Basetrack Live Coming to Harris Center, 10/2

Basetrack Live is a unique and ambitious theatrical collaboration between award-winning theatre company En Garde Arts and corpsmen from Marine 1/8. It explores the impact of modern warfare on soldiers, their families and communities across the U.S.A. Harris Center for the Arts in Folsom is proud to be among the few performing centers previewing this new work before it premieres on Veterans Day 2014 at the internationally renowned Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Basetrack Live will be presented Thursday, October 2, 2014 at 7:30 pm. Tickets are priced at $19-$39; Premium $45; Veterans with ID $19; Students with ID $12. Tickets are available online at www.harriscenter.net or from Harris Center Ticket Office at 916-608-6888 from 10 am to 6 pm, Monday through Saturday, and two hours before show time. Parking is included in the price of the ticket. Harris Center is located on the west side of Folsom Lake College campus in Folsom, CA, facing East Bidwell Street.

Basetrack Live began with a photojournalist. Teru Kuwayama, award-winning photo journalist, launching 1/8 BASETRACK. This Facebook page and website enabled Marines to communicate with their loved ones back home. It was also became the repository for an amazing collection of photographs and videos of the Marines and the Afghanistan people.

It then became a social media phenomenon. The BASETRACK Facebook page received over 5 million hits in 2009 and 2010, becoming a lifeline for Marines and their families. It was the first time in the history of the war that social media was used to this extent. Edward Bilous and En Garde Arts encountered this material, and recognized its potential to illustrate a moment in our history that many of us are struggling to understand. In a gesture that could only exist at this point in time, En Garde contacted the photojournalists and the Marines via social media, and struck up an unlikely partnership to bring their story to American audiences.

Using exclusively verbatim text contributed by the Marines and their families, the show follows AJ, a young Texan, as he joins the 1st Battalion 8th Marines, leaving his girlfriend Melissa, for the war in Afghanistan. A dynamic musical score drives a cascade of stunning photographs, videos and social media exchanges that follow AJ and his fellow Marines through training, deployment and returning home. These personal accounts reveal something that most of us rarely get to see: soldiers and their families coming to terms with the extraordinary challenge of integrating back into their families and communities after being at the frontline.

Far from the political arguments for or against the Gulf Wars are the deeply personal stories of the people whose lives have been altered by their experience in the modern US military. As the longest war in our history draws to an end, and the men and women of the armed forces return home to communities across the country, Basetrack Live offers a starting point for dialogue, compassion and mutual understanding.

Basetrack Live was made possible with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Theater Project, with lead funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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