The A.V. Club’s 2011 Line Breaks Festival preview

Thanks to the University Of Wisconsin and its Office Of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, last year’s installment of the annual Line Breaks has been etched into The A.V. Club’s skulls ever since. Of course we were enamored with Janelle Monáe’s dizzying footwork and soul-infused wailing and the charming performance from Stew & Heidi of Passing Strange fame. But most importantly, we caught our first taste of the First Wave program’s mash-up of hip-hop and musical theater via slam poet Jasmine Mans’ massive lyrical throwdown on Nicki Minaj during her opening set for Monáe. Line Breaks is back for its fifth installment (April 8-16), so we can stop pacing back and forth excitedly and run some of its potential highlights under our nerd-scope. Oh yeah, and the whole thing is free.

The Limp: Rafael Casal—April 16, 7 p.m., Rotunda Studio, Overture Center

While the First Wave students have always played a huge role in the festival, giving a number of group and solo presentations during 2010’s installment, OMAI and First Wave office manager Lauren Young says that this year will be pretty much all about the students. “I think this year represents a real sort of transition for us from bringing in a number of guest artists to instead making Line Breaks a showcase for our [First Wave] cohorts,” explains Young, and she speaks the truth. The only real guest appearance comes from former UW graduate student and First Wave creative director Rafael Casal, who will fly in from Oakland, California to perform his own one-man production, The Limp, which Casal described as “an exploration of sex in the male psyche.”

The play follows a young adult male getting ready for his first date. Casal elaborates, “The whole show is compartmentalized, analyzing love and its complications—three characters with three very different viewpoints. Before I started work on this, I had directed 14 or 15 solo shorts for other students, so it felt right to finally work on my own. I wanted to show them some other work that could maybe be used as a tool or a talking point later on.” According to Casal, he’s been hard at work on the piece for the last two years. But while he insists that the play isn’t completely finished, he hopes to form a new connection to his students with it.

For Those Who Pray In Closets: Danez Smith; and Bloody Mary: Jasmine Mans—April 8-9, 7 p.m., Rotunda Studio, Overture Center

Since debuting a short from For Those Who Pray In Closets called The Trouble With Sundays at last year’s Line Breaks, Danez Smith has been working steadily on his play about Isaiah—a 22-year-old man who is half-drag queen and half-Evangelist—and how, in Smith’s own words, “being queer and Christian can relate to the same man.” Smith brought the fruits of his labor to the Queer Contact Festival in Manchester, England back in February and is excited to bring it home to the festival. Opener Jasmine Mans—whose slam poetry dunk on Nicki Minaj caused a stir last year—describes her piece Bloody Mary as acknowledging “that humanity lies within all of us” while simultaneously asking, “How far will we allow art to go as a people?” Mans also noted that Bloody Mary was actually denied entry at last year’s festival, but after another year of hard work, she feels that it’s now “time for it to come alive.” Mans continues, “I always wrote about Mary Magdalene in poems. This time, it’s in one complete story.”

Working Class: Asia Elliot; Still Born: William Giles; and In Other News: Gayle Smaller—April 13, 7 p.m., Rotunda Studio, Overture Center

Line Breaks’ mid-week batch of solo sets could be one of the most varied. Asia Elliot’s Working Class promises to be a “coming of age story,” scaling the trials and tribulations of teenage adolescence for a young woman, William Giles’ Still Born will focus on the “culture lost in immigration stories,” and finally Gayle Smaller’s In Other News will take on the lives of a gangster, a “hood chick,” and a family man residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The work will note the vast contrast between the local news and reality.

CTRL + ALTER + DEL: April 10-11, 7 p.m.; and Dog Years: A Wisconsin Experience: April 14, 7 p.m., First Wave’s First Cohort—Rotunda Studio, Overture Center

With the first ever First Wave First Cohort of students on its way out and a batch of fresh, Fourth Cohort faces on their way in, it only makes sense that the Line Breaks audience receives both a mighty swan song and a taste of what’s to come. Young expressed her excitement about Dog Years: A Wisconsin Experience. “It’s a collection of vignettes that describe everything from the first cohort’s first summer with us all the way through graduation day, so it’s sort of a chronological journey, covering four and a half years in one evening.”

The latest Cohort piece, CTRL + ALTER + DEL, also looks pretty promising, opening a dialogue on the relationship between technology and identity as it dives into “social networking, cyber-bullying, altering realities, and deleting flaws.” Obviously, these nights come highly recommended to anyone who wants to see what the First Wave program, at its core, is all about.