Audrey claire taichman biography samples
At the rate it’s growing, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe, holding court between Sept. 3 and 18 this year, may soon take its place beside two of the world’s greatest annual international artsfests – the four-week, late-summer Edinburgh International Festival in the Scottish capital and early summer’s Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C.
Edinburgh, the world’s largest international festival, drawing hundreds of acclaimed performers from every sector of the globe, also boasts the world’s largest Fringe Festival, an unjuried array of wildly divergent talents, with more than 32,000 performances and more than 2,000 shows packed into 250 venues across the smoky city.
Spoleto USA, although smaller in scale, mounts dozens of operatic, theatrical and musical productions, many of them world premieres, and boasts its own Piccolo Spoleto (piccolo, in Italian, means “little” – a misnomer, if I ever heard one) – about 700 unjuried events in 17 days, half of them free.
By comparison, Producing Director Nick Stuccio invites dozens of cutting-edge contemporary performing artists from across the nation and around the world to our own Philadelphia Live Arts Festival to show us what they can do. Meanwhile, the Philly Fringe explodes across the urban and suburban landscape with unfiltered performing and visual artists, many experienced, many new, eager to entertain, titillate and otherwise stir up the spirits of the teeming culturistas who crave great art and innovation.
The twin festivals are wondrous beasts consuming our imagination as they themselves desire to be consumed.
And to keep feeding the beast – to encourage more experimentation, to coax more artists out of the shadows and into the flickering lights – the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe are hosting, on Wednesday, Sept. 15, their first annual benefit. Dubbed the Feastival, the ambitious event bring Take us way back: what was the film that sparked your passion for cinema? Your epic female filmmaker lists are incredible. How is it humanly possible to curate these lists into the thousands?! Explain your process. To be honest, my current curation method is mainly ‘seven degrees of Kevin Bacon’ and stumbling onto women who are working behind the scenes, plus adding the ones I already knew. I’ve also noticed some women from the credits in things that I’ve watched, and have also looked at some festival lineups and indie film release lists for new titles. I haven’t had a chance to survey all the award nominee lists and women-oriented film websites yet and I have less free time now, so the lists are definitely still a work in progress. The Cinematography and Composer lists are still very new. I’ve also had help from other Letterboxd members, and one that I’d like to especia If you’re a chef, requests to participate in charity fundraisers come fast and furious. If you’re a chef with a conscience, you say yes to as many of them as you can. But prepping a thousand or so portions and gearing up to serve them offsite is both expensive and time consuming. That’s why, more often than not, tasting events aren’t places where you can expect to sample a restaurant’s best work. Good cause, sure. Best food ever? Not likely. Except at Feastival. The annual FringeArts gala, which raises most of the money needed to put on the citywide Fringe Festival, is renowned among the party set for its incredible food. That’s the opinion of everyone from arts patrons who attend to chefs who participate to the founder of the event, restaurateur Audrey Taichman. “I don’t know why,” says Taichman, who owns Twenty Manning Grill, Audrey Claire and Cook. “I mean, when I did other events it was always like, ‘Ok, I’ll donate, I’ll put out a chip with some tartare on it.’ But in our first year, everybody came and it was just unbelievable.” That first event, in 2010, sold just over 200 tickets — not many. But even so, it raised an eye-popping $235,000. Attendance and revenue have grown steadily — last year’s party hosted more than 1,000 guests and pulled in a cool $515,000 Part of the reason for the smashing success is that attendees know there will be seriously great food. “Feastival is superior,” says Ben Puchowitz, chef and co-owner at Cheu Noodle Bar and Bing Bing Dim Sum. “No offense to other events.” Why? “The combination of great food, music and art somehow creates this big ball of energy that everyone in attendance can feel. It’s like magic fairy dust that makes everything better to the senses.” At Feastival, live acrobatic performances are always part of the evening — something that stems from and highlights its connection with the arts scene. “Most fundraising events are in ballrooms of corporate hotels,” says Sam Mink of Oyster House and Mi We always hear about the shiny, new food companies. The Spot is a series about the Philadelphia area's more established establishments and the people behind them. Audrey Taichman is an anchor of the Philadelphia restaurant scene, as the owner of Audrey Claire, Twenty Manning Grill and Cook - and organizer of annual FringeArts fundraiser Feastival. Nineteen years ago, when she launched Audrey Claire, her BYOB in a former five-and-dime on the corner of 20th and Spruce Streets, Taichman was nothing but a 26-year-old who had a lot of experience as a server and bartender. What she also had was a lot of energy, nerve, and charm. The banker who approved her small-business loan told her she probably wouldn't have gotten it, if not for her charisma. The banker was right to follow his instincts, because Audrey Claire was busy from the night it opened. Upending conventional wisdom - at the time, hotspots included the luxe Striped Bass and Le Bec-Fin - Philadelphians embraced Taichman's vision of a streetcorner BYOB. Diners happily toted their own bottles and waited up to two hours to crowd into the spare-but-tasteful space to enjoy simple bistro fare. And they still do. Her second restaurant, right up the block, got off to a more rocky start. The longtime home to Carolina's had been turned into a wine bar called Beaujolais, but it faltered after less than two years. In 1999, the owners decided to sell. Taichman decided she had to buy. The bar was Audrey Claire's de facto waiting room. The interior was revamped, an Asian fusion menu was developed, and Twenty Manning was born. It was a much bigger endeavor than her original BYOB, with double the seating and a full bar. From the start, Taichman was in over her head, and she knew it. In 2002, her then-boyfriend Marc Vetri sent her a lifeline in the form of chef Kiong Banh, who helped streamline the menu and establish order. Still, the concept wasn't quite there, and it took eight more years - and the crushing reality o
This is a really hard question, but the first film I went out and bought memorabilia for wasThe Mummy in 1999. It was a Mummy action figure that included canopic jars. The movie made me want to visit Egypt, and it definitely sparked an appreciation for Rachel Weisz on my part, although the entire cast was fantastic. And one of the first films I bought on DVD wasAmélie.
Thank you! My first two lists—Written by Women and Directed by Women—actually started from me trying to track what was on my watchlist that I could eventually use for a personal ‘52 Films by Women’ list, and then I just decided one day to start adding everything, even the Hallmark and Lifetime movies, since people tend to turn their noses up at them. You can see the origins from the Directed by Women list, where it is still in a ‘when added’ order. The other lists came from seeing names and wanting to record them in a list to keep track of them. I used to work in a library, so I guess I just feel a compulsion to catalog things sometimes.