Asian American Theater Workshop
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Asian American Theater Workshop
The Asian American Theater Company (AATC) is a non-profit theatre performance company based in San Francisco. Its stated mission is "To connect people to Asian American culture through theatre". Background The Asian American Theater Company was established in 1973 by playwright Frank Chin to develop and present original works of theatre about Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander descent. AATC is credited as a progenitor of the Asian-American theater movement alongside East West Players and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.Houston, Velina Hasu. "Currents: Out of the Margins: A National Theatre Conference in Los Angeles Galvanizes Asian-American Forces." ''American Theatre'' 10 2006: 132–7 In addition to being a producing company, AATC is a workshop where Asian Pacific Islander writers, actors and directors can explore ideas and create works that carry with them the AATC's purpose, which is to explore who Asian Pacific Islander Americans are as a people and as a community. For m ...
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Frank Chin
Frank Chin (born February 25, 1940) is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre. Life and career Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California on February 25, 1940; until the age of six, he remained under the care of a retired vaudeville couple in Placerville, California. At that time, his mother brought him back to the San Francisco Bay Area and thereafter Chin grew up in Oakland Chinatown. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965. According to Chin, who had returned from a sabbatical working as the first Chinese brakeman for the Southern Pacific railroad, he intimidated a dean into graduating him with a bachelor's degree in English: " said'I want a decision by Friday' and he said, 'Well, I'm a very busy man,' and I said, 'You're a working stiff like me - you have a decision Friday and I don't care what it is. Either I've graduated or I ...
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Greg Watanabe
Greg Watanabe (born November 8, 1967) is an American actor known for his role in ''Watch Over Me''. He also appears in the independent films, Philip Kan Gotanda's ''Life Tastes Good'', '' Only the Brave'' and ''Americanese''. He is a founding member of the Asian American sketch comedy troupe, 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors. Watanabe received a 2009 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award nomination for Featured Performance in ''The Happy Ones'' at South Coast Repertory. In 2010, he appeared in the world premiere of Ken Narasaki's ''No-No Boy''. In October 2015, Watanabe made his Broadway debut in ''Allegiance: A New American Musical'' at the Longacre Theatre in New York City with co-stars George Takei, Lea Salonga, Michael K. Lee and Telly Leung. Filmography Film Television Awards and nominations Ovation Awards *2011 File:2011 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: a protester partaking in Occupy Wall Street heralds the beginning of the Occupy movement; protests aga ...
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Arts Organizations Established In 1973
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences across time and space. Prominent examples of the arts include: * visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting), * literary arts (incl ...
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Arts Organizations Based In The San Francisco Bay Area
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences across time and space. Prominent examples of the arts include: * visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting), * literary arts (includ ...
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Non-profit Organizations Based In San Francisco
A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in contrast with an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a profit for its owners. A nonprofit is subject to the non-distribution constraint: any revenues that exceed expenses must be committed to the organization's purpose, not taken by private parties. An array of organizations are nonprofit, including some political organizations, schools, business associations, churches, social clubs, and consumer cooperatives. Nonprofit entities may seek approval from governments to be tax-exempt, and some may also qualify to receive tax-deductible contributions, but an entity may incorporate as a nonprofit entity without securing tax-exempt status. Key aspects of nonprofits are accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to eve ...
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Asian-American Organizations
Asian Americans are Americans of Asian ancestry (including naturalized Americans who are immigrants from specific regions in Asia and descendants of such immigrants). Although this term had historically been used for all the indigenous peoples of the continent of Asia, the usage of the term "Asian" by the United States Census Bureau only includes people with origins or ancestry from the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent and excludes people with ethnic origins in certain parts of Asia, including West Asia who are now categorized as Middle Eastern Americans. The "Asian" census category includes people who indicate their race(s) on the census as "Asian" or reported entries such as "Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Malaysian, and Other Asian". In 2020, Americans who identified as Asian alone (19,886,049) or in combination with other races (4,114,949) made up 7.2% of the U.S. population. Chinese, Indian, and Filipi ...
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Theatre Companies In San Francisco
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actor, actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe"). Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its theme (arts), themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre ...
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Asian-American Theatre
Asian American theatre is theatre written, directed or acted by Asian Americans. From initial efforts by four theatre companies in the 1960s, Asian-American theatre has grown to around forty groups today. Early productions often had Asian themes or settings; "yellowface" was a common medium for displaying the perceived exoticism of the East in American performance. With the growing establishment of second-generation Asian-Americans in the 21st century, it is becoming more common today to see Asian-Americans in roles that defy historical stereotypes in the United States. Background Asian-American theatre emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s with the foundation of four theatre companies: East West Players in Los Angeles, Asian American Theatre Workshop (later renamed Asian American Theater Company) in San Francisco, Theatrical Ensemble of Asians (later renamed Northwest Asian American Theatre) in Seattle, and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York City. The Northwest Asian Americ ...
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Rick Shiomi
Rick Shiomi (born May 25, 1947)Biography and Genealogy Master Index. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, Cengage Learning. 1980- 2009. is an internationally recognized, award-winning Japanese Canadian playwright, stage director, artistic director and taiko artist, and a major player in the Asian American/Canadian theatre movement. He is best known for his groundbreaking play ''Yellow Fever,'' which earned him the Bay Area Theater Circle Critics Award and “Bernie” Award. Over the last couple decades, Shiomi has also become a notable artistic and stage director. He directed the world premiere of the play ''Caught'' by Christopher Chen for which he received the Philadelphia Barrymore Award Nomination for Outstanding Direction. He is currently the Co-Artistic Director of Full Circle Theater Company. Career Shiomi's ''Yellow Fever'' premiered at the Asian American Theater Company in 1982, winning awards, and leading to Pan Asian Repertory Theatre's New York production, garnering rave r ...
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Ken Narasaki
Ken Narasaki (born April 4, 1958) is an American playwright and actor. He is the former Literary Manager at East West Players theatre company in Los Angeles. He is the twin brother of civil rights leader Karen Narasaki. Actor Narasaki has appeared in a number of Independent film, independent features including Jon Moritsugu's ''Terminal USA'' (1993), Chris Chan Lee's ''Yellow (1998 film), Yellow'' (1998), John Huckert's ''Hard (film), Hard'' (also in 1998) and Lane Nishikawa's ''Only the Brave (2006 film), Only the Brave'' (2006). Narasaki learned to speak German when he was cast as the lead in the German television series, ''Zwei Profis'' in 2002. He has appeared in over 65 plays in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York's Lincoln Center Theatre in the world premiere of Samuel D. Hunter's "Greater Clements", for which he was nominated for a Lucille Lortel award for featured actor in 2019. Playwright Narasaki's ''Ghosts and Baggage'' was produced at the Los An ...
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Hiroshi Kashiwagi
Hiroshi Kashiwagi (November 8, 1922 – October 29, 2019) was a ''Nisei'' (second-generation Japanese American) poet, playwright and actor. For his writing and performance work on stage he is considered an early pioneer of Asian American theatre. Biography Kashiwagi was born in 1922 in Sacramento, California. He grew up in Loomis, a small fruit-growing town in Placer County, California, where his ''Issei'' parents ran a fish market. He attended Loomis Elementary school, Placer High School and Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, graduating in 1940. He also attended Japanese language school, where he did his first writing and performing. During World War II, following the signing of Executive Order 9066, Kashiwagi and his family were sent to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, an internment camp for Japanese Americans. In camp, Kashiwagi spent time reading, and joined a theatre group. When the U.S. government forced detainees to fill out a Leave Clearance Application Form, co ...
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Philip Kan Gotanda
Philip Kan Gotanda (born December 17, 1951) is an American playwright and filmmaker and a third generation Japanese American. Much of his work deals with Asian American issues and experiences. Biography Over the last three decades Gotanda has composed many plays designed to broaden theater in America. Through his plays and advocacy, he has been instrumental in bringing stories of Asians in the United States to mainstream American theater, as well as to Europe and Asia. The creator of one of the largest bodies of Asian American-themed work, Gotanda's plays and films are studied and performed at universities and schools across the USA. Gotanda wrote the text and directed the production of Maestro Kent Nagano's '' Manzanar: An American Story'', an original symphonic work with narration. His newest work, ''After the War'', premiered at the American Conservatory Theater in March 2007. ''After the War'' chronicles San Francisco's Japantown in the late 1940s, when Japanese American ...
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