Theater News

Tim Etchells Recieves 2016 Spalding Gray Award

Etchells is a UK-based theater maker and teacher.

Tim Etchells and Aisha Orazbayeva in Etchells' 2015 theatrical project Seeping Through.
Tim Etchells and Aisha Orazbayeva in Etchells' 2015 theatrical project Seeping Through.
(photo via www.timetchells.com)

Theater maker and visual artist Tim Etchells has been named the recipient of the 2016 Spalding Gray Award. The award comes with a $20,000 commission to create a new work and provides for a full production of that work at the honor's sponsoring organizations.

Named after the late monologist Gray, the prize is sponsored by Performance Space 122, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, On the Boards in Seattle, and Kathleen Russo, Gray's Widow. It is presented by the Spalding Gray National Consortium.

Etchells, known for his solo work and as Artistic Director of British theater collaborative Forced Entertainment, creates formative text-driven works that search for identity in a fractured, uncertain world. With the Spalding Gray Award, he will collaborate with Forced Entertainment to create a new performance piece titled Real Magic. Real Magic is about the traps we live in and the possibilities of escape. Exploring story and the absence of a story, it mixes text, music, image, movement and silence.

Gray's signature monologues include Swimming to Cambodia, It's a Slippery Slope, Morning, Noon and Night, and Monster in a Box. He died in 2004.