BURAN THEATRE COMPANY INC

Mission Statement

BURAN THEATRE is an ensemble of disparate multidisciplinary and intergenerational artists who joyfully and anarchically reconfigure narrative, form, production, gender, and genre to develop & present surreal, queer, iconoclastic theatre productions. Our work embraces the absurd, the chaotic, the unknown, the impossible and the surreal with prism-like narrative complexity. With each production we create a space where audiences are energetically released from the performance with vivid imagery and language, and more questions than answers to dream about. Our committed ensemble of artists includes writers, directors, performers, designers, puppeteers, taxidermists, musicians, choreographers, educators, and auto mechanics, among other professional obsessions. Each of the major works since 2009 have explored themes with relevance to living in the contemporary: the possibility of revolutionary social and economic change (Money Buckets!, 2009); contemporary colonialism and cultural appropriation through the lens of Werner Herzog's boat movie (The House of Fitzcarraldo, 2010-12); the tension between nature & technology (Nightmares: A Demonstration of the Sublime, 2013); health, wellness & the business of dying, (Magic Bullets, 2014), and mass extinction & climate change (Mammoth, 2015). Our works have been presented in NYC at A.R.T./NY's Gural Theatre, The Brick, The Bushwick Starr (with Target Margin), chashama, Dixon Place, Exit Art, HB Studio, Incubator Arts Project/Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and The Silent Barn; nationally at The Unicorn and MET Ensemble (Kansas City), Tricklock's Revolutions International Theatre Festival (Albuquerque, NM), Highways Performance Sapce and Studio/Stage Theater (Los Angeles), The Marigny Opera House (New Orleans), Lawrence Arts Center (Lawrence, KS), Las Vegas Little Theatre and The Box Office Theatre (Las Vegas, NV), and internationally at the Vilnius Chamber Theater (Vilnius, Lithuania). Our rigorous development process occurs over two-years as the company meets around the artistic director’s text to create inexplicable and circular performances. Each work premieres in NYC and tours to communities throughout the U.S., being re-made and recast in each locale. For each production we also engage a curated visual arts component in tandem with its creation, in the form of exhibitions or integrated into the presentation of the work itself. The CartHorse Fellowship is the development and production model for Buran Theatre's second decade. Through the CartHorse Fellowship Buran provides equitable opportunities to artists whose work would otherwise not be developed and presented; simultaneously, we seek to challenge organizational paradigms in the non-profit performing arts field that favor marginalization, nepotism, commercialization, and hierarchy. In line with Buran's mission of generosity and inclusion, we actively work to demote & dismantle capitalism's influence on art-making by promoting and bestowing our horizontal practices through the Fellowship.