Mark Aldrich
Biographical Info My work with students has prompted an idea for creating an international women’sproject. After all the SPOOL Society are women, role models for girls. While they don’t have superpowers, they use their brains to outwit their adversaries. I would like to build on my own mentoring experiences, and my work with Ken Lundquist and his actors. My plan is to develop and produce, with sponsorship, planning, and implementation grants, a production of each episode as a theater piece. I think of this work as a kind of laboratory for the development of a new kind of theater, in which blown up projected images of my pages are used as scenery, sometimes with animation. Against this backdrop, live narration with acting, singing and dance sequences would occur in certain times during the performance. My idea is to recruit women experienced in the performing arts— directors, animators, actors, dancers, musicians, songwriters, and techies to mentor younger women to work on this project. The grant money would be used to collaborate with local theater colleges to produce a quality theater piece -- The "Shards Of Time" Project- Shards of Time, my illustrated book series, reflects over forty years of research, writing and drawing. The ideas are a product of my upbringing and education. My mother was an artist; her early gifts to me were a love of Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, and the Bible. Degrees in English, History, Library Science, Interior Design, and Theater help to inform the work. . As the librarian at a maximum security prison, I directed a prisoner theater group for ten years. In 2010, I worked with Kenneth Lundquist Jr. owner of WULFLYNX Studios, a consulting and production company, to produce a video of one of the episodes that included all illustration panels, music, and actors voices. In that same year, Ken and I mentored two students from Newtown High school in a job shadowing project that lasted eight weeks and produced an educational companion video that discussed visual quotation in Shards of Time.
Email Address maldrich53@gmail.com
Start Date May 12, 2022
Creative Abilities theater, drawing_illustration, painter, writer