The Year of the Bitch
There’s a pretty general consensus that 2017 was a bitch of a year.
And it was. But in the words of one of our ‘Women Who Inspire Us’, Amy Poehler:
Bitches Get Shit Done.
I, for one, sincerely hope that 2017 goes down in history as the year we stopped crying about it and did something. The year we gave a f*ck, without giving a f*ck — if you know what I mean.
The Dirty Blondes, for example, kicked off the year of resistance with The Resister Project — a 51-person festival of raging mad artists which has become a defining moment in our company’s history. After the election, we took stock of the art we were creating, the resources we had available and we changed our course so that we could be a better company — a company that listens to the moment, to others and tries really really hard not to be a tone-deaf company. (It’s an on-going process and we always have more to learn).
2017 continued as a year of reflection for us, as we moved forward with the world premiere of How to Be Safe at The Kraine. A 12-performance run of a new play that explores mental illness and a desire to feel to safe in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Finally, we hosted a staged reading of Darcy Parker Bruce’s Soldier Poet, a devastating beautiful poem of a play that is currently blowing people’s minds in DC. It’s a reflective and daring play — centered around the war in Syria — but totally human in its universality, the questions — Who am I and what can I do?
In 2017, we asked ourselves ‘Who am I?’ and reemerged with a new inclusive brand image and a new outlook on the future. What can we do?
In 2018, we will move forward as the new The Dirty Blondes. We’ll host The Hair Project — a night of solo performances centered around the idea of hair: how it defines us, changes us, controls peoples perceptions and expectations, how we control it to reflect our true selves. We want to tell our story — the one behind the name The Dirty Blondes — and then we want to hear other artists tell theirs.
Then, we will host UnBanned Plays, a performance cycle of American plays that have been subject to censorship and silencing. Now more than ever its time to confront America’s history of silencing artists in an effort to quell social resistance and change. What are the plays we haven’t heard before, what can we learn from those stories so that we can be prepared to find censorship moving forward?
We will also explore a new type of programming — The Dirty Dirty Blondes — where we support, workshop and help develop a brand new play or project. This year we are working with the incredible Mia Anderson and her ravishing one-woman show ‘Love is Love is Love.’ We are working with her to provide the resources she needs to rewrite and re-imagine the work, and then we will stage the work in a late Spring or Summer workshop production. It’s a glorious work of self-reflection and celebration and we are honored she has let us into her process.
And of course, we will continue to find ways to support a growing community of brave independent artists through our Beta Reading Series and Play-in-a-Day festivals, where artists come together to mine new ideas, new collaborations and new stories.
2017 was a bitch — but maybe the good kind of bitch that makes you take stock of who exactly you are. We are poised and ready to kick 2018’s ass and we can’t wait to see you and share it all with you along the way.
Donate now to help support the 2018 season of The Dirty Blondes — https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/the-dirty-blondes/campaigns/846
