IN PRAISE OF FOLLY Lead Artists

AISLING ARTS, INC. Bryn Manion is a co-founder of Aisling Arts, INC., the Astoria-based theater company. She is currently directing her original piece, Force Part One: Wanderlust which will debut in May. Her recent directing credits include Me & Ruth, The Beggar's Opera, When the Levee Breaks, Macbeth, A Few Hallelujahs, Love's Labour's Lost and Twelfth Night. As a performer, Bryn has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and The International Performance Arts Symposia. Her favorite roles include Rosaura in Life's a Dream, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Mephistophiles in Dr. Faustus, Betty in Cloud Nine, and Wheeler in Angel City. Bryn teaches acting at the Drama Studio in Springfield, MA when not busy with her commitments with Aisling Arts in NYC. Wendy Remington, co-founder of Aisling Arts, oversees much of the planning and development of the company in addition to her extensive performance contributions. Some of her most recent roles include Jenny in The Beggar's Opera, Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Antigone in Antigone, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, a Witch in Macbeth, Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost and Maria in Twelfth Night. She most recently directed Aisling Arts' production of Life's a Dream and is a designer for many of their productions.

ALEXANDRA ARON has directed numerous productions throughout the NY area, including As You Like It for Shakesperience Productions (Waterbury, Ct); Eloise and Ray by Stephanie Fleishmann (New Georges); Bei Nacht - a klezmer musical, composed by Frank London (La Mama, Julliard); Vinegar Tom by Caryl Churchill (Teabag Productions); Great Men of Science by Glen Berger at The Currican Theater and at Access Theater; and The HR Project (Peculiar Works Project), among others. Alex spent a year in the Middle East working at Assiraj Theater in Ramallah, Palestine, where she directed the Arabic language production of The Mole's Dance (Mohammad Kamel Jabr). She also directed No Second Troy (Karen Hartman) at the Ha-Canyon Theater in Jerusalem. In Seattle, work includes Dark Ride by Len Jenkin (Freehold), Mango Tea by Paul Wietz (New City Theater) and an original adaptation of Salome (Annex Theater). Alex is a member of the Women's Project Artistic Leadership Forum and Directing Forum and is also a member of New Georges Theater. She has been a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and has assistant directed at Seattle Rep, the Guthrie Theater, Circle Rep and La Mama. Alex is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

LAURA BUTCHY has written, directed and dramaturged many productions in New York and Pennsylvania. Her dramaturgy work in NYC includes Herakles, Garden: The Lorca Project, and Strip. Laura served as literary intern for A Winter's Tale and Julius Caesar with the Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. She received her MFA in Dramaturgy and Script Development at Columbia University, where she dramaturged countless productions and managed the Schapiro Theater. In Pittsburgh, she was assistant production manager for La Cage Aux Folles, Kiss Me Kate, Chess, Cinderella and Gypsy with the Civic Light Opera. She also founded and produced the Annual Westminster One-Act Festival in New Wilmington, PA.

YANIRA CASTRO is the director/choreographer of the New York City based performance group, Yanira Castro + Company. Composed of performers and designers, the Company fuses highly stylized movement with original music, text, costumes and visual environments. Her work has been presented in a variety of venues in New York including: Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, HERE, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Dixon Place, and the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center. Most recently, Castro has been working on site-specific installation projects. The Company’s latest piece, Cartography, was presented by XO: Projects Inc. at the Old American Can Factory in 2002. Other site-specific works include 2:1 commissioned by Peculiar Works Project for The Judson House Project. The Company has also been presented out of state at Dance Place in Washington, DC; Amherst College in Massachusetts; and The University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. Castro is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts’ BUILD grant, a Bessie Schönberg/First Light Commission from Dance Theater Workshop with funds from the Jerome Foundation, and three Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant awards. Currently, she is working on a new site-specific, dance project, Beacon, to be presented by Dance Theater Workshop at the Brooklyn Lyceum in January 2005. www.yaniracastrocompany.org.

NICOLE CAVALIERE's NYC choregraphic credits include Temperaments and Witches and Lovers (Frederick Loewe Theater), The Seven Year Itch (Access Theater), Oh Dad, Poor Dad... (Playwright's Horizons Project), The Gymnastics Nutcracker (LIGA), and An Occurrence Remembered (WSC). Nicole has been commissioned a number of times to create works for Peculiar Works Project. This includes the first showing of The Human Exhibit from the Big Apple Metropolis at CHARAS/El Bohio in BIG ART in Small Places '98; HEBAM later served as the debut performance piece for Nicole's multi-media performing arts company, The Cavaliere Players, in the 2001 New York International Fringe Festival. Nicole also collaborated with PWP producer Ralph Lewis on "The Den of Vice" section of The Judson House Project. Besides her extensive training in dance in studios in Philadelphia and New York, Nicole has completed the two-year professional acting program at William Esper Studios, and studies piano, guitar and drums. Nicole is the General Manager of Primary Stages, an Off Broadway theater.

chiaki is a New York based visual artist/designer interested in performance media, experimental music and psychology. Her work ranges from live visual performance with abstract images so called ³8 bit motion paintings² that combine aspects of minimalist and organic aesthetics to interactive installation. chiaki has been experimenting with interactions between visuals, sound and movement to explore new modes of reactive expression. She holds BFA in Computer Art from The School of Visual Arts(New York), Scenic Design and Performance Art from Musashino Art University (Tokyo) and The New School University(New York). chiaki is impassioned about exploring synesthesia ­ cross sense modality and deconstructing old media with new technology to create a hybrid collaborative art form with various types of artists/musicains. She has a background in media design in entertainment/media industry includ. MTV Networks, CBS, News Corporation. chiaki has performed live visuals at accompanied by experimental musicians at New York City's video performance venues, including Share at OpenAir, Remote Lounge and the X-fest experimental video festival. She also has provided visuals for musicians working on the forefront of the electronic music scenes at Kitchen, Knitting Factory, Galapagos, Volume, Phonomena, The Bunker at Tonic, Dance Theater Workshop and The Tank.

STEVEN DEAN is artistic director of The Skeleton Organisation. Recent productions and installations include The Lysistrata Project at HERE Arts Center; the site-specific fashion show Fashion Feast at the Frontier; Ridden, presented as a part of Peculiar Works' Don Quixote Project at HERE; Compulsion Pts 1-6, also presented at HERE, and The Naked and the Nude (in pursuit of everything and nothing), installed within Hotel New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.

DANIEL T. DENVER's second CD, Periphemera, is due for release this fall. Recent works include the spoken-word jazz oratorios Toadskin and Misodoctakleidist for Peculiar Works; a flute sonata for Janet Axelrod, an orchestral piece veldt: dry August, 1892, for which he won the '97 Kenneth Davenport Composition Competition; and scores for the films Goodbye Charlie and Sam Shepard's Action. He regularly plays with various rock, pop and funk bands. His duo Tincture with Eisa Davis had two songs featured on the Showtime series Soul Food.

ALEC DUFFY's most recent piece, America the Beautiful: Can I get a Sacco & Vanzetti Value Meal, super-sized, with a Diet Coke to go, please? was presented in December at New Perspectives Theatre. In 2003, he was awarded a Drama League Directing Fellowship to work at the Hangar Theatre. There he directed Gertrude Stein’s Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It and the world premiere of Carlos Murillo’s A Human Interest Story. His play, Biography’s Top Ten People of the Millennium Sing Their Favorite Kurt Weill Songs, was an award-winner at the 2001 New York Fringe Festival. Other work he's have done includes an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey for the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and direction of Friedrich Duerrenmatt's Der Besuch der Alten Dame (The Visit) and Adrienne Kennedy's A Rat's Mass. Duffy is a distant relative of American patriot Nathan Hale. He is a graduate of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris and Duke University.

DIANE DWYER's work encompasses video, installation and performance. She has worked on a number of installations with Peculiar Works, including Judson House Project. Her current work is an online performance, Diane the American Swimmer, www.dianetheamericanswimmer.com, which will be featured in the International Digital Media Festival in Cuba this summer.

MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS' recent directing credits include Recent Tragic Events by Craig Wright (Playwright's Horizons); Havana is Waiting by Eduardo Machado (Cherry Lane); Force Continuum (Atlantic Theatre) and Breath, Boom (Yale Rep) by Kia Corthron; Finer Noble Gases by Adam Rapp and When the Sea Drowns in Sand by Eduardo Machado (Humana Festival); and ¡Siempre México con nosotros! (Sna Jtz'ibajom, Chiapas, Mexico). His play have been produced by Twilight Theatre Company; Flush Puppy Productions, Chicago; LEFT Theatre - at La Mama and La Tea; and INTAR NewWorks Lab; among many others. Michael is the recipient of a TCG New Generations Grant, NEA/TCG Career Development Program Grant, a playwriting fellowship from Mark Taper Forum, a Princess Grace Fellowship, a Van Lier Fellowship from Repertorio Español, and a Drama League Director's residency. He is Producing Artistic Director of INTAR in NYC.

FERNANDO MANECA is a NYC-based hybrid performance artist. Mr. Maneca has been creating and developing work for over 15 years, honing and establishing a unique aesthetic voice and eclectic stagecraft by actively exploring the boundaries between disciplines and genres -- i.e. movement, text, audio design, costume design, stage design, and video projections. His work has been supported by grants from Meet The Composer and the Brooklyn Arts Council; space grants from BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and a two-year residency at HERE Arts Center. As a choreographer, composer, director and video-maker, Mr. Maneca has received commissions from several performing artists and companies in NYC, Los Angeles, Rhode Island and Portugal.

LYNN NEUMAN is a New York-based choreographer and teacher who serves as an Artistic Director of Artichoke Dance Company, a company she co-founded in 1995. Her athletic dance style is derived from combining modern dance with contact improvisation and gymnastics. Lynn's choreography has been presented in NYC under the auspices of Artichoke at venues including Dancespace/St. Mark's, Joyce SoHo, the Ohio Theater, the Merce Cunningham Studio, Solo Arts Group and the Evolving Arts Theater, and in festivals including Fringe NYC, the Fringe Festival for Independent Dance Artists in Toronto, Dance NOW, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Humor Unplucked. Her video/dance works have been presented by Peculiar Works Project and the National Association of Artists' Organization and shown at the American Dance Festival and the Virginia Film Festival. Lynn has been a guest teacher and choreographer at Sweet Briar College, the American College Dance Festival, Virginia Intermont College, The New Jersey Governor's School for the Arts, and is currently is a yoga instructor, a teaching artist for the Lincoln Center Aesthetic Education Institute and modern dance instructor at Peridance. Lynn has a BFA from The University of Michigan and an MFA from Temple University.

GABRIEL SHANKS' has directed productions at HERE, Present Company Theatorium, the Red Room, Seelen Theatre, Ohio Theatre, Judson House (NYC); Theatre Project, Pussycat Theatre, AXIS Theatre (Baltimore); Source Theatre Company, the Corcoran Gallery, Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.); Seven Stages Performing Arts Center (Atlanta); R.S.9 Szinhas (Budapest), and other theatres nationally and internationally. As a found of the theatre company Funkopolis, Gabriel wrote and directed Twelve Confessions, Pierced, Poor Super Man, 3 Stories To The Ground, rite #55/wonderwall elegy and Bochenski's Brain. Also a playwright, Gabriel has received numerous awards for his work, including the 1998 Theatre Project Honor for Outstanding Vision in the Theatre, the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Award, Outstanding Production of the 1995 Washington Theatre Festival and others. Upcoming projects include Steve Berkoff's adaptation of Fall of the House of Usher for his new company, Creative Mechanics, and Buckaroo, his latest play.