Mahayana (Yana) Landowne
Theater Director
New York, New York USA
I am inspired by you, women of the theater. By how we find our path and realize our vision. By how we grow and support growth in others.
My goal as an artist is to inspire creative thought – I want to dive into and mine the past to replenish a jaded cultural community. As a theater director, I want to open the question of participatory art and audience engagement. I want to encourage empowerment of all involved in the process of making an artistic experience.
Here is a clip of the Picasso Project – I want to develop it into Enter- art- ment (working title) – a play/movement piece about activating and inhabiting fine art. Using paintings by modern and contemporary artists as storyboards, we will create a series of scenes; which will intertwine opening up meaning and the permission of diverse interpretation for performance company and the audience. Each individual scene explores excerpts from an artist’s body of work and is sculpted by the rhythm, visual world, and energy of the artist’s work.
When first starting to explore this idea with Picasso’s Blue Period, I was amazed by the depth of plot and visual meaning that could be mined by physically exploring the painting. Now I’d like to experiment with a variety of artists such as Goya, Toulouse Lautrec, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and Salvador Dali. Any suggestions of artists would be fantastic.
I want to make a piece that can perform locally and tour. The tour performance will include an interactive audience workshop, so they can experience inhabiting paintings too. I can see this piece performing at museums and performing arts centers around the country and the world. It expands definitions and is a playful way to encourage engaging in Art.
And then there are the streets and taking performance and radical transformation 😉 that is a different side of the story.
Mahayana (Yana) Landowne‘s projects include: Impossible Country (MudBone), Fairytale Experiment (Rubulad), MIXED (Baruch), Beyond My Remote Control (Wild Project), Picasso Project (Luna Stage), The Heiress, (Mint), Machinal (Rochester). Favorites include Skriker, Seagull, brass logic, Streetcar, Obgynt, Lear, and Mud. Collaborator- Lush Vally. NYU-BFA-acting YSD-MFA-directing. Creativity Workshops – Radiant Axis (Radiantaxis.com). yana.landowne.org
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