CWF Lead Artist:  Julie Queen
Project Title:  Ten Dollar Destiny
Recipient Organization:  Thick Description
Lead Artist:  Julie Queen
Genre and Date Awarded:  Performing Arts, June 2005
Premiered:  January, 2008

Performance artist, singer, and filmmaker Julie Queen is collaborating with Thick Description and a team of artists to create and produce Ten Dollar Destiny, a multi-media production based on Queen’s research into psychics, fortune tellers, and psychology.  The piece will premiere at the Thick House, Thick Description’s 80 seat theater, in July 2007.  It is being designed to tour to other venues.

Ten Dollar Destiny’s story will be told in a first person narrative and performed in a variety of musical styles—opera, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and experimental.  Queen writes about her story:

It’s so tempting to believe that our future can be known, and yet, any attempt to divine that future ends up fatally confused.  That combination of beauty and confusion is necessary, I think; it’s the fuel for faith and hope…and theatre.

Queen’s research for the piece will involve consulting a range of psychics and astrologers from around the world.  Many readings will take place in person, and others by phone or e-mail.  Also during the early development phase for the piece, she will meet with people from the Berkeley Psychic Institute and the Institute of Noetic Science; visit the psychic town of Lily Dale, New York; and consult with a team of psychoanalysts at the Psychoanalytic Institute of California.  Dr. Julie Leavitt will provide ongoing advice about the crossing points between psychics and psychology.

Upon completing the research, Queen will develop the musical theater work through a collaboration with the artists who make up Thick Description (director Tony Kelly, dramaturg, Karen Amano, and lighting designer Rick Martin), and a further team of distinguished participating artists.  The latter include: composers Pamela Z, and José Marquez and Ana Machado (of the band Pepito), writer Carol Lloyd, filmmaker Paul Lundahl, and set designer Paolo Salvagione. To enhance the story’s use of different time frames, shifting perceptions, and continuous surprise, the artists are planning a giant pop-up book set incorporating 3D film projectors.  Julie Queen and filmmaker Paul Lundahl also are developing a documentary film of Ten Dollar Destiny’s research and performance.

Julie Queen is a San Francisco based singer, performance artist, and filmmaker who has performed in many premieres, sung in concert with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, and been a co-founder of the interdisciplinary performance group, the Qube Chix. 

Thick Description creates, produces, and presents new theater intended to reflect and engage the San Francisco Bay Area’s racially and culturally diverse audience community.  It believes that when art is relevant and accessible, it can transform the world. The company’s work rises out of connecting to its local community, to popular culture, and to events of the day.  To that end, Thick Description operates its venue, the Thick House, as a performing arts/community center—producing world-class, professional theater, presenting emerging performing groups, hosting neighborhood events, collaborating on community projects, and partnering with local businesses.  Ten Dollar Destiny will be the fourth music-theater work produced in Thick Description’s 16-year history.

Julie Queen is a San Francisco based performer and filmmaker whose onstage career has consisted of singing and performing in startling operas, theatre pieces, and avant-cabaret for more than 20 years.  Her work has been seen in diverse venues from dive bars to concert halls—often on ropes, trapezes or in cages—and her fearlessness has allowed her to continue exploring new and interesting work.

She has performed in many premieres of new work, ranging from the title roles in the opera Wuornos, about convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos, in the opera Frida about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.  She performed with Thick Description in their first commissioned opera, Firebird Hotel.  Ms. Queen has sung in concert with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Kent Nagano.  She has performed with Soon 3 (Ace Taboo), in Erik Ehn’s Phrenic Crush, with Della Davidson, and with many other Bay Area luminaries.

Queen is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary performance group, the Qube Chix (Pamela Z, Leigh Evans, and Julie Queen), who are known for their hauntingly beautiful theatre pieces, amazing vocal music, and crazy stage performances like shaving men bald on stage while singing maniacally.  They have performed in theaters and clubs throughout the Bay Area and also at The Knitting Factory and CBGB’s in New York.  Their performance piece, Circle of Bone, was featured and received funding from the Bay Area Dance Series and University of Nebraska at Omaha as well as the LEF Foundation and Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.  They received a residency at Yellow Springs Institute where they had the opportunity to collaborate with New York theater experimentalists Mabou Mines.

Other recent collaborations include Burning Louise, an opera theatre piece, which originated in Z Space’s New Music Theatre’s collaboration retreat.  Queen’s collaboration with playwright Brad Erickson, composer Dwight Okamura, and co-performer Trauma Flintstone has resulted in two concert readings, a music video, and a planned fully-staged production.

Julie Queen also is finishing her first feature documentary film, Tango Stories, a lyrical exploration of tango music and musicians in contemporary Buenos Aires.  She is a co-director/producer with her filmmaker husband Paul Lundahl. 

Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology.  She creates solo works combining operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found percussion objects, spoken word, and electronics.  In addition to her solo work, she has composed and recorded scores for dance, theatre, film, and new music chamber ensembles.  Her large-scale multi-media works have been presented at The Kitchen in New York and Theater Artaud and ODC in San Francisco; and her audio works have been presented in exhibitions at The Whitney Museum in New York and the Diözesanmuseum in Cologne.

Composers José Marquez and Ana Machado of the San Francisco Band Pepito feature electronic elements and rhythms along with electro-acoustic instrumentation.  Their first release, Migrante, earned them “Best New Band” at the 2002 Latin Alternative Music Conference in New York.  According to the Band’s Tijuana-based label, Static Discos, “Pepito is punky IDM with both English and Spanish lyrics, optimistic modernism, political discourse with the gratification of an ever expanding universe, crafty songs that hook you up and never let go, smart bombs, sexy cars and pop deliverance.”

Writer Carol Lloyd returns to theatrical work with Ten Dollar Destiny. During the 1980s and 1990s she worked as a writer and dramaturg for choreographer Ellie Herman and collaborative multimedia/performance ensembles such as Elbows Akimbo and the Qube Chix (featuring Julie Queen). In recent years she has written essays for Salon, The New York Times Magazine and the NPR radio series This American Life.  She writes a weekly column on real estate for the San Francisco Chronicle, and teaches a class based on her best-selling career counseling book for creative people, “Creating a Life Worth Living.” She holds an MFA degree in playwriting from UCLA.

Paul Lundahl has been shooting, producing, and editing films and videos for documentaries, experimental films, and performance for over 20 years.  He received a gold award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for co-producing the documentary Anatomy of a Springroll, which has aired on over 250 PBS affiliates, in film festivals, and museums around the United States.  His documentary on the late Stan Brakhage, Parallel Faust, has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Cinematheque, and Denver Center Cinema.  Paul’s 25’ x 40’ digital film installation, “Dance,” has been playing at Experience Music Project since 2001.  He presented work at the Sundance Film Festival 2000 and 2001 at the House of Docs, the result of a unique assignment teaching filmmaking to young students in Bhutan and Croatia.  His interest in 3-D cinema has resulted in a recent stereoscopic film installation at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

Paolo Salvagione, set designer, is an inventor/designer who creatively solves a variety of unique design requests.  One of his current projects involves working with Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand, and others of The Long Now Foundation as a Project Engineer, designing a large mechanical clock intended to last for 10,000 years.  He also is working on designing a new type of elevator system and controls, a queuing theory for moving people in the next generation of tall buildings.  Past projects include:  designing and prototyping a three component epoxy painting system for Boeing, designing a Meteorite dust collection box for NASA, a Camera dolly for Matthew Barney, and a door actuation and safety system for a glass cylindrical elevator for Koolhaas/Prada in New York City.

Dr. Julie Leavitt spent her first five years out of residency working with chronically mentally ill patients in the public sector at Community Focus, an assertive community treatment program in the Tenderloin.  She is currently developing her private practice as an adult psychiatrist/psychotherapist.  She also is the Medical Doctor at Caduceus, an outreach case management program for the homeless mentally ill.  She is the medical director/staff psychiatrist at Access Institute, a low fee psychoanalytically focused treatment program.  She is a board member of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.