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Bio-Sketch New York City guerilla filmmaker Dennis Leroy
Moore (DLM) was born in 1976 in Flushing, NY and is
first-generation American. His parents are originally from Port
of Spain, Trinidad. His first independent feature film As
an Act of Protest, a lacerating, surreal drama about racism
in America, was picked as the best “Black Film of the year”
by The Black World Today and called “powerful” by Variety
magazine. Needless to say, DLM’s work has begun to garner
critical attention within the NY underground and across the
country. Both political and personal, DLM’s work speaks
specifically to the emerging generation of artists, the hip-hop
community, and the alienated people of American society. In
February 2003, DLM received an honorarium from UNC, Chapel Hill
for a special discussion and screening of As
an Act of Protest. It originally premiered at the Pan
African Film Festival in Los Angeles, February 2002.
DLM has (literally) begged, borrowed, and
stolen to support his art and is an admirer of avant-garde &
Foreign films. His favorite filmmakers are a varied lot
including Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, John Cassavetes, Francis
Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, and Ingmar Bergman. His directing style
is a unique blend and influence of expressionistic theater, the
political subversion of Bertolt Brecht, the Black Arts Movement
and the plays of Amiri Baraka, and the “documentary”
naturalism of the European post-neo realists such as Lars von
Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, founders of the Dogme 95 movement.
DLM first studied acting at the Sanford
Meisner Theater in 1988. He
went on to graduate from the LaGuardia High School of Performing
Arts, where he then studied in Russia at the Moscow Art Theater
(Marat Yusim and Oleg Tabakov) and in 1994 earned a scholarship
to study classical acting at the Juilliard Conservatory, where
he instead began to direct. DLM left Juilliard to concentrate on
the staging and reviving of Black American classics as opposed
to the European ones. He has independently produced and directed
several plays and is included in the Independent-Art Here
Theater’s roster of “Best Directors of the 1990's.”
He has curated readings, seminars, and was
the very first artist to ever induct a Black Theater Seminar in
Lincoln Center as well as perform a staged reading at Alice
Tully Hall, which established the “Wednesday-at-One” series.
Between 1993 and present Moore’s theater credits have included
such plays as Tennessee Williams’ Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton, Bertolt Brecht’s
in the Jungle of the Cities, Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Dutchman,
and the Toilet, Elizabeth
Wong’s China Doll about
the Chinese-American screen star Anna May Wong,
Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s
Last Tape, and comedian/poet Robbyne Kaamil’s The
Bitch is Back He co-authored the still un-produced screen
adaptation of Ed Bullins’early drama Goin’a
Buffalo.
DLM has been hired to direct the film One Day in the Life, former
Black Panther Marvin X’s autobiographical tale of drug
addiction and loss, in April 2003 on location in San Francisco
and Oakland. In September, 2003 he plans to workshop and then
shoot his next personal feature The Desperate Ones, a dark,
character-driven drama film about suicide, love, family, and the
doom of war in the fall and early winter of 2003.
DLM is a co-founder of John Brown X
Productions, LLC – an independent production company formed by
Melissa Dymock, whose goal is to support filmmakers with truly
independent visions and who are not afraid of challenging the
media’s representation of women, people of color, and all
those who are often marginalized or under-represented. John
Brown X Productions, was named after the white abolitionist John
Brown and the great political activist and religious leader
Malcolm X. Together, these identities define a certain
characteristic of American history and society otherwise
forgotten and John Brown X Productions seek to produce and
distribute films with the radical fearlessness of these two
brave men of the past.
For further information on Dennis Leroy
Moore’s work and to read in-depth reviews/essays about his
first feature film “As an Act of Protest” visit www.asanactofprotest.com
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Dennis
Leroy Moore’s THE ART OF ACTING
10 Week Intensive
Acting Training Program
May 3rd to July 13, 2003
What is art? What makes acting an art? Why
are artists important?
How important is it to create art in times of
War?
Actor, Writer,
& Director Dennis Leroy Moore seeks to find answers to these
questions.
Moore’s 10
Week Intensive Acting Training Program is geared toward the
practice, understanding, and exploration of the art of acting,
the history of modern American theater (including the Black Arts
Movement and the off-Broadway movement), and analysis of
contemporary cinema and the actor’s contributions to movies in
a personal, historical, and political context.
Classes will entail
basic various forms of scene-study, workshop performances,
breathing exercises,
improvisation, watching old and new films (domestic &
foreign), readings of new plays and screenplays intended to be
directed by Dennis Leroy Moore.
The ultimate goal
is to allow directors to be able to form ensembles to work with
on their next film or theater projects.
This 10 Week
Intensive Acting Program is designed to hone in on and
benefit the actor as an artist, not as a celebrity or fetish of
Pop culture.
Beginning
May 3rd to July 13, 2003 -- Saturdays and Sundays 1:00pm -
4:00pm
@
The Creative Acting Company (122 W. 26th St., 11th Floor)
Cost
of Full Ten Week Session: $390.00
Small classes,
convenient location
Call
212-969-0011 or 347-231-9779
for registration and/or more information * * * *
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update 1
July 2008 |
