Image Theater and the Van Reipen Collective. She has performed at HERE, Theater for the New City, and the Empire State Building lobby among other venues. She collaborated with Sam Shepard before he was famous, and with composer Mark Brooks on a piece performed at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Institute.  She founded Eonta Space in Chelsea in the 1970's, presenting Charlemagne Palestine, Pierre Ruiz and Van Zandt Ellis among many others. Lauren's recent movement work continues to explore bodily constraint, but in a new way as it is informed by muscular dystrophy type II, immune mediatiated thrombo cytopenea and central serous choreoretinopathy.  While writing her doctoral dissertation "Issues in the Collection and Conservation of American Vernacular Memorial Art" for the University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Art she experiencied a life-changing epiphany.  As a professional dilletante, Lauren has not mastered such trades as curator (at the Construction Company's gallery, Art Under Construction), typographer (for Conde Nast), printmaker, costume designer, soupist, historic preservationist (with the Bergen Square Historical Society), gardener, and janitor. She is the ultra violet 2-octave subvisual reluctant harmonic elder of the Perceiver of Sound League and Czrina of Eonta Space.

Richard Gross  hails from Buffalo, NY. He has been active as a musician/performer in New York City for the last 22 years, playing a variety of instruments and more recently, acting. He last appeared in the Medicine Show Theatre's recent productions of The Beggar's Opera, Wall Street: A Farce and Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen and was previously seen in Van Reipen Collective's BUBBLES and Shelly's Spherical Journey. Richard is a member of the band Fist of Kindness.

Gary Heidt is the author/librettist of the Defenestration Trilogy, including The Birth and Theft of Television, Nightingale: The Last Days of James Forrestal and Man: The Biology of a Fall with composer Evan Hause. He is a co-founder of Lovesphere, a 67-year performance project currently in its 17th year, and co-founder of the Mammals of Zod, an improvising big band whose first album, Kill the Humans, was deemed "a masterpiece" by the Village Voice. He has performed at the Bowery Ballroom, Lincoln Center, CBGB's, the Knitting Factory, the Cooler, Resistance Theater, and numerous other venues. His poetry has appeared in Infinity’s Kitchen, Fence, Lost and Found Times, and Private Arts. He has been featured in the New York Observer as the author of the musical Feng Shui Assassin and in Paper Magazineas one of their "100 Beautiful People." He is the producer of many recordings, including Is It Because I'm Black? by Vattell Cherry, Reproductive Organ of the Machine Phylum by CitiZen One and the Ambient Outlaws, L'of and Kill The Humans by Mammals of Zod. His songs have been featured on radio worldwide, and have appeared on several international compilations and on television. He currently works as a literary agent with Signature Literary Agency and performs with the band Fist of Kindness.

Christopher Weston was a Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Resistance Theater, Brooklyn, NY, where he designed and directed his own original works (AntiGone, DreamFire, The Blood of Martyrs) as well as works by others (Hamletmachine, Macbeth). With the Brooklyn Theatre Company, he designed and directed the original production, ...it goes Boom! Other directing credits include original productions of Dracula, When We Dead Awaken, Fucking with the Norm (Naked Theater Company). As a Lighting Designer, regional productions have included Mrs. Mannerly (Penguin Rep). Proof, Having Our Say (Hangar Theatre), and The Color of Flesh (NJ Rep). International: T.E.L.O.S. (European Biennial in Athens, Greece). New York theaters have included the Kitchen, John Houseman, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 59E59, 45th Street Theatre, Queens Theatre in the Park, Cherry Lane, Metropolitan Playhouse, Lamb’s Theatre, Barrow Group, Center Stage/New York, Theatre for the New City, HERE Arts Center, Raw Space, Connelly Theatre, Kraine Theatre, Mazer Theatre, Access Theatre and the Old American Can Factory. He was nominated for Outstanding Lighting Design by the New York Innovative Theatre Awards for his design of The Return of Peter Grimm at Metropolitan Playhouse. Since 2000, he has been the Resident Lighting Designer for the OBIE winning Immigrant’s Theatre Project. He has an MFA in Lighting Design from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a BFA in Performance Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to lighting theater and dance, Chris has designed for interiors, architecture, fundraisers, weddings and other events. chriswestondesign.com


C O L L A B O R A T I N G   A R T I S T S

Brian "Cookie" Cook (technical director) began his career in Quincy, IL as a gravedigger. Despite his brilliant prospects in the field, he followed the siren song of chemical engineering to the University of Iowa, which inevitably led him to work for Local 690 IATSE as a stage hand. His meteoric career temporarily diverted in an incident involving the "Ain't Misbehavin'" tour bus. Cookie studied Japanese language and culture until, returning to showbiz, he became Technical Director of the Armory Theater in Champaign Urbana in the crucial years when the Naked Theater changed everything forever. Cookie hit the road with Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby for a while, then settled down in New York City where he worked for various Broadway and television shows before becoming a production electrician for ABC Networks and technical director for the Van Reipen Collective.

Martin Esters (media and improvisation artist) [Conscientious Mythmakers] is an actor and director in classical and performance-based improv theater, working since 2003 with Fast Forward Theatre, and since 2010, SQUARE. As a playwright, he won the "Marburg Short Drama Competition" (2009/10/11) and the English Theatre Berlin Short Drama Competition (2011). As a director, his work includes BRÜCKENSINFONIE 2006, ELISABETH-FAKTOR 2007, ODYSSEE 2009, MOBY DICK 2010. His work as a video performance artist includes SEVEN DAYS OF LOVE (award winner at the "cellu l'art" short film festival Jena 2002); LIVE TAPES (2007/08); SCAPES OF LAND AND SOUND (2011).  

Sabine Manke [Conscientious Mythmakers] has worked as performer, dramaturg, artistic director and producer for independent theater productions since 1999. Her creative impulses were fostered by GWU's theatre classes (1994/1995) as well as enriched and distorted by the M.A. program “Cultures of the Curatorial” at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig (2009-2011). She holds a Ph.d. in European ethnology/Cultural Studies from Philipps University Marburg (2008). In her work she likes to explore the boundaries between academic, artistic and curatorial methods of research and presentation.

Cara Scarmack is a theater-maker and musician living and working in New York City. She has presented work in NYC at The Kitchen, New York Theatre Workshop 4th Street Theatre, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, a warehouse in Gowanus, Cornelia Street Cafe, the YWCA of Brooklyn, Cherry Lane Theatre, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, Parkside Lounge, Brecht Forum and outside of NYC at The Off Center in Burlington, Vermont. She is currently a student of bluegrass aficionado Michael Daves and is happily pursuing her MFA in Playwriting in Mac Wellman’s program at Brooklyn College. carascarmack.com

Niki Tulk loves to write, dream, read, learn and make art in many different media from theatre and music, to making up her family’s next weekend breakfast menu. A qualified Drama & English teacher, she has a Masters of Education in Children’s Literature from the U. of Georgia, and has studied Literature, Dramatic Art and Theatre Making at the U. of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia – and is now enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Writing at The New School, where she won a merit scholarship. Niki is an educator, writer and practitioner in high schools, community theatre groups, youth programs and a writer/performer of multi-media work with musician/ songwriter Mark Tulk. For several years she has worked as performance and artist mentor/manager of independent musicians, as part of a non-profit record label in Melbourne, Australia. She is also a trained classical cellist, and singer. Niki’s passion is to nurture creativity in as many aspects of her family and community as she can. Because Art can change the world and there ain’t much time. nikitulk.com