About the Orgs

TumbleMe Productions is a dynamic site for collaboration.  Artists, audiences, and community members are invited to smash taboos and open windows using new and recycled tools, including: multi-media and participatory performances; issue-based workshops using writing and other fun toys, and community partnerships for creative social change. Rooted in queer community & blooming where it's planted, TumbleMe Productions believes that art is not just art.  Art is: a vibrant vehicle for anti-oppression work; a powerful site for spiritual practice; a conversation between artists and patrons; most fun when it’s fresh and reinventing itself.  Each show raises awareness (and/or pocket change) for an important social issue.  In its first year, TumbleMe presented BodyLove: Queer Bodies Revealed thru the Spoken Word, raising money for National Eating Disorders Association; And God Said, Come On Inside, raising awareness about queer spirituality, and XOXO: Love Notes from the Margins, raising funds for Northwest Network of LGBT Survivors of Abuse.  In 2010 TumbleMe also produced an audio CD of queer love stories, recorded at Empty Sea Studios.  SPRUNG is TumbleMe's first collaboration with the Fremont Abbey Arts Center.

Fremont Abbey Arts Center is a 9000 square foot nonprofit Arts Center where all ages can learn & develop through education & performance in many different mediums. Built in 1914, The Fremont Abbey underwent major renovations completed in March 2008. Striving to become a "third place" in North Seattle, the Abbey is a comfortable venue where a wide variety of people from different income levels & backgrounds interact via community-driven & volunteer-powered events, workshops, classes, and private instruction. Both students & the general public can experience high quality performances by artists from around the world.  Why?  We feel the arts are one of the best ways for people of all ages to develop, advance, and improve their quality of life. And especially when multiple art forms & artists collaborate together (see our flagship event, www.theround.org, now in 5 cities). This can be through an educational & interactive experience or sometimes simply viewing a stellar performance.

Got Green envisions that communities of color and low-income communities will fully participate in and benefit from – the sustainable green economy.  This vision includes economic benefits: Access to training and living wage green jobs as a pathway to prosperity; Reduce utility costs through energy efficient housing; Improve opportunities for small business development; Promote access to and availability of alternative, renewable energy. It also includes health and social benefits: Improve health outcomes by creating healthy homes; Create sustainable and healthy neighborhoods and communities.  This show is not a production of Got Green.  Got Green will receive a donation of partial proceeds from SPRUNG ticket sales.


SAVE THE DATE, Get a Date, BUY YOUR TICKET! 
See You At the Abbey!
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Presented by
TumbleMe & Fremont Abbey Arts Center

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May 8th, 2010  | Doors 7pm, Show 8pm
Fremont Abbey Arts Center | 4272 Fremont Ave. N. 
$12 Advance*, $15 Door

www.brownpapertickets.com

Featuring :
Elaina M. Ellis   Karen Finneyfrock   
Amber Flame    Tara Hardy   Marita Isabel   Shanay Salas  & special musical guests Shenandoah Davis and Ingrid Elizabeth of Coyote Grace!


Did you ever blush at the sight of a blooming magnolia?  Curtsy for a daffodil?  Swoon for jasmine or drool for honeysuckle?  TumbleMe Productions & Fremont Abbey Arts Center are pleased to present SPRUNG: An Evening Garden-Grown Poetry. 

For one night only, six of Seattle's most celebrated female performance poets will pay tribute to Spring the way they know how, while two internationally renowned lady singer/songwriters make sweet, sweet music.  The line-up includes Karen Finneyfrock as she comes off of her national book tour; Ingrid Elizabeth as she concludes a jaunt with the Indigo Girls and Girlyman; Shanay Salas fresh from the finals stage at Youth Speaks Seattle's Grand Slam; and that's just the tip of the tulip! Get a lesson in the freshest of fierceness from Tara Hardy, Elaina M. Ellis, Amber Flame, Marita Isabel, and Shenandoah Davis.  The evening is sure to move: Toes will tap and skirts will swish.  Blossoms will open, and petals will drop. 
*Discounted tickets available for un(der)employed poetry-lovers.  Contact Elaina@TumbleMe.org

With the huge popularity of events at the Fremont Abbey Art Center (check out www.theround.org) and TumbleMe's record of 100% sold-out shows, it's a sure bet that tickets will go fast.  Buy them today at Brown Paper tickets.

Partial proceeds will be donated to a local environmental justice organization, Got Green, which works "to insure that communities of color and low-income communities will fully participate and benefit from the sustainable green economy." 


ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Elaina M. Ellis is the founder of TumbleMe Productions, and the Artistic Director of SPRUNG.  She recently quit her dayjob and is delighted to spend her days teaching, writing, and scheming at the intersection of art/social change.  In addition to teaching at Bent, Seattle's queer writing institute, Elaina facilitates workshops for schools, non-profit organizations, church groups, and conferences, on topics including Writing as a Spiritual Practice; BodyLove (writing as a tool to dismantle bodyshame); Visioning for a Positive Future; and Effective Allyship.  Elaina has been a featured poet at Seattle Poetry Slam, Seattle Spit, Artstopia, Jewish Arts Festival, National Queer Arts Festival, and The Femme Conference, and is published in Push Magazine, Awaken Consciousness Magazine, The Benthology, and her self-published chapbooks.  Elaina is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Antioch University.

Karen Finneyfrock is a novelist, poet and teaching artist living in Seattle.  Karen is the author of two books of poetry including the recently released, Ceremony for the Choking Ghost (Write Bloody Press.) She is a Writer-in-Residence at Richard Hugo House and teaches for Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers-in-the-Schools. Her first young adult novel, Celia the Dark and Weird, will be released by The Viking Press in summer of 2011. A member of three National Poetry Slam teams, Karen was honored as a “Slam Legend” at the National Poetry Slam in 2006.  “Finneyfrock writes poetry with muscular verve and narrative push. The depth and breadth suggested in just a few polished images placed next to each other will make you reconsider what poetry can do.” (Paul Constant, The Stranger)

Amber Flame is an award-winning artist, activist and educator who performs extensively in Seattle. Whether exploring rhythmic and harmonic structures as a framework for spoken word or blending voice in song, she tests genre and medium boundaries. Through a grant from the Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas, Amber presented her one-woman show, Binary, in the Spring of 2008. Amber's newest one-woman play, entitled Hands Above The Covers: Hairy Palms & Other Nightmares of a Church Kid, is slated to debut late June with funding through the City of Seattle's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. She is also currently at work recording a new album of original music with her band, Last of the RedHot Mamas, as well as writing her first novel under the auspices of Jack Straw Artist Support and Writers Programs. She is the big brain behind A Flame Production, a visionary, collective project, as well as a member of Sankofa, an African-American women's choir.

Tara Hardy is the working-class queer femme poet who founded Bent, a Writing Institute for LGBTQ people.  In 2002, she was elected by the people and named by the city council as Seattle's Poet Populist, or poet of the people, and she won the Seattle Grand Slam Champion title in the same year.  In 2008, 2009, and 2010, she returned to wow judges on National Slam stages.  She holds an MFA from Vermont College in fiction writing, and an MSW from the University of Michigan in community organizing. Tara is a daughter of the United Auto Workers, and worked in the Battered Women's Movement for 15 years.  She has toured with United States with Michelle Tea in the Stromboli's Island show, with Oratrix, an all-girl, all-queer Seattle-based spoken word troupe, and Salt Lines with Andrea Gibson, Denise Jolly, and Sonya Renee. Tara's work appears in Without a Net, Sex and Single Girls, Fusion, Blythe House Quarterly, Brazen, Switched-on-Gutenberg, and her self-published chapbooks.

Marita Isabel is a first generation Filipina American queer femme diva who has come into her power as a performance poet, on stages such as "Shifting Words", "Seattle Spit', "Voices Rising", "Bent Mentor Showcase", and TumbleMe Productions' "BodyLove", "And God Said, Come On Inside" and "XOXO: Love Notes from the Margins". Along with performing, Marita has founded, coordinated and facilitated various recovery-based events, workshops and support groups including "Shift Your Spirit" with Elaina M. Ellis, "Shifting Words" and "Progress" with Bec Taylor. She co-teaches a general writing class with Tara Hardy at Bent Writing Institute and recently published her first chapbook, "goodbad things".  "Just when you think [Marita] Isabel is done blowing your mind, she reads another poem and you've got a new favorite from her repertoire of blissful 'goodbad things.'’ -Shaun Knittel, Seattle Gay News

Shanay Salas is a two-time Seattle Youth Grand Slam finalist, and a member of the 2010 Youth Speaks Seattle and University of Washington CUPSI slam teams. She is a senior at The Nova Project, a public alternative high school, where she teaches Performance Poetry and co-creates spaces of support and activism for her fellow women, LGBT folks, and students/staff of color. She believes the most revolutionary act is to love oneself and feel at home in the power of one's body and voice. She writes to heal, share truths, celebrate, and to create the world she wishes to exist in, within a world that would often rather her not exist.

What folks say about Shenandoah Davis: "It begins as a plinking piano, almost too shy to carry on and is followed by a unique voice just on the verge of cracking, but hangs on the precipice - never quite falling off. The sound expands with new layerings of that voice, making it stronger, broadening the knife’s edge, and becoming a solid foundation when shored up by classical strings and further layerings of piano. Even with a solid footing, the music still teeters somewhere between folk, classical and ragtime." - Kevin LeDoux, Seattle SubSonic  "I get so excited hearing music by people with so much classical training, seeing how they employ their background in their own music. And it shows through here in all the best ways, while retaining this remarkable originality. I am amazed at how something can sound at once so familiar and so marvelously unique." - Fabulist

Ingrid Elizabeth aka Miss Amazing Grace is a "Renaissance Femme" who can and will do it all. Most of the time, she serves as the femmer half of queer folkgrass roots duo, Coyote Grace, with transman singer/songwriter, Joe Stevens. This season, Coyote Grace will warm stages for the Indigo Girls and Girly Man, delivering Ingrid to Seattle just in time for SPRUNG.  A powerful songwriter and seasoned performer, Ingrid holds down the upright bass and sports a brassy set of soulful pipes, and lately she runs around town with her new sweetheart... the ukulele. When she's not on the road, you can find her twirling a burlesque tassel, spitting sultry spoken word, burning a hip hop joint down, taking dirty pictures, crocheting some funky headgear, teaching sex-positive education workshops, or knee deep in California greens on the farm in Sonoma County.