Intermedia Arts and Minnesota’s performing arts community welcomes back Los Angeles-based theater company, TeAda Productions. As part of the Global Taxi Driver project, TeAda’s ensemble invites artists, community members with taxi stories, and taxi drivers to a free story-gathering and theater-making workshop Monday, August 12th, 7pm-10pm at Intermedia Arts. These stories and local taxi driver interviews will provide a jumping off point for TeAda’s week-long residency at Intermedia Arts and will culminate in a work-in-progress performance of Global Taxi Driver on Saturday, August 17th, 2-4pm, and will include a 30-minute panel discussion moderated by Sandy Agustin. The audience will also be given the opportunity to share their own taxi stories, which will be considered for inclusion in the developing production scheduled to premiere at Intermedia Arts in April 2014. Ensemble members include Ova Saopeng, Shyamala Moorty, Saymoukda Vongsay and Robert Karimi, directed by Leilani Chan.

Taxi Story Workshop:  Monday, August 12; 7-10 PM

Global Taxi Driver work-in-progress performance: Saturday, August 17; 2-4 PM

Both events at Intermedia Arts: 2822 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408

RSVP to alisunn@IntermediaArts.org, (612) 871-4444

TeAda Productions is a Los Angeles based company that has be creating community-based theater about underserved communities for over 15 years. Most recently they brought Refugee Nation to the Twin Cities in 2010.  TeAda returns to Minnesota with to work with Twin Cities artists and communities to create this new work, Global Taxi Driver (GTD). Written and directed by Leilani Chan, GTD is being created out of taxi ride experiences and explores personal narratives of taxi drivers and riders. GTD looks at taxi rides as durational performances that hold profound opportunities for deep insights on social relations. Throughout the world, taxi driving is one of the first jobs accessible to immigrants, often taken on by men who once had (or still have) occupations as farmers, soldiers, doctors, etc. For tourists, a ride in a taxi is their first exposure to a “native informant” of the city they visit. For tourists, a ride in a taxi is their first exposure to a “native informant” of the city they visit. The irony is often that taxi driver, like the tourist, is also a transient with many stories to tell. What can we learn from these transnational citizens?  What does the world look like from the eyes of a Taxi Driver?

 Writer-director Leilani Chan is the Founding Artistic Director of TeAda Productions (www.teada.org). For over ten years, TeAda Productions’ cross-disciplinary performances have addressed health, education, and social justice issues of communities of color. TeAda Productions is a non-profit theater company whose primary mission is to empower underserved communities through the development and presentation of interdisciplinary theatrical performance pieces by, for and about people of color. The recipient of an MFA from UC Irvine, Ms. Chan recently co-wrote and performed in “Refugee Nation,” an L.A. Weekly Pick of the Week at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Learn more at www.teada.org.