Dear KIT Friends,
It's that time of the year where we ask you to please remember KIT and consider making a fully tax-deductible year-end gift to support Theater, Italian culture, and overall ART. Please read below what we did in 2014 and what we are planning for 2015. I hope you would consider contributing to our season.
Many thanks again and Happy Holidays.
Laura&KIT
What KIT did in 2014:
- Two new productions: Decameron by Boccaccio at Casa Italiana and in tour and The Cloven Viscount by Calvino in collaboration with Eastman School of Music
- Tour of old and new productions in schools, communities and Italian institutions in New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Rochester, San Francisco
- Co-production of two theatrical events in Italy (CollaborAzioni WWL Roma and CollaborAzioni Calabria)
- A bigger and longer In Scena! 2014: 6 shows, 4 readings, the Mario Fratti Award, 20 days!
- A workshop,with final public presentation, led by Three time Obie Award Rocco Sisto titled From Boccaccio to Shakespeare (via Machiavelli) to explore the similarities and differences among such great writers.
This year, more than ever, we brought Italian theater and therefore culture to communities and to people not familiar with our culture and of course our theater. The result was astonishing and exciting.
No matter if the play was with supertitles or in English with some Italian, no matter if the play was dated 1348 or 2014, the involvement, joy and excitement of an audience for our culture, art and language made me realize that we are going in the right direction.
We went to community centers, where people who don't know Italian cheered for Italian Language only productions. We even went to Probation Centers to work with their clients and they came to see shows and cried and laughed.
There is a lot more to do and you can help.
As you may know, it is difficult for a theater company that produces Foreign Culture to get funded from the State and from the usual foundations that are obviously more dedicated to American theatre.
This is what we need for 2015, priority-wise:
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Create a new website for Kairos Italy Theater with a dedicated section on Education: this past year proved again that our job is making art while educating our audience on Italian culture.
The new website would provide for each show:
Material on the author, the show, the time when the play was written and so on. The material will consist in podcasts, essays, videos; Activities for the classroom; Bibliography; Contents created by students and audience on each show. Value: $1000
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Hire a part-time staff member for our outreach effort: many schools, universities, communities would like to work with us. We love doing it but we desperately need to hire a staff member dedicated to connect with each one of them and organize the work. Value: $2500
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Have a consultant to better work on grants and corporate giving (in order to be able to produce all the beautiful plays we'd like to produce): we are working with a wonderful consultant who gives us a special price because she believes in what we do. We need to work with her all year long in order to be able to hopefully reach some results. Value: $4000
- New costumes for the new production of Decameron and Mandrake Root: The two very successful shows come back for a short run in New York and then a tour in the East Coast and in the near future in California. We'd love to have a professional helping us with the costumes, to improve them. Value: $700
- Raise the money for the third edition of In Scena! in May 2015. Value: so much! Any contribution is welcome!
2015 is already in the making. Beside Boccaccio and Machiavelli, we'll present a work on Pasolini, the third edition of In Scena!, works by new upcoming Italian playwrights, new collaborations between KIT and Italian theater companies in Italy, we'll tour with our new and old productions and we'll present a reading series that will bring together Italian and Italian-American playwrights.
Be our main actor, help us spreading the beauty and importance of Italian Culture everywhere...
ALL THE DONATION ARE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
