Announcing the 2020 Fringe New Play Prize Winner
PTC and the Vancouver Fringe Festival are pleased to announce that JK JK — Jenny Larson and khattieQ — have won the Fringe New Play Prize with their work-in-progress Catalina La O Presenta: Ahora Conmigo. The Prize includes a free Mainstage spot at the 2020 Vancouver Fringe, the design and execution of a development process for the play with PTC’s Project Dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel, and a free spot in PTC’s how-to-produce-theatre seminar series Block P.
About Catalina La O Presenta: Ahora Conmigo
Catalina La O presenta: Ahora Conmigo, draws inspiration from Puerto Rican musical legends Myrta Silva, Lucecita Benitez, and Yolandita Monge. This interactive, bilingual cabaret performance is part (physical) clown show, part punk rock performance, y todo emoción performed by khattieQ.
Catalina La O’s mother is lost, unable to join her in Puerto Rico for the finale taping of Catalina’s one-hour TV program, “Ahora Conmigo.” Then a destructive hurricane hits Puerto Rico and throws Catalina into her darkest hour. Emerging from the aftermath, wet and wounded, Catalina seeks refuge in her television studio. Though her backing band and television crew have all gone missing, Catalina believes her beloved audience still survives. She sings and performs to them and to herself, sharing stories and songs of heartbreak, resistance, and survival.
Catalina La O Presenta: Ahora Conmigo will premiere at the 2020 Vancouver Fringe Festival, September 10 – 20, 2020.
Bios
khattieQ is a musician and performer from Puerto Rico. She has played as a professional musician with over 20 bands, notably touring as lead drummer for queer femme core band The Tuna Helpers. She was the creator of punk band BLXPLTN, and served as lead vocalist from 2013 to 2015.
Jenny Larson is an interdisciplinary theatre artist. She is a director, devising artists, and performer. She has an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Credits include: From the Pig Pile by Sibyl Kempson, with the Rude Mechs and Salvage Vanguard Theater, Guest by Courtesy, devised with Hannah Kenah, has played Fusebox Festival, SHE MAKES THEATER festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Brooklyn Yard.
Together they are JK JK. The couple creates collaboratively-devised queer performance art to magnify stories of the disenfranchised and disrupt the status quo. khattie and Jenny began working together in 2015 as part of Adrienne Dawes’ Denim Doves. They have been artists-in-residence at the Osage Arts Community in Belle, MO and performed in the Finland edition of Unlived Lives (originally devised by Ida Daniel, Jenny Larson, Todor Stoyanov, and Graham Reynolds) as part of the Kaustinen 50th Anniversary Folk Music Festival. In October JK JK performed scenes from Catalina at the Interplay Festival here in Vancouver, produced by Deanna Peters and Mutable Subject.