March 25 –
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Patrons,
Due to the shelter in place restrictions in place for the state of California we’ve been looking ahead at our schedule. Our actors were supposed to begin rehearsal for our May show, Caught several days ago. After much discussion around the challenging logistics of the show, and the safety of all the artists involved with this productions, we’ve decided to make the heartbreaking decision to cancel the entire run of the play. We’ll look at the possibility of bringing it into our 2021 season that we’re currently planning. Likewise, our circus artists are unable to rehearse for their April shows so Grimm and Peter and the Wolf in April are cancelled. We hope to be able to plug those shows in later in the year/in early 2021 when life resumes to something resembling normal. Ellie in the box office will be in touch about options for ticket holders. We’re in discussions about Spring Awakening with our co-producer and the holder of the rights so stay posted for news on the musical front.
In the meantime, we’ve got some digital offerings and events coming online this week. We launched Dragon On Demand with last season’s Macbeth and are planning to add a circus performance from late last year (their Nutcracker show) and the recently cancelled world premiere of Confession by Barry Slater. Keep an eye on the Dragon on Demand channel for all these offerings and more!
This week we have some live events online, either hosted by Dragon or by local artists we know and want to support.
Tonight at 7p it’s Bedroom Karaoke with the incomparable Juanita Harris (Mamie in our Further Adventures of Hedda Gabbler play several seasons ago). Juanita can be found tonight on YouTube.
Thursday night at 8p on Dragon’s Facebook Live stream, Co-Artistic Director Alika Spencer-Koknar will continue reading from Time Sailors by local artists Shelli Frew.
Friday night at 8p it’s the COVID Crew Review on Facebook from local artists like Max Tachis. Roneet Aliza Rahamim, Maria Marquis, and Tasi Alabastro (our Macbeth team).
On Saturday night at 8p our pal Nathaniel Card will be doing a Facebook live reading on the Dragon page from Mark Twain’s Letters from Earth.
On Sunday afternoon at 2p Co-Artistic Director Bora “Max” Koknar will do some live readings from Edgar Allen Poe (with a possible switch to some Neil Gaiman)
On the educational front, we offering our Adult Essentials of Playwriting class with Bridgette Dutta Portman ONLINE, and Neva Hutchinson is converting her acting classed to an ONLINE format.
We are also going to be continuing on virtually with youth classes like our Theatre Intensives, and our Storytelling & Play class. Please visit http://rwcyt.orgfor all the details!
You can find out more about performance schedule changes and new digital offerings on our website, and on our Social Media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). In these tough times, as we begin to go a little stir crazy, and perhaps more than a little isolated, in our homes we hope that we’re able to provide you with a little diversion, some fun or perhaps a bit of a sense of community. And if you would like to keep us going, please please please, keep checking out what we’ve got available to keep maintaining a sense of community thru these tough times, and consider donating so we can keep paying our $12,000/month rent and keep our staff employed so they can keep feeding themselves and their families through this extraordinary situation.
Thank you for being part of the Dragon family. We hope to see you (virtually) at the show.
Max, Alika, Kim, Ellie, Mae Linh, Charlotte, and Justine
March 20 –
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Patrons,
We hope you are able to stay safe and secure in your homes during these insane times. As we begin our first cancelled weekend of performances, we wanted to announce a couple of ways that we at the Dragon are working to keep the fires burning for theatre and the arts while we are all taking some time to help flatten the curve for everyone’s sake.
First of all, we are launching Dragon on Demand. Over the next couple of weeks, we will begin building a limited library of Vimeo released On Demand archival videos we’ve taken of a few previous productions to give you a chance to continue experiencing theatre while we all shelter in place, and perhaps even get to catch that one show that you missed in its original run. Every viewing of these videos will help us continue paying our rent, our small staff, and support our local community of artists so we can hit the ground running when we’re safely able to present live events again. We’re kicking off Dragon on Demand tonight with a brilliant production we had the honor of hosting at the Dragon in our 2019 2nd Stages Series, the production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, produced by Roneet Aliza Rahamim and Max Tachis. You can check it out here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/macbethatdragon?
In addition to Dragon on Demand, while we figure out other ways to build community, make art, and amplify the voices of the many brilliant artists in our community, we will begin putting our mouths…. where our mouths are, and offer up a Dragon Reading Hour with Max & Alika during the times when we would normally be in performance to connect in some small way to our Dragon family during this tough time and scratch that artistic itch that brought us to the Dragon in the first place. Our Reading Hour will go live on our Facebook page this Saturday at 8:00pm and Sunday at 2:00pm, with Alika sharing a reading of the new novel Time Sailors by Bay Area local author, actor, immersive creator, contortionist et al. Shelli Frew, while we will run a quick poll of choices for Max’s reading between 3 classics that live in the Public Domain. Each day we will read about an hour and take a little time to catch up with you all. We will be kicking off the stream on Facebook Live, since that is one of the more convenient platforms where much of our audience hangs out, but we are working on also making recordings and other live platforms available as we get the ball rolling for those of you who are not on Facebook. Be on the lookout for a Facebook event coming soon.
We are also working on converting as many of our educational offerings to online courses and finding new ways to serve you on that front. We’ve already begun offering our Adult Essentials of Playwriting class with Bridgette Dutta Portman digitally, which has just been featured in the LA Times, with adult acting classes to go digital soon. We do also offer private coaching for adults looking to fine tune their public presentation skills that include topics like way finding your design voice, building confidence, mindfulness techniques, and that beef up your storytelling and communication skills as these are all key skills for corporate presentations and sales staff. To register for the adult playwriting class go here, and to get information on private coaching go here and Product Maestro workshops (Max is a co-creator and teacher on some units) here.
We are also going to be continuing on virtually with youth classes like our Theatre Intensives, and our Storytelling & Play class. Please stay tuned and visit http://rwcyt.org for future updates.
You can find out more about performance schedule changes and new digital offerings on our website, and on our Social Media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). In these tough times, as we begin to go a little stir crazy, and perhaps more than a little isolated, in our homes we hope that we’re able to provide you with a little diversion, some fun or perhaps a bit of a sense of community. And if you would like to keep us going, please please please, keep checking out what we’ve got available to keep maintaining a sense of community thru these tough times, and consider donating so we can keep paying our $12,000/month rent and keep some of our staff employed so they can keep feeding themselves and their families through this extraordinary situation.
Thank you for being part of the Dragon family. We hope to see you (virtually) at the show.
Max, Alika, Kim, Ellie, Mae Linh, Charlotte, and Justine
March 15 –
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Patrons,
As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve rapidly, we’re writing to you with another update. We announced a few days ago that we would be going on with performances with updated policies in place. On Saturday, March 14th the San Mateo County Health Officer issued a new order that mass gatherings of 50 or more people are prohibited, and gatherings of 10-49 people are prohibited unless they take a specific list of precautions. Given the size of our space, our own internal guidelines have been in line within the medical guidelines established for that smaller group meeting.
However, with the current County Health Officer order, and after discussion with our team of artists, we’ve decided to make the difficult call to suspend further performances of both The Baltimore Waltz and Confession starting on Sunday March 15th. This was a very challenging decision for all of us at the Dragon while we continue to try to balance the safety and the well being of our community against our mission as a community resource. For more information on COVID-19 in San Mateo County please visit the County Health Emergency Operations Center website at https://cmo.smcgov.org/eoc For information about “flattening the curve,” which is what the health departments are now all trying to do with the restrictions on public gatherings, this is a great read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/
To the end of serving our community, we are already working with our playwrights and rights holders on other ways we may be able to share these shows with our Dragon family in digital form. We are also immediately turning our attention towards how we may be able to support our community through this time as a resource. There are still a million ways to build community through performance and storytelling, and process the world around us through that experience. And as long as Dragon is around, we will be right alongside this community to support their efforts to find understanding and unity through creative expression. Whether that is through 1 on 1 theatre experiences, using technology to distribute the work of artists beyond our walls, or whatever other brilliant solution a member of our community is devising for our current quandary and wondering what resources they could harness to make their idea a reality.
As things develop rapidly, we will be in touch, and appreciate you taking the time to read these updates. If you are curious, please check in on our website and social media channels about the status of all our programs. As much as we would like to be able to say x, y and z is suspended until this time, the truth is that the circumstances are developing too rapidly for any of us to decisively know what the new normal will be in two weeks or even two months. And in the meantime, we will keep you updated on a day to day and case by case basis. (And we promise, this doesn’t mean daily wall-of-text emails to everyone. But you can expect to hear more from us if there are any changes to a program for which you have a registration or ticket. )
Finally, if you value the Dragon, do consider a donation to help us make sure we can weather this madness. On April 1, we will pay our rent of about $12,000 to have a theatre when this has blown over, and our staff will pay their rents and mortgages on their homes. We realize everyone is worried, or already getting ready for a financial struggle with what is happening right now, but any financial gifts you are able to make at this time will make a world of difference towards our odds of survival, and we promise, as always to put your support right back to supporting our local community of brilliant artists help us get through this difficult time. You can make a donation to Dragon via our Facebook fundraiser (they don’t take any fees whatsoever so your online donation is maximized) at https://www.facebook.com/donate/616755669170471/
Thank you SO MUCH for all of your support and stay well!
Sincerely,
Alika U. Spencer-Koknar, Co-Artistic Director
Bora “Max” Koknar, Co-Artistic Director
Kimberly Wadycki, Managing Director