ELSKA'S ARCTIC ADVENTURE

An interactive solo show for young audiences

Written and performed by Shelley Wollert

Directed by Nicholas A. Cotz

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A workshop performance

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Friday, April 3, 2020  |  7:00p

Saturday, April 4, 2020  |  11:00a 

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Chain Theatre

312 W 36th St, 4th floor

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FREE  (RSVP Required)

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After a mysterious seed arrives with an albatross, Elska and the audience embark on an epic journey across her arctic island.  Could the glowing seed be dangerous? Should she plant it? Will the Land of Lost Socks ever learn to behave themselves? Through pop songs, dance, puppetry, and projection, young pioneers (3-6 years old) will be immersed in Elska's quirky land of fire and ice in this interactive 40 minute production. Award-winning artist Elska (Parents' Choice, NAPPA, NY Times Critic's Pick) brings the audience through waterfalls, geysers, and fields of moss, introducing them to her best friends along the way.

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SHELLEY WOLLERT (Playwright, Elska) Elska is a multi-media project for families created by Shelley Wollert and Allen Farmelo after a trip to Iceland in 2009.  Elska, a fictional character, performed by Wollert, is a modern pioneer who discovers a small island off the coast of Iceland on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where she lives with a group of unusual residents – an Arctic Fox, a Polar Bear writer, a green Goobler, and a colony of Lost Socks, to name a few. Elska’s debut album, Middle of Nowhere, which released 2012 on Winter Bear Records, received critical acclaim and both a Parents’ Choice Foundation Silver Award and a NAPPA Honors Award, as well as national exposure though heavy rotation on SiriusMX Radio since its release.  Elska toured her one-woman theatrical show Middle of Nowhere, throughout the United States, UK, Canada and Iceland in such venues as BAM (Brooklyn), Symphony Space (NYC), Alden Theater (VA), Mass MoCA (MA), Arts Commons (Calgary) from 2012-2016. Shelley is currently writing a collection of short stories from Elska’s Island that will be accompanied by a music album and live theatrical production.

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NICHOLAS A. COTZ (Director) has produced and directed in New York, Los Angeles, and Europe. Favorite directing projects include Gideon Irving's My Name is Gideon at The Brick in Williamsburg, and the NY Times Critic’s Pick rogerandtom at HERE with Personal Space Theatrics. Recent producing credits with AFO include: Irving's Songs, Space Travel, and Everything in Between at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, winning ThreeWeeks Editors’ Award; Irving’s I’m Probably Going to Die Eventually at Rattlestick; the NY Times Critic's Pick The Brobot Johnson Experience, by Darian Dauchan (co-produced with The Bushwick Starr); and Lizzie Vieh's Monsoon Season both at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and in NYC at Rattlestick Playwright's Theater. Cotz holds an MFA in directing from Brooklyn College and was a Manhattan Theatre Club Directing Fellow.