February 19
1001 Beds
Written by and featuring Tim Miller

Immensely popular performance artist and gay activist Tim Miller kicks off the season with a fourth alteractive appearance, this time featuring his brand new show titled 1001 Beds, which actually has Cincinnati origins. This raucous and rowdy exploration of Mr. Miller's adventures in a performer's life chronicles his travels across love, politics and art. From a gay teen's head-on collision with life in a sleazy hotel across the street from the Hollywood Bowl to an ecstatic vision of a sex-positive future on a mattress in a police holding cell, 1001 Beds is a fiercely funny, sexy and border-crossing story about the transforming power of art.

Tim Miller is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and gay rights activist. He is the author of the books Body Blows and Shirts and Skin and his performance texts have appeared in the play collections O Solo Homo and Sharing the Delirium. Mr. Miller teaches performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Theater and is co-founder of Performance Space 122 in New York City and Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.

Based on the writings of Cincinnati’s own award-winning columnist and commentator Kathy Y. Wilson, Your Negro Tour Guide is a provocative solo performance piece about identity in modern America. Through scathing and thoughtful rants, letters, music and nightmares, actress Torie Wiggins steers audiences through the modern black landscape of race, gender and class. Borrowing from spoken word, hip hop, cabaret and stand-up, this uncensored monologue is a searing, honest look at race in modern America.

Kathy Y. Wilson is an award-winning writer and the former weekly columnist for CityBeat. Her commentaries also have been heard on NPR's All Things Considered. She has written for Newsday and has won awards from the Ohio Associated Press, the Association of Alternative Newspapers, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Slam Cincinnati brings together some of the city’s best performance poets for a one-of-a-kind alteractive performance. The evening is coordinated by Cincinnati native Obalaye Macharia, who performs simply under the name Obalaye and is the founder of The Artistic Order of 144K. The group is a collaborative of spoken word artists, authors, playwrights, recording artists, producers, actors, singers and musicians who are, in their own words, “bombing spots with oral tags and spraying down audiences with lyrical graffiti.” The 144K performance ensemble tours extensively both in the United States and abroad.

Natalie Sullivan, Stacey Hallal and Sarah Maher are the trio of ladies who perform as the sketch comedy and improvisational group Firecracker, which is also the title of their alteractive show. Firecracker began performing together in February 2005 and appearances have included the iO and Playground theatres. According to Time Out Chicago, “The scenes are funny, thanks to inventive characters placed in unusual situations. And the show’s worth seeing for hilarious Mr. Clean commercials and other great video tidbits interspersed throughout.”

Stacey Hallal has performed and taught comedy at more than 25 international comedy festivals across the U.S. and Canada. In Chicago, she plays with Second City's house ensemble The Lordosis Effect, iO's Millies, in the duo sketch group Cusick and Hallal and in the groundbreaking improvisation show In Every Life, in which she and Mark Sutton improvise a comedy, a tragedy and a romance. Natalie Sullivan came to the Chicago improv scene from Florida in 2003. In addition to Firecracker, she performs improvisation with Lunch Club and sketch comedy with Johnny’s Regret. Sarah Maher performed at iO Chicago with Psychoplasmics, at the Playground Theater with Cowlick and with the children’s touring show Hogwash, in addition to directing the all-female improvisation team The Misfits.

The Values Americans Live By is presented by the Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration (L.E.C.). A physical and funny performance piece, the show is based on the pamphlet of the same name, written by cultural anthropologist L. Robert Kohls in 1984, that articulated 13 American values — personal control over the environment, time and its control, competition, free enterprise and future orientation, among them — in an attempt to demystify the American people for foreign visitors.

The show first was performed for The Delhi Alternative Theatre Festival in Delhi, India, in 2004, while the North American premiere took place in collaboration with the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Los Angeles later that year. The L.E.C. has endeavored to “cultivate ecstasy through physical theatre” since 1996. According to its web site, the L.E.C. “explores the practice of audiences and performers as they converge on an undefined point. That point in physical space and the narrative frame of the event are treated as variable conditions in laboratory experiments made possible only in collaboration with the audience.”

Acclaimed at this past year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival, performer Simone Perrin comes to alteractive with a new show: Simone Perrin Sings Songs of Love and Love Lost with her Accordion Pixie. The performance combines an accordion, a voice that “packs a wallop,” a tale of a broken-hearted vampire and boots that were made for walkin’.

Ms. Perrin recently returned to her home of Minnesota after graduating from Oberlin College/Conservatory and living for five years in New York City. There, she performed with Mettawee River Theater Company, the Main Squeeze Accordion Orchestra and the sketch comedy group Bad Astronauts. In Minneapolis, she has worked with Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Chicago Avenue Project, Playwrights Center, Thirst Theater, Theater Latte Da and Mixed Blood Theatre. This past summer, she and Pixie the accordion premiered two shows at the Fringe: her one-woman show Tall Tale of a Broken Heart and In Hopes of Claudia with Kevin Kling.