Where Stanislavski Meets Fanon.
Kangalee Arts Ensemble, Inc.
“My Dying City (or: The Social Justice Suicide Hour”) is the Ensemble’s latest play. A result of the Action Lab’s Artist-in-Action Fellowship granted to Dennis Leroy Kangalee — this new provocative piece explores the crisis of a rogue radical radio station amidst genocide and revolution. And much more. This work-in-progress begins rehearsal April 1, 2025. Stay Tuned!
“Technology & The Human Cry:” Samuel Beckett’s plays are not foretelling doom -- they are the results of it. The Kangalee Arts Ensemble, Inc. & J. Stock Productions kicked off the new year ringing in the grave absurdity of our times with two of Samuel Beckett's tour-de-force monologues dealing with aging, regret, and dread — Krapp's Last Tape & Rockaby. Both monologues were performed by Dennis Leroy Kangalee and Justine Stock.
Our special limited engagement on the West Coast - Carmel and Big Sur - recently closed January 28, 2025 to sold out audiences. We were honored to have played at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts and the Henry Miller Memorial Library.
“Krapp’s Last Tape and Rockaby are startling plays about more than failure or regret or memories, their character’s signify the end of an era...for themselves...the audience...our society.” ”
Stills Justine Stock as W in “Rockaby” and Dennis Leroy Kangalee as Krapp in “Krapp’s Last Tape” - are by Manny Espinoza from the Carl Cherry Center premiere of the Kanaglee’s Arts revival in Carmel, CA January 23, 2025. Directed by Dennis Leroy Kangalee.
“Kangalee as Krapp and Stock in Rockaby were tragic and funny...Both plays portrayed people who many of us will become someday, asking bold questions about aging.”
Beckett’s monologues are disembodied spirits, voices, or conflicted bodies floating in the ether after the war or during catastrophe. They are the tremblings inside of us when we have regret or deep guilt. They are the epitaphs of the last people alive who are slowly conceding that there is nowhere else to go when you have reached the end. The world is full of absurdity; Beckett challenges you to find your own within the gates of his words. Like Shakespeare, Beckett’s poetry frees the actor, Picasso he urges you perceive differently, like Chaplin and Keaton — he begs you to laugh at the mystery and despair of life…and this pushes the actor to perform his words as if saving a life. Namely that lone performer in the light saying his words. And digesting them before an audience. The Kangalee Arts Ensemble makes Beckett as urgent as their protest dramas and as entertaining as their Actor’s exercises.
“…Dennis Leroy Kangalee’s vision of a theater company is like a culmination of American Theater’s past 100 years. From Ira Aldridge to the Group Theater to the passionate agitprop of the Black Arts Movement and the The Living Theater. His dramatic works are chock-full of ideas, overwhelmingly so…but the best cocktail of the personal and political.”
— Kam Williams, Village Voice
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The KANGALEE ARTS ENSEMBLE, INC. is a 501-C3 BIPOC non-profit theater company devoted to the collision of radical politics, classical theater aesthetics, & the liberation of the actor.
Inspired by the legacy of The Living Theater and the Black Arts Movement, it is led and organized by artists and activists who work hard to achieve that delicate balance in theater between high poetry, entertainment, agitprop, and the leap towards transcendence. Never forsaking one for the other.
With their provocative 2024 drama, The Life & Death of Art, the group’s first original work which openly equated the repression of artists with the oppression against Blacks and Palestinians, experiences and ideas from corners of the arts and trenches of revolutionary activism were applied. Premiering in April 2024, the play exemplified the group’s aim of blending the personal with the political. And by doing this, galvanizing both the idea of the dramatic written word and the role of the performing artist.
For revolutions come - not just as thieves in the night - but on the backs of actors…
The original cast of the NYC premiere of The Life & Death of Art in April 2024.