Creative Placemaking for Rural Communities
Saturday, November 7, 2020 at 1:30 pm
With Josh Rice / Shake on the Lake
An improviser at heart, Josh has lived his life by staying present, saying “yes, and…” to opportunities, and using all these experiences to transform not only his rural hometown of Perry, NY, but other surrounding rural, under-served communities of Western New York through the arts. Learn how you can collectively reimagine and reinvent the heart of your community using the arts and creative partnerships.
Josh Rice
JOSH RICE is a multidisciplinary theatre and teaching artist specializing in puppetry and improvisation, splitting his time between Perry, NY and Brooklyn. He the co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of Shake on the Lake, a not-for-profit professional theatre based in Perry, NY that specializes in fast, physical, and accessible adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, incorporating simple performer-driven spectacle, puppetry, live music, improvisation, and audience interaction. In 2017 Josh was awarded a Wyoming Country Rural Arts Initiative Grant to start a theatre in an abandoned main street storefront in Perry—Theatre@37—where he also founded and produced the inaugural New York State Puppet Festival in June 2018. He is also the host of The Puppet Pod!, a podcast about the niche world of contemporary puppetry for adults. Puppetry Credits: Dan Hurlin’s Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed (Bard SummerScape, Holland Festival); Shank’s Mare (Chicago Int’t Puppet Festival, Paris, La MaMa, Japan tour, Hawaii tour, U.S. tour); Petrushka (NY Philharmonic Orchestra, The Barbican, Oregon Symphony Orchestra, Columbus Symphony; The Scarlet Ibis (HERE Arts Center); and Packrat (La MaMa). He also founded and directs The Mnemonic Theatre Project, a puppetry program for seniors living with Alzheimer’s and Dementia, which has been featured on the PBS documentary series, Visionaries, for which he is also the recipient of a 2014 National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellowship. Josh also directs and performs in Improv@37, a monthly improv comedy performance series at Theatre@37. Josh is a Teaching Artist with The New Victory Theatre (Broadway) and Young Audiences of Western New York, and is a Lecturer in Improvisation at Stony Brook University with the Alan Alda School of Communicating Science, teaching scientists how to be better communicators using improv techniques. He has been on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, Pace University, the University of Rochester, and taught workshops for Barcelona Institute of the Arts, SUNY Geneseo, Genesee Community College, Yale, and Cornell, among others. MFA, Sarah Lawrence College. More at joshriceprojects.com
