ABOUT US

Grrl Action, a program of Rude Mechanicals, began in 1999 as a summer workshop in creative writing and performance designed to empower girls between the ages of 13 and 16 to find their public voices and build confidence while collaborating with young women from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.

In fall 2007, after eight years of success, Grrl Action expanded its mission, and added a year-round performance-based artistic education program. Grrl Action now enables young women from 13 to 18 to plan and execute individual, long-term artistic projects, working across the disciplines, alongside professional female artists as their mentors.

Grrl Action participants now can expand their practice beyond the theatre space and into their everyday lives and communities, making them not only better writers and performers, but better citizens, activists, and role models. Engaging them through collectivity and community involvement, Grrl Action inspires young women to widen and transcend the definition of what it means to be an artist.

Our Mission: 

To help teenage girls find voice and vision through the power of performance.

Our Vision:

We see teenage girls realizing their potential as artists, critical thinkers and powerful role models.

Our Guiding Principles:

Our Facility:

Grrl Action, a program of Rude Mechanicals, takes place at the Rude Mechs' performance venue, The Off Center. Rude Mechs is currently in the process of beginning renovations on an additional 1,400 s.f. of warehouse space connected to The Off Center. Once complete, this space will be named The Off Shoot and will be dedicated to the work of Grrl Action. For more information about The Off Shoot, click here.

Rude Mechanicals

The Off Center

2211- A Hidalgo St.

Austin, TX 78702

Our Staff:

MADGE DARLINGTON | GRRL ACTION CO-MANAGING PROGRAM DIRECTOR

Madge Darlington, MFA, has served as Grrl Action Faculty and as Production Director since 2004. She is a Founding Co-Producing Artistic Director of Rude Mechanicals. For Rude Mechs, she directed the first-ever stage adaptation of Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. She has also served as Scenic Designer for Lust Supper, as Technical Director for Lipstick Traces, Requiem for Tesla, Big Love, How Late it Was How Late, and Cherrywood. Madge performed in Rude Mechs’ productions Pale Idiot, Salivation, and In the House of the Moles.

Through her association with the University of Texas Shakespeare at Winedale program she worked as an Actor or Assistant Director on over 25 Shakespeare plays (including Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare's Globe, London). Madge served as Program Coordinator for the University of Texas Shakespeare at Winedale summer program from 1994 to 1999, where she administered the program and instructed undergraduate students in performance, design and technical direction. Madge has taught theatre to young people in Rude Mechanicals’ Adopt-a-School Program at Travis High School, and in Leander High School’s drama department. Madge also created a Shakespeare study in performance program for the at-risk youth performance group Cultural Warriors at the American Institute for Learning in Austin, Texas.

In May of 2004, Madge received an M.F.A. in Theatre Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. She remains a Junior Fellow of British Studies at The University of Texas. During her time at the Department of Theater and Dance she worked as Technical Director on Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle and Yacov Sharir's Automated Body Project. She has studied with Ann Bogart, Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, Deb

Margolin, and Peggy Shaw. 

 

MEG SULLIVAN | GRRL ACTION CO-MANAGING PROGRAM DIRECTOR

Meg Sullivan, MFA, has served as a Grrl Action mentor for the past two years. Meg has taught acting and theatre history at Texas A&M University and The University of Texas at Austin. Meg also works with Women and Their Work as the program coordinator for Learning Through the Arts, a professional development program helping teachers integrate more arts-based teaching to core curriculum in Manor, Tx. Meg has worked as a consultant, facilitator, and director for the Living Newspaper project of the Humanities Institute of the University of Texas. For the Harry Ransom Center, Meg choreographed and co-directed gallery performances to coincide with the "The American Twenties" exhibit and served as a guest curator for the exhibit of Arthur Miller's archives "Rehearsing the American Dream".

As a community-engaged artist, Meg creates original works that combine movement and gesture with autobiographical and ethnographic text to explore issues of place, memory, history, and justice. A Curious Seaside Feeling, based on the writings of Virginia Woolf, was produced as part of the 2008 Frontera Festival. Chat/Piles, an auto-ethnography about the history of lead mining and contamination at the Tar Creek Superfund Site in Northeastern Oklahoma, was produced at the Micro-Fringe Festival of the 2008 conference of the American Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in Denver, Colorado.

Ongoing community-based projects include facilitating autobiographical solo performance workshops at the Wellness Community of Greater Boston and at the annual Tar Creek Conference in Miami, Oklahoma. As a performer in Austin, Meg has been seen as Jennie in Voices Underwater by Abi Basch with Salvage Vanguard, and as Mary Rowlandson in Have you Ever Been Assassinated? with Rude Mechs. She served as Production Manager for Rude Mechs' 2008 production of The Method Gun at The Long Center for the Performing Arts. Meg is also a member of The Meeting Point, an improvisational dance collective.

Meg received her MFA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007.

 

Site photo credit:  Beverly Barrett Photography