Co-Director, Halloween 2009

Christopher Allen is a Twin Cities born actor, community arts teacher, printmaker, and set builder. As a child, he began performing in his parent’s basement creating site-specific pieces centering on youth and parental angst. In more recent times Christopher has performed in and built for Barebones Annual Halloween Show since 2006.

He has been working as a performer and company member of Bedlam Theatre since 2007. His most recent work includes set design for Million Dollar Museum at Bedlam Theatre, performing in the 2009 Fringe show Comedy Of Errors, and playing an angst-filled teenager in Joseph Evan’s Turducken.

As well as performing on stage at various Twin Cities Theaters, Christopher enjoys building shadow puppets, paper cuts, and woodcuts. When not working on a show, he is Youth Coordinator at Bedlam, helping Cedar Riverside youth express themselves and each other through community and the performing arts. Most recently in collaboration with Brian Coyle Center youth he organized and created a neighborhood “Urban Safari” parade, teaching nearly 20 kids to stilt.

This fall he is ecstatic to be co-director of Barebones Halloween madness, and delighted to bring a little pure evil into the show.

Visiting Artist, Halloween 2009

Music Director, 2009 Halloween Show

Graphics Designer, Halloween 2009

JoAnn Blohowiak is a South Minneapolis resident, artist, and graphic designer. She has created the BareBones tabloid for the past three years. For this year’s Halloween show, JoAnn will also be playing her trumpet with the BareBones Music Ensemble.

Visit JoAnn’s Website

Co-Director, Halloween 2009

Lelis Brito is a Venezuelan-American director, choreographer, performer and educator of movement-theater who has worked for national and international venues for over 25 years. Her early training in dance with the Joffrey Ballet and Solange Golovine led her to a professional career in dance, dancing with Dayton Contemporary Dance, Cincinnati Contemporary Dance theatre, and Kei Takei’s Moving Earth amongst others.

Having created over 70 original works to date, including plays, choreographed dances, and visual scenography narratives, she began stretching her compositional thinking at Antioch College in the late 80’s where she studied puppetry and Visual Scenography with Amy Trompetter and others, and developed her performance composition under the tutelage of Dimitra Reber. She moved on to become a member of various performance collectives and collaboratives and locally has performed with In the Heart of the Beast, Trece Lunas Arts Collective, Bedlam Theatre, Rosy Simas Dance Company, Red Eye Collaborative, and more.

She has served as dance faculty at Antioch College, taught dance, composition, and performance for various companies, and has brought kinaethetic education into the public school classrooms through her Kinaesthetic Connections program. For 3 years, she developed innovative family-centered somatic fitness programming for Running Wolf Fitness Center. In 1997 she earned her MFA in dance composition, developing physical approach to Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the oppressed techniques. She continues to develop Boal’s work, most recently teaching at the International Theatre of the Oppressed conference in May of 2009.

She has choreographed and coached stilters and fire performers (most recently for Rah Kojis’ Infiamati) and in 2004 was assistant Director for the Puppetry Arts Studio production of Mercurius Lumens. She is the founder of the Center for Moving Cultures, an organization dedicated to transforming the experienced body through education and performance. She is also a certified personal trainer and body image educator.

After performing with Barebones Fleeced, she joins the Barebones team as Co-director, helping to weave multiple visions into a cohesive dream at the end of Fall.

Malia was raised in Bloomington, Minnesota. She attended the Arts High School at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, where she studied music composition and visual arts. After graduating high school in 1994, Malia earned a BA degree in 1998 from the Paracollege at St. Olaf College. She double-majored in Studio Art and “Art as Community Activism”, with additional studies in Performance Art through the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (1996). In 1999, Malia Burkhart began working with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater (HOBT) as an Americorps volunteer, and has since become an associate artist with the company.

Currently, Malia works independently as a residency teacher, puppet-builder and performer for multiple organizations. With HOBT, her puppets and performances have been featured in mainstage productions including Gyre, Seed, Winter Dreams, Gotama, Invigorate the Common Well, episodes I, II, and III, and smaller touring shows. Malia has been an active member of the all-female stilting performance group Chicks on Sticks since 1999, and has designed puppets and performed in the Halloween Extravaganza through Barebones Arts Collective.

Throughout the school year and summer, Malia teaches arts residencies for grades K – 12 in mask-making and puppetry. She can be booked to come to your school by contacting her directly, or through COMPAS. Malia also teaches arts residencies through the Minnesota State Arts Board, East Side Arts Council of St. Paul, In the Heart of the Beast Theater, The Ordway Center for Performing Arts, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Malia was a recipient of the 2007 Naked Stages Program through Intermedia Arts and the Jerome Foundation. Naked Stages is an intensive performance research program designed to give artists a supportive environment in which to build their performance and production skills while creating a new performance art piece. Through this program, Malia debuted “The Survival Pages” — a one-woman show investigating her relationship to nature through theater, video projection, dance, and original music.

Malia’s international experience includes: studying Butoh Dance (2001-2003) in Japan with Min Tanaka and Ken Mai, leading a parade section in the 2005 Dream Parade in Taiwan, and participating as a volunteer English teacher on the Peace Boat, where she toured 17 countries around the southern hemisphere over the course of 4 months. Onboard the Peace Boat, Malia led puppet workshops and presented multi-lingual puppet shows in Argentina and Chile, promoting awareness of Global Warming and the water crisis.

Malia Burkhart is a biracial artist of Japanese- and German-American descent.

Visiting Artist, Halloween 2009

Halloween Show 2009 Visiting Artist

Halloween Show 2009 Section Designer