SPT Presents: the Shakers! a play by Kevin Killian and Wayne Smith

SPT PRESENTS: The Shakers! a play by Wayne Smith and Kevin Killian

Friday, October 22 · event begins at 7:30pm
$8-15 entrance/ students and members FREE
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Timken Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street
San Francisco, CA
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More Info Shortly after the US Civil War, a band of spiritual pioneers live simply on a rural commune, rejecting the temptations of the outside world. United in their devotion to Mother Ann Lee (but separated by gender), they invent ingenious chairs still used today: rocking, high, electric and wheel, among others. In ecstasy, they whirl, tremble and shake on the floor, hence the name "Shakers." But wrinkles are beginning to appear in their 19th century utopia of clean lines. A rebellious Shaker girl with amnesia begins naming the stars in the sky, daring to dream of a life outside her village; an aged patriarch hides a shameful secret; an old woman tells fortunes by listening to apples ripen; a wounded and bitter Civil War veteran watches as his world divides in two. Near the end, a new broom is invented.

SPT and Mill College present: Hiromi Ito!

SPT and Mills College present: Hiromi Ito!

Tuesday, October 19 · 7:00pm
Mills College, Mills Hall Living Room
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA

Born in Tokyo, Hiromi Itō is regarded as one of the most prominent poets of contemporary Japan. Since her debut in the late 1970s, she consistently has expanded her creative spheres: from issues of sexuality to the oral traditions of Native Americans, the lifecycles of plants, and migrant and transnational experiences.

About Itō’s first U.S. edition of work, Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō, renowned poet Anne Waldman writes, “Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies and delights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth. . . . Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats.”

Itō has published more than 10 critically acclaimed collections of poetry; several novels; and a dozen books of essays, including Oume (Green plums, 1982), Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjuhimeko, 1993), and Kawara Arekusa (Wild grass upon a riverbank, 2005), which won the prestigious Takami Jun Prize.