PARACHUTE: The Coney Island Performance Festival: November 2012

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Upcoming Events

Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival goes to the Brooklyn Museum's First Saturdays! (Thanks for inviting us Brooklyn Museum!)

Saturday, December 1, 2012, 9:00-10:00 p.m.
Seating is limited.
Room TBA!

www.brooklynmuseum.org/visit/first_saturdays.php

Featuring:

The Believe Project reciting Muriel Rukeyser's words on Coney Island

Sheila Maldonado, author of one bedroom solo

Amanda Deutch, Parachute director and poet

The Believe Project performing at Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival, 2012 in the New York Aquarium Plaza.

Coney Island, Coney Island…

Let me see,
Let me feel,
Let me know what is real,

Let me believe.

-Muriel Rukeyser, 1973
from Houdini (c) Paris Press, 2002

When we first came across, Muriel Rukeyser’s strange, poetic and powerful words about Coney Island in her play, Houdini, many moons ago, we got chills. Now, more than ever, we find these words resounding with new meaning after the storm. Each day, we revisit these words and they give us hope: “..Let me believe.”

Our Mission

Parachute: The Coney Island Performance Festival is a community-based literary organization. The cornerstone of Parachute's work is a free two-day festival featuring renowned poets and writers reading at the New York Aquarium after hours, in the Alien Stingers Jellyfish Exhibit. Throughout the year, Parachute also offers creative writing workshops and innovative poetic events.

Parachute celebrates Coney Island’s vivid literary present and past through readings, letterpress broadsides, workshops and attention to the literary luminaries that have walked across Coney’s shores and been inspired by it—Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, and Henry Miller, to name but a few.

About the Artistic Director

Amanda Deutch is a native New Yorker with Coney Island roots. She first got the sand in her shoes standing in her nana's kitchen while the adults talked about "The Half Moon Hotel," which was up the block from their apartment on 29th street in Coney Island. The words, "Half Moon Hotel," and "Coney Island" rang like mysterious poetry to her nine year-old ears. Amanda has had poetry published widely. Some of her recent work can be found in Esque Mag online and Boog City. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and in 2007, she was awarded a Footpaths to Creativity fellowship on Flores Island in the Azores. She lives in Brooklyn where she facilitates writing workshops, works at the Coney Island History Project and is a third generation skee-ball player.