Fertile Ground’s 4th Year Set for 1/19-29

In its fourth year, the Portland-grown Fertile Ground City-Wide Festival of New Work continues to flourish planted in a town of prolific playwrights, abundant actors, innovative dancers, talented designers and adventuresome producers. With many returning companies as well as new producers, FG12 brings over 100 interesting and diverse world premiere works to Portland making Fertile Ground 2012 the lushest jungle of creation yet.

With 17 fully produced theatrical world premieres, 14 dance world premieres, and a myriad of workshop productions, staged readings, readings and events at all times of the day, Fertile Ground will be thriving on stages, nooks and crannies all over Portland for 10 days from January 19 to 29, 2011.

Shining out through the winter darkness, Fertile Ground offers an astonishing breadth of creative work for the stage, compressed into 10 of the darkest and wettest days of the Portland calendar. Close to every single major theatre company and many dance companies in town are participating, presenting new work as a world premiere or as a piece in development. In addition to seasoned producers, dozens of small, local producers, playwrights and choreographers are also choosing to offer their work for this collaborative Portland showcase festival.

Audiences will meet a people like a redneck Mormon thespian, a teenage commando, a grease monkey girl in a musical, teenagers in crisis, do-gooder State Department bureaucrat, fairytales that come to life, a boy with Tourette’s, Galileo’s daughter and many more. The festival offers inventive adaptations of seminal works like The Duchess of Malfi, They, Rapunzel and King Lear. Social and political issues are explored with true stories of the sex trade in Portland and homelessness, and with plays like Famished, Café Baghdad, Word.Voice., No Good Woman, B’aktun 13, Graceland, Paraguay and others. In the dance genre, fresh dance pieces populate the “Groovin’ Greenhouse,” and Meshi Chavez and tEEth at White Bird offer completely new choreography. Also added to this year’s breadth is Portland Animation Now! where local animators share their digital artistry.

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