Hogfish Farm to Stage – Taking Space
7:00pm
Doors at 6:30
$12 day of show
Taking Space is a program of new spoken word works by women and non-binary artists-in-residence Julia Campanelli, Kammy Ibarra, Julia Jennings and Anna Grace Uehlein.
The program will consist of a public share of works-in-progress and a facilitated critical response with artists and audience members.
Julia Campanelli
Flame
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
FLAME is based on Margaret Lang, one of the 4000+ people (84 percent women) who were executed under the Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563. For two hundred years, known as the Burning Times, Scotland persecuted more people for witchcraft than any other European country. Margaret was a pious midwife, accused by an 11-year-old girl to be the “worst witch” of the Paisley 8 who were executed in Paisley, Scotland, on June 10th, 1697.
By shining a light on this miscarriage of justice, I hope their names will rise from the flames, receive an official pardon from Scottish Parliament, and set a much-needed legal precedent, that justice has no expiration date. Persecution of “witches” is not in the distant past. A 2020 UN report states that at least 20,000 “witches” were killed across 60 countries between 2009 and 2019.
Margaret Lang is the inspiration for my screenplay The Paisley Witch Trial, recipient of 12 Best Screenplay awards including Raindance and Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope finalist. I intend FLAME and the TPWT film to be memorials to those wrongly persecuted in Scotland and to help address the ongoing witchcraft-related violence in the world.
Julia Campanelli (She/her/hers) is an award-winning writer, director, producer, actor, and Raindance Screenwriting Fellow. Founder and Producing Director of Shelter Film, a New York-based independent film company dedicated to changing the cinematic narrative by creating films by and about women and marginalized humans for an inclusive, diverse, worldwide audience. Julia also founded and was Artistic Director of Shelter Theatre Group, a 501c3 company dedicated to equality and inclusion on stage. She directed and produced 13 stage productions in NYC, including the critically acclaimed immersive Macbeth on LES, staged in St. Teresa’s Church in NYC’s infamous five points neighborhood.
Her film, 116, inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, has screened in over 50 festivals worldwide and received 30 awards, including 10 Best Film, seven Best Director, six Best Actor awards among others. Her screenplay THE PAISLEY WITCH TRIAL has received 12 Best Screenplay awards including Raindance, Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope finalist, Academy Nicholl Fellowship Top 15%, Red List Top 1%, and is Black List recommended. THE PAISLEY WITCH TRIAL, the true, untold story of the last witch hunt in Scotland, grew out of Margaret Lang’s story, the subject of Julia’s solo show, Flame, which she is extremely excited to be developing at the Hogfish 2024 residency.
As an actor, Julia is known for NBCUniversal’s Dementia 13, Shelter Film’s 116, Kill the Monsters, and One Life To Live. She appeared as Hecate and Margaret Lang in the OBIE Award-winning show Sleep No More (Punchdrunk).
Kammy Ibarra
Carpool
Silo and their sister Allison are always the last to be picked up from school. Silo meets Lauren, another student who also waits to get picked up, and together they quickly build a friendly routine. When Lauren breaks the news that they won’t be waiting after school anymore, Silo is forced to face the reality of their hardships and life without Lauren after school. Carpool is a short play about a young person in the midst of learning to navigate adolescence and homelessness.
Kammy Ibarra (they/them) grew up in the small, made-up-sounding town of Walnut, California, just outside of Los Angeles. After a gap in their theatre education, followed by an untimely global pandemic, Kammy returned to continue their schooling at Cypress College, where they stepped into roles in The Toxic Avenger, and Hair. Kammy made the move to NYC in 2022 to attend Circle in the Square Theatre School to further pursue their passion for performance and storytelling. At Circle, they were given the space to explore their identity as it relates to their artistry, and dedicate their time at school to sharing their experiences with their peers as a proud queer, indigenous-Latinx artist. In recent projects, Kammy has been featured in several devised works, including a musical-parody retelling of the Super Mario Brothers through the music of Adele, and a staged reading of Wakeman: The Rosetta Project, a new Americana folk musical by Jenn Grinels. Kammy’s ultimate mission is to cultivate a world (in theatre and beyond!) which honors true diversity, and celebrates the experiences of marginalized communities. They look forward to continuing to develop new works that reflect their core values & celebrates their deep love for their culture, shoe-throwing power ballads, and their unique sense of humor!
Julia Jennings
The Poor Clares
The Poor Clares, named for the Order of Saint Clare (the Roman Catholic nuns), follows four young women—all named Clare—living together in a small house (or maybe it’s a convent?) not long after their college graduation. An exploration of modern-day queer divinity through the lens of girlhood and the saltwater gothic, this play ventures to ask, how do we identify what is sacred? How do we worship each other? In what ways do the self-mythology and obsession of girlhood take on a spiritual quality? For these five days, we are all Clares, we are together on the Titanic submersible that has gone missing, and we must keep seeking new versions of ourselves or else we will surely perish.
Julia Jennings is a Maine-based writer/director. She holds a BA in theater and English from Bowdoin College and has also studied at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. She has worked with companies such as the Theater at Monmouth, Hogfish, and most recently at Portland Stage, as a directing apprentice. Her written works include The Wash/In the End, we all go to Providence (2022 Maine State Winner, Clauder Competition for New England Playwrights), What if this Were a Wedding? (workshopped with Melancholics Anonymous, produced by Maine Playwrights Festival 2024), and Goodbye Rhoda.
Julia Jennings at New Play Exchange
Anna Grace Uehlein
Measure v. Measure
In the era of post-Roe America, Shakespeare’s lesser-known comedy Measure for Measure is more relevant than ever before. Following the young nun Isabella as she is dragged into a mess of politics, sex, and trickery, Shakespeare makes surprisingly potent commentary on the plights of existing as a woman in a man’s world, particularly under a man’s government. Similar to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure is a deeply serious story at its core, but is shrouded in cheap comedy that is entirely unrelated to the plot in order to market the play to a socially restrictive government and society. When one removes the comedic stone surrounding the play, one finds a shimmering geode of nuanced social commentary. Choosing to produce Shakespeare’s entire original text as if it is scripture tends to bog down modern audiences with entirely too much text and too many plot lines, and in cases like Measure for Measure, a social message that is quite difficult to decipher. Transforming Shakespeare’s text into something suitable for a modern audience and highlighting modern social issues will regenerate this story that I have fallen so deeply in love with, hopefully providing audiences with a nuanced look at the prominent history of male governmental control over the female body, and the shocking similarity between that history and the actions of our so-called “modern” government.
Anna Grace Uehlein (she/they) is a queer, indigenous actor, musician, and storyteller from Washington, D.C., currently studying acting at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. They are especially inspired by art that intentionally pushes the envelope on political and social issues, and aims to actively create important cultural change. Anna Grace is thrilled to be making their professional theatrical debut with Hogfish, and is greatly looking forward to helping build a healing community space for creating cutting-edge new work.