Crossing Borders II: An Artistic Engagement

		The inner landscape of the insane - intense and spiritually charged Restraints created and performed by Diane Edgecomb
Discover new and startling possibilities for theatrical expression On The Edge A Workshop Intensive
		...madness and genius, war and peace, prison and freedom... "N" A staged reading of a new play by Laura Harrington

In 2003, Pilgrim produced its first, modest, "international" festival, Crossing Borders – an intercultural engagement, which opened at the Boston Center for the Arts. The festival brought challenging theatre work to Boston that linked artists from Massachusetts and abroad, including Deborah Lake Fortson’s Body and Sold!, Perla Logarzo’s There are Stones in Heaven…, Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Sherrill Stoodley’s young, all-women company, Serious Play!, and Chimaera Physical Theater’s The Living Room. Post-show discussion topics during the first Crossing Borders festival included the critical crisis of the growing sex trade industry here and abroad, political and personal persecution in Argentina, and the creative process itself.

Pilgrim has proposed to make the festival an annual or biennial event. Crossing Borders is conceived of as a festival of artistic exchange, often intercultural in nature. The company believes that this effort offers a unique opportunity to introduce Massachusetts audiences and artists to new forms of theatre, generate a more multi-cultural range of audiences, and offer area artists the chance to engage in ongoing artistic dialogue.

This year, Crossing Borders II has been re-imagined as an exchange between differing creative languages and practices. It offers the visions and processes of two women guest artists, an award-winning Massachusetts playwright, Laura Harrington, who is in collaboration with the Pilgrim company on a new, visionary work for theatre about Napoleon; and actor/auteur, Boston's Diane Edgecomb, whose solo work is inspired from her engagement with Zbigniew Cynkutis, a leading actor of Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre. As part of the month-long series of events, Pilgrim co-founders Kim Mancuso and Kermit Dunkelberg will collaborate with Edgecomb on a three-day long intensive acting workshop, based on their common training with members of the Polish Lab.

Supported in part by:

LEF Foundation