Lit Moon Theatre Company

The Lit Moon Theatre Company is a Santa Barbara-bred and based collective of theatre artists. Founded in 1991, Lit Moon staged its first production (Alice in Wonderland) in 1992, and achieved federal non-profit status in 1996. The purpose of the organization is "to offer educational opportunities that broaden and deepen an understanding of world theatre and cultural traditions, and promote and inspire inter-cultural understanding through live theatre performance." The company's artistic work cultivates a physical, image-based performance vocabulary. "If you haven't seen a Lit Moon production," wrote Santa Barbara News-Press critic Philip Brandes in 1994, "the company's approach to storytelling through a marriage of movement-based narrative with traditional techniques is inspiring in its sense of reawakened possibilities." Ten years on, in January 2004, Matt Radz of the Montreal Gazette wrote of Lit Moon's production of Hamlet, seen at the Centaur Theatre's Wildside Festival, "The company's style, melding the rigours of physical theatre with classic text, makes them pioneers, if not unique."

Lit Moon creates new productions with international collaborators, presents them at home and abroad, and produces alternating bi-annual international theater festivals in Santa Barbara. To date, Lit Moon has produced twenty-three original productions, six artistic residencies with artists from six different European countries, and ten international theater festivals. Lit Moon's festivals have featured thirty-two productions from twelve different countries, including Theatre Credo, Sofia (1998 and 2001), Do-Theatre St. Petersburg (2000, 2001, and 2004), the Market Theatre of Johannesburg (2003), the Bulgarian National Theatre, Sofia (2006), and the Georgian State Theatre, Tbilisi (2008). Lit Moon's own touring has taken the company to Bulgaria, Scotland, Quebec, the Czech Republic, Poland (three occasions), Montenegro, and Macedonia. Recent invitations include festivals in China, Bulgaria, Albania, and the European Republic of Georgia.