We've been hard at work at the Torrent Collective the past couple of weeks. We've had a photo shoot with the fabulous Kate Raines and have put out our first press release. I'd like to share some of the images and press material with you.
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Artistic Director of Groundswell, Scott Sheppard, goes head to head with 2013 FringeArts LAB Fellow, Mason Rosenthal, in Go Long Big Softie, a new devised theater piece that tackles the hard and soft questions of contemporary masculinity. Under the assistance of Charlotte Ford, who delighted audiences in 2012 with BANG, a clown show about female sexuality, Go Long Big Softie enters the world of defunct 1980’s mens’ groups, taking audiences on a mythopoetic journey to heal the wounds of the male psyche.
The site specific piece takes place at the Torrent Collective, a dilapidated architectural palimpsest in the Italian Market District. Rosenthal explains, “This building has been a 7UP bottling factory, a boxing club, and a Vietnamese cultural center. Now it is a space for fire spinners, DJ’s, martial artists, and rappers. It’s gone through its own masculine identity crisis and it’s falling apart. It’s the perfect place to investigate the past, present, and future of male identity.”
Robert Bly, a major figure in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 80’s and 90’s controversially claims, “Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.” Go Long Big Softie asks, what can an antiquated men’s group obsessed with the power of myth teach us about becoming a man today?