What We Are Doing

Our second-greatest talent? - by Avi Glickstein

Polybe + Seats — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:36:06 +0000

Over our ten-year history, Polybe + Seats has always been able to rely on one tried-and-true method of fundraising: the bake sale. From the outside, it may appear that being able to bake is a prerequisite for new Company Members. This isn't the case, but, somehow, we've continued to attract little bread and cake babies who love to just crank out the sweets (myself included).

This past Sunday, we put ourselves to work to raise funds for Alice, or the Scottish Gravediggers (opening October 20 - ahem, ahem) and wound up having our most successful sale to date - we raised over $500! How good do treats have to be to make that kind of money? We've posted some pictures so you can see for yourself.

However, here are some basic principles we followed that we think are essential to any profitable bake sale:

1) Don't limit yourselves to human beings. We had lots of happy four-legged customers on Sunday. In fact, we even sold the few treats we had left to an amazingly sweet pitbull named Sammy while having after-sale beers at Mission Dolores.

2) You can never overbake. We thought we had too much stock. We were wrong. We finished the day with a small bowl of the single, sole surviving members of various baked goods families and exactly one dozen tiny apple pies. True, we were making deals like crazy toward the end of the day, but so what? "Hand over fist," as my entrepreneurial wife said. Yep.

3) Location, location, location - the Executive Director of our performance venue, Kim at the Old Stone House, was generous enough to let us set up on the sidewalk in front of the grounds and also contacted the Park Slope farmers market, which was right next to us, to make sure we wouldn't tick them off. And they were generous enough to not mind us being there. Truthfully, they had nothing to worry about since their market is filled with amazing things like Doc Pickle, Go-Go Pops, and Barry's Tempeh. It also helps to be able to say, "We're raising money for a show that's going up RIGHT THERE in two weeks!" Oh boy. Two weeks. Yeesh.

and last...

4) Don't be surprised if people in your company go a little crazy. We had more than one person stay up into the wee hours "waiting for things to cool" and what not. Well whatever everyone did, it was beautiful, delicious, and gone, gone, gone. The bank don't lie, my friends.

And speaking of friends, here are the people you need to accost to cater your next birthday party and some of the bounty they brought forth (for some reason, my authorial voice has turned Biblical - huh):

Katya Schapiro - Chocolate Whoopie Pies with Pear Mousseline Filling, Buckwheat Cookies with Cacao Nibs, Tomato Tart

Sarah Sakaan - Butter Cookies, Tiny Apple Pies, Cream Cheese-Frosted Pumpkin Cupcakes (remember those "wee hours" people?)

Avi Glickstein - Plum Tart

Stacey McMath - Peanut Butter Dog Treats and Liver Dog Treats

Catherine Wallach - Banana Bread, Pumpkin Bread, Fudgy Brownies, Corn Muffins

Jessica Brater - Cheesy Beer Bread, Sugar Cookies w/Candied Kansas Sunflower Seeds

Bevan Dunbar - Marzipan Snails...MARZIPAN SNAILS!

Miriam Felton-Dansky - Cheesecake Swirl Brownies

Kate Marvin - Plum Torte (they're in season, ok?)

Ok, now if you missed the sale and are salivating, I will say this. Traditionally, there has been some sort of baked good or goods sold at our plays. I'm not promising anything, but your best shot is to come see...

ALICE, OR THE SCOTTISH GRAVEDIGGERS

Beginning October 20!

Our Dreamscape at FIGMENT NYC!

Polybe + Seats — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:49:15 +0000

Polybe + Seats was happy to be a part of this year's FIGMENT NYC, an annual arts festival on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Company member Sarah Sakaan led an ensemble (consisting of Juan Carlos Matsuda, Liz Rosen, Sarah Sakaan, Eve Udesky, and Ari Vigoda) in creating a movement and storytelling piece inspired by their dreams and memories of dreaming. Avi Glickstein's photos of the June 11th performance are here! Thank you, FIGMENT, for an arts-filled weekend!

Open Rehearsal, Melodramatic Photo Shoot

Polybe + Seats — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:29:06 +0000

On Saturday, March 26, at the Old Stone House, we presented an open rehearsal of selected "Alice" scenes (plus added material by our writers!) for a small audience of our friends and mentors. This was a great opportunity for us to see how an audience would respond to the work we've been doing over the last few months. In rehearsals, we've experimented with applying melodramatic acting techniques to Pixérécourt's play, using "The Thespian Preceptor," an acting manual from 1810, as well as paintings from the period and other research. We chose three action-packed scenes from "Alice" to work on--one from each act, so we could begin to envision the arc of the piece--and also rehearsed original scenes by Libby Emmons, Avi Glickstein, and Sarah Sakaan.

After the open rehearsal, we held an informal discussion with the audience, and they reflected on the story, the acting techniques, and melodrama more broadly. We're grateful to them for their encouragement and insightful comments!

We're also very grateful to Howard Wallach, who took beautiful photos of our actors rehearsing "Alice," and we wanted to share a few snapshots of our adventures in melodrama. Click here for the photos!

--Miriam Felton-Dansky

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Polybe + Seats — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:41:09 +0000

Jessica Brater and I went to the Brooklyn Arts Council 2011 Community Arts Regrant Program Awards Ceremony last night at Brooklyn Borough Hall to receive Polybe + Seats' regrant in support of Alice, or the Scottish Gravediggers. We are so grateful to BAC and the panelists for their support and their recognition of organizations like ours around Brooklyn! - Catherine Wallach

Welcome to our new website!

Polybe + Seats — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:02:37 +0000

Welcome to our new website! We've remodeled it from the ground up to be able to show you lots of new information - photos, reviews, and more - in what we think is a more easily-navigable format.

Thank you so much to everyone who worked on this redesign with me, especially Natalie Robin and Stacey McMath. Please browse around and tell us what you think!

-Catherine Wallach, Producing Director

Starting our new project: Alice, or the Scottish Gravediggers

Polybe + Seats — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:58:20 +0000

We are off to a great start with development for our upcoming project! Early this fall, dramaturg Miriam Felton-Dansky and the rest of the company began research into French melodrama and the history of medical experimentation for our adaptation of Alice, or The Scottish Gravediggers, to premiere in October 2011, just in time for Halloween. In addition plowing through a vast amount of reading, we visited the Cushing Center at Yale’s medical school library to look at the hundreds of slices of preserved brains Dr. Cushing collected in his research. Our research into melodrama yielded a fabulous document called “The Thespian Preceptor,” which provides recipes for actors in portraying nearly every emotion under the sun. With the help of translator Daniel Gerould, we discovered that the play has never before been performed in English.

Our October 2010 reading of the original play was followed by a lively post-reading discussion with Daniel Gerould, who answered questions about everything from melodrama’s position as a popular form to its relationship to opera. Since the reading, we have continued regular meetings to discuss issues surrounding the play and to share research and images. The acting company has been meeting for a series of movement workshops, led by Lindsay Torrey, to explore melodramatic physicality. Over Thanksgiving, our set designer, Danielle Baskin, visited the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago and returned with wonderful research on medical instruments and anatomical painting.

We are also thrilled to have been offered a residency and partnership with the Old Stone House in Park Slope, where we will begin working in January 2011 and produce an August 2011 workshop and the full production. We should be all set to begin practicing medical quackery in earnest by the time the new year rolls around.

- Jessica Brater, Artistic Director