Snuggled neatly between The Continental Club and Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge, BETA Theater moved into a beautiful room upstairs above Tacos A Go Go. It is the perfect space for us to continue growing our community. We’ve been homeless for over a year, and while figuring out where to land, we started our weekly show MAX & Friends at Big Top (It’s free, Tuesdays at 7:30PM). The fellas at Continental reached out to us when the space became vacant, and that’s all that we needed to sign the lease.
Currently, we are dreaming about what to do next. It’s a perfect location for us to dream big, and it’s a perfect time to step into our world. BETA is offering more classes than ever before, and we’re taking exciting steps to stay true to BETA’s mission to empower folks to use improv as a tool to make shows, shorts, and sketches. Also, this part of town is just cool.
The Rush Process Workshop
Animation and Design by Traci Thiebaud at Dinolion
Dave Merson Hess is a diverse and talented artist, Animator, Composer and Filmmaker. He is also the Director of Rush Process, a hand-crafted animation festival presented at Aurora Picture Show. BETA has worked with him as an Animation Educator and a Producer for various shows.
A bit of trivia, Dave produced the animation we stole a still from for BETA's logo. Here it is:
Inspired by BETA's Make-A-Movie Night, he approached us to hold an animation workshop in conjunction with the festival where people show up, divide into teams, improvise a bunch of quick scenes, pick our favorite scenes, assign them to groups, create short animations and screen them that day. And that's what we did. We met at The Waughford on the Sunday after the festival, and made the following:
Keep an eye out for our next Rush Process Animation workshop. I heard a rumor that movement is involved with the next.
Thank you to all those who participated, and special thanks to Dinolion for supplying a lot of the necessary equipment to pull off such a rush process and screening of very fun work.