Theatre Alumni Showcase Projects at Edinburgh Fringe 2024
A dynamic group of School of the Arts alumni will participate in this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world’s largest performing arts festival. The annual festival showcases more than 59,600 performances of 3,841 different shows across 322 venues running through August 26 this year.
Acting alumna Yeena Sung ’20, Directing alumna Chaesong Kim ’23, and Sound Art alumnus Anthony Sertel Dean ’22 are heading to Edinburgh with Welcome to My Room, the interdisciplinary one-woman show they recently workshopped in the East Village. The show comprises a dynamic blend of musical concert, poetry, and personal narrative, and draws inspiration from Sung’s experiences living in New York. Main character 'Y,' a Korean expat turned New Yorker, delves into themes of perpetual foreignness and the complexities of inhabiting a female body, as well as memory, family, and inheritance. The show aims to evoke “vulnerability, warmth, and comfort” while providing a platform to unlearn societal conditioning, confront internalized oppression, and grieve isolation and cultural loss.
Welcome to My Room will run through August 10, 2024, at Greenside @ George Street - Mint Studio, with performances starting at 11:35 am.
The Blood, directed by alumnus Sam Gibbs '24, written by Emily Everett '24, with dramaturgy by Sarah Bedwell '24, and Gianna Durante '24 as Stage Manager, will also run at the festival. The Blood presents an imagined future where traditional means of storytelling have vanished and a group of traveling storytellers roams the land, preserving the art of narrative through their recollections. Join them for three tales by the fabled Brothers Grimm: “The Three Snake Leaves,” “Faithful Johannes,” and "The Robber Bridegroom."
The Blood, performed by New York City's Stairwell Theater Company, will run at The Annexe at Paradise in the Vault, with performances at 10:20 pm through August 10, 2024.
Last but not least, The Amazing Doctor She Medicine Show, co-created and directed by Phoebe Brooks ’23, will also run in Edinburgh through August 10. In addition to Brooks, fellow Theatre alumni Olivia Rigdon ’23 and Kanika Vaish ’22 participated in the show as Generative Workshop participants, and Janvi Sai (BC ’23) is the Production Assistant. In The Amazing Doctor She Medicine Show, audience members join the quest to recover Doctor She’s “Miracle Cure,” a wellness supplement lost since the 13th century, much like the story of the doctor herself. In a madcap blend of humor, games, speculative fiction, interactive elements, and totally accurate medical facts, you’ll learn the incredible history of this extraordinary literary figure from Boccaccio to Shakespeare. This performance reveals the history of misogyny in western medicine, in a hilarious journey into the world of wellness and medical misogyny.
“The Amazing Doctor She Medicine Show was initially created as a Shakespeare class project, though it's developed a lot since then,” Brooks said. “My professor identified that I was expending all my energy on the aspects of the play I didn't care for, rather than focusing on the parts I found interesting. She helped me have the courage to reimagine the play as a new piece focused on the life of a female doctor from the Middle Ages, which is technically just a small plot point in the original All's Well. As a result, my co-creator Katie Fanning and I built our whole show around only 30 lines (two scenes) from the roughly 3000 lines that make up the full play (supplemented by historical context and jokes that I've written and Katie brilliantly improvises).”
You can catch The Amazing Doctor She Medicine Show at Dovecot Studios with performances from Tuesday to Friday at 4:30 PM, and on Saturday at 1:30 PM and 4:30 PM, until August 10, 2024.