Writing for performance is about identifying the series of decisions that the performer makes in confronting the challenge presented by their dramatic circumstances. Your personal experience is the raw material from which we craft an original performance work suitable for cabaret, gallery, theatre, film, and online venues. Can the legacies of varied performance traditions, old and new, offer useful insights and/or methods to power our message? Yes!
Kestutis Nakas is a writer, performer, director, and teacher whose work has been presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Yale Rep, La Mama, Dixon Place, P.S. 122, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, 8BC, The Kitchen, Highways, Prop Theatre and numerous other national and regional venues. Performance works and plays include RIP, No Bees for Bridgeport, Railroad Backward, Remembrance of Things Pontiac, My Heart, My President, Hunger and Lightning, and The Andrew Carnegie Story. In the 1980’s, he was active in New York’s East Village performance scene and was Artistic Director of Gates of Dawn, which showcased New York performers. He has taught at NYU, UCLA, CUNY, and the University of New Mexico. He is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at The Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago. His performance text about urban beekeeping, No Bees for Bridgeport, was published in Animal Acts, Performing Species Today, an anthology of new performance edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, University of Michigan Press. A bilingual edition of his critically acclaimed tragi-comic cycle: When Lithuania Ruled The World was published by Aukso Zuvys (Gloden Fish), Vilnius , in February 2017. In December 2017, he presented Channel D a new solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In June 2018, in honor of the centennial of Lithuanian independence, he presented a staged reading of all four parts of When Lithuania Ruled the World at HOWL Happening, New York City. Kestutis Nakas lives in Chicago with his wife and son.