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Laurelann Porter

Actor - Dancer - Director - Filmmaker - Poet - Singer - Writer

About the artist: LAURELANN PORTER
Professional Biography

Laurelann is producing the 2nd "Sopa Americana International Festival of Solo Performance of the Americas" to hit Phoenix and Prescott in May and June of 2005. The Festival will feature performers from throughout North, Central and South America and will include an intensive 4 day workshop session for solo performers.

Most Recent Accomplishments
Laurelann has been writing creatively for the theatre for over ten years. Her most recent presentation was the MFA Applied Project production of her new play . . . Needles, Guns & Grass . . . : a Live Action Graphic Novel which Laurelann directed herself. This production of “Needles” featured the comic illustrations of local artist Mark Pate. Other recent performances include the local premiere of Vvvooo, an Adaptation of Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die produced by cutting edge performance troupe Theatre in my Basement SW Annex in April of 2003; a staged reading of current work-in-progress Apache Tears in April of 2003, and a local production of her newest one-woman show Passion Fruit in September of 2002. Passion Fruit is a lyrical performance piece about obsession, passion, and loss in a bisexual love triangle and includes some of Laurelann’s original songs. Previous accomplishments include the December 2001 workshop production of House With the Magic Fruit, a one-woman show written in collaboration with actress Emily Sinnot. House With the Magic Fruit was inspired by the true story of a Taiwanese woman who follows her love to America. Laurelann organized and produced “Sopa Americana” in November of 1999, a festival of solo performances featuring four internationally acclaimed performers including Porter herself, performing her one-woman show "Idle Worship or the Day I Realized my Dad was Short." Other performers included Clio award winner Rebecca Ortese, Jay Ruby (founder of The Carpetbag Brigade Theatre Company of Prescott, AZ), and veteran NYC actor, playwright, filmmaker and theatre producer Beresford Bennett. The highlight of the festival was the staged reading of Vvvooo, which featured two local actors from Curitiba. All performances of the festival took place at the Teatro Fernanda Montenegro, one of the leading professional theatres of Curitiba. Current plays in the works include The Price Tag, or How Not to Make Love to a Woman, a one-woman show taking a darkly comic look at marriage and divorce, and Cisne, a full length screenplay about a supernatural and spiritual superheroine figure, the story of which came to Laurelann in a dream.

Recent Musical Accomplishments
Laurelann spent 4 years as a singer/ songwriter for bands in Boston and Curitiba, Brazil. Laurelann played keyboards and sang back-up for the band “World Gone Crazy” in Boston in 1990. She also helped arrange the band’s songs by creating her own keyboard parts. As the lead singer of the band “Outrageous Fortune” Laurelann wrote all the lyrics and co-wrote all the music. “Outrageous Fortune” played in Boston for about a year from 1994-1995 before heading to Brazil to spend a year performing and recording their work. These recording sessions produced the CD “Shakespeare Didn’t Say That”. In 1998-1999 Laurelann performed and recorded with a variety of local Curitiba musicians under the band name “Gringa”. Many of the songs recorded with “Gringa” ended up contributing to the soundtrack for Vvvooo, including the title track, a bluesy jazz tour de force created jointly by Laurelann and musicians Candido Serra on guitar, Paulo Bettega on bass and Lucas Nieri on drums. Lucas offered the initial song seed and the very talented Brazilian musicians together created a lush bed of harmony and unique rhythms for Laurelann to throw her jazz-scat-blues vocal melodies on top. The self-produced CD “Gringa” has been recorded but has yet to be released or distributed.

Education
Laurelann Porter graduated from the Katherine K. Herberger College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University in December of 2003 with her Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting. Work developed and produced while at ASU were the 10 minute plays “Just One Kiss”, “. . . Needles, Guns & Grass . . . Episodes 1, 2 and 3” (which were later developed into a full-length play); the One-Act plays Double 6, House With the Magic Fruit, Passion Fruit, and full length productions of Vvvooo, an Adaptation of Paulo Coelho’s novel Veronika Decides to Die and . . . Needles, Guns & Grass . . ., a Live Action Graphic Novel . She received her BFA in Independent Theatre Studies from the School for the Arts at Boston University in May of 1993. Laurelann centered her studies at Boston University around alternative performance styles. Some of her most rewarding projects while at B.U. included: performer in a Kurt Weill review, actor in a production of Marat/Sade, assistant director on a production of Blood Wedding, and collaborator on a Samuel Beckett workshop which included directing and acting in a video production of his television play Eh Joe, translating some of Beckett's poetry from French into English and onto stage as well as performing her favorite role to date, that of the character "Mouth" in Not I. By far the most exciting project while at B.U. was her participation in "The PlayGround," a playwright's festival for new playwrights and new plays at Boston University where she produced and performed her original one-woman show titled Idle Worship or The Day I Realized My Dad Was Short. This was the project that allowed Laurelann to really explore new ideas about combining music and theatre in non-traditional ways.

Performance Experiences
Acting experiences at ASU include the role of Carol Jonesmith in Trista Baldwin’s Electropuss on ASU’s mainstage as well as the performance of her one-woman show Passion Fruit. In Boston, Laurelann was seen professionally in Quincy Center Dinner Theatre's production of Chicago as the "Hanging Hungarian" Katalin Hunyak, as carpet salesman, Rod in the Triangle Theatre's production of The Well of Horniness by Holly Hughes, and as The Duke/Grand Inestimable Chicken in the Triangle's production of Cinderella, the Real True Story. Laurelann's one woman show Idle Worship had its professional debut at Boston Theatreworks in the summer of 1994. Idle Worship was also presented at the Willow House Little Theatre in Phoenix, AZ in October, 1999; at the historic old church in downtown Tempe, AZ, in November of 1999, at the “Sopa Americana” theatre festival in Curitiba, Brazil, in November 1999, and a selection was performed at the Teatro Caliente Festival in October of 2004. Laurelann will be performing selections from a new work in progress entitled "The Price Tag or How Not to Make Love to a Woman" at the 2005 Teatro Caliente festival at Modified Arts in Phoenix.

Teaching Experiences
Laurelann taught Beginning Screenwriting at ASU in the Fall of 2001 and Fall of 2002. As part of ASU’s Maestra/Maestro, she worked alongside percussionist and musician Keith Johnson for one year teaching music, creative writing, percussion, singing, and drama to middle school children at an inner-city school in Phoenix. She spent one semester teaching the junior and senior high school students of the Omega Academy Charter School as part of the Black Theatre Troupe Drama Outreach Program. The highlight of the semester was the writing and presenting of a workshop production of the original play Curandera, written by Laurelann and based on the writings of the students themselves. Other teaching experience includes several years teaching English as a Second Language to both children and adults in Curitiba, Brazil.