What Do You Want To Be When You Give Up?
Gentleness and Fortitude
A rehearsal between two actors turns into explosions of angst, politics, literature, motherhood, forgiveness, and love — with snatches of song, a handful of dances, rants about life, and impassioned appeals to both the moon and Jane Austen.
The Play is currently experiencing a re-vamp and near completion. Watch this space for updates!
Standing Down Straight®
A Workshop
How to Make Gravity Your New Best Friend
Jump Rhythm® is scheduling its
2023 Standing Down Straight® Workshops.
Watch this space for more information!
Standing Down Straight® (SDS) is a method of voice-and-movement training that helps us do the tasks of everyday living without causing strain or injury to the body. How? By guiding us to use life’s most effective and cost-free – aid to healing and strengthening the body: gravity-directed relaxation.
SDS explains how gravity works with the human skeleton, in fact, how it is designed to use gravity to ground our bodies, we use less muscular effort when working or playing, whether at home, on the job, on the athletic field, or onstage.
On this basis, SDS is a movement system made for truly every body.
See our Home Page for Workshop Scheduling
What’s Happening Now
The Play is currently experiencing a re-vamp and near completion. Rehearsals continue as we complete a high-quality video and/or until such time that live performances, with audiences, begin again.
The Standing Down Straight® workshop (SDS)is available! It is delivered virtually vua the Zoom platform. The 8-hour workshop is personally facilitated by Billy across three (3) days, five (5) hrs/day with breaks.
Contact us now to set one up!
Cast and Creative Team
Billy Siegenfeld
Actor, Playwright, Director, Choreographer
Jordan Batta
Associate Artistic Director; Company Member; Actor
Tucker DeGregory
Director
Peter Anderson
Lighting and Sound Designer
Joshua Weckesser
Technical Director, Production Stage Manager
Suzanne Scott
Executive Director, Company; Producer
Billy Siegenfeld and Jordan Batta have so much talent and electricity that it seems to spill out into the audience. Siegenfeld’s play, What Do You Want to Be When You Give Up?, is both a powerful and intimate piece that combines tender acting, beautiful singing, and explosive dance. To see two performers so magnificently attuned to each other is a delight. As the story unfolds, the drama grows from a simple disagreement in a rehearsal room to a thrilling exploration of what it means to be an artist in a world that seems to only get bigger and bigger. The play works its magic in a subtle and revelatory way; as the performers flit between delicate dances and riotous eruptions of funk and tap, so too does the conversation shift between the hilarious banalities of suburban life and the extraordinary potential for art to heal the broken parts of ourselves, especially in dark times. Do not miss an opportunity to see this show!
[This play] dares to tell – no, show – the struggles, frustrations, and needs of a woman trying desperately to reconcile her artistic self with her role as a mother and wife. I immediately thought to myself, “I know her.”…It is their constant moving in and out of sync with one other, as all of us do with our colleagues, friends, lovers, spouses, and children, that makes this play both powerful and refreshing.
Audience Reviews
The piece’s greatest strength lies in its transparency; these actors know what they’re talking about because they live it. ‘What Do You Want to Be When You Give Up?’ reads as a timely meditation on hopelessness and isolation, ultimately suggesting that we’re never as alone as we may feel.
Producers
Executive
Nancy Gidwitz
Ed and Helen Nicoll
Managing
Bernie & Sally Dobroski
Anna Marie Panlilio
Associate
Paul Edwards
William Griffith
Joy Javitz
Ray and Jane Neufeld
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