Giving Voice Productions is committed to expanding the horizons and the definitions of theatrical form. It is our goal to “meet” contemporary audiences and create a space where pressing, raw, and relevant material can exist in an aesthetic of beauty and grace. We believe that this dynamic allows audiences to not only enjoy the theatrical event, but also receive and contemplate the subject matter.
Giving Voice Productions is committed to creating theatre from real and contemporary issues that are alive within the community. Through live performance and outreach efforts, we endeavor to inform, educate, entertain, and spark community discussion. Our performances are followed by in-depth talk-back sessions, which encourage the audience to be in dialogue with the artists and foster connections within the community.
Giving Voice Productions
Christa Ray
Christa Ray
Christa Ray holds an MFA in Theatre: Contemporary Performance from Naropa University. She has been involved with creating and acting in many original plays including her one-woman show, Lightning In The Storm: The Clara Barton Story (DragonFly Arts, Inc.), Medea Noir (Talos Theater Ensemble), Poles Apart (Slightly Askew Players) and the ritual healing performance, Emergence, which she also produced and directed. With Giving Voice Productions she co-created and performed in Power to Pleasing: The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls in the Boulder International Fringe Festival (2005. 2006) and at the University of Colorado. Christa also co-created and co-directed Pressure to Prove: The Sex Lives of Teenage Boys, which premiered at the 2007 Boulder International Fringe Festival.
Christa holds a post-graduate Diploma in Voice Movement Therapy from the Royal Society of Arts in London. She teaches her class Fearless Heart Voice-work at Naropa University through the Extended Studies School and has a private practice in Boulder, CO. She also co-teaches theatre classes with Bethany to at-risk youth in Denver through a program they initiated, and continue to develop, called the Urban Voices Performance Project.
Christa is a co-founder of Giving Voice Productions and the director/founder of DragonFly Arts, Inc.
Bethany Jean Urban
Bethany Jean Urban
Bethany Jean Urban is a theatrical artist who creates original theatrical ‘events’. She holds an MFA in Theater: Contemporary Performance from Naropa University (Boulder, CO).
Bethany Jean is a founding member of Giving Voice Productions and a co-creator of Power to Pleasing: The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls which won “Pick of the Fringe” at the Boulder International Fringe Festival in 2005 and 2006. She is happy to be focusing on the development and growth of Giving Voice Productions.
In 2006, Bethany Jean also founded Crimson Crow Productions which houses her works in progress. She is also an associate member of Boulder based Theatre 13 and co-created and performed the physical theatre piece once upon a time: The End.
Bethany Jean has made her living as a circus performer based in Belfast, Ireland where she created and performed various aerial and acrobatic shows and performed in venues and on streets all over Ireland. She also taught circus to children and teens as cross-community outreach in Belfast.
Bethany Jean has spent time living in Los Angeles where she has worked both on camera and off camera in commercial casting. Now in Boulder, she continues her interest in film and dabbles occasionally when the opportunity arises.
Aside from her stage creations, Bethany Jean is presently focusing on developing somatically based actor training methods, incorporating contemplative studies, space awareness practices, experiential anatomy, and Body-Mind Centering®. Bethany teaches theatre to at-risk youth in Denver through a program she helped initiate, and continues to develop, called the Urban Voices Performance Project.
She is also developing theatrical programming for incarcerated populations.
Liz Stanton
Liz Stanton
Liz Stanton is a theater artist specializing in performing, singing and composing. She is a co-founder of Giving Voice Productions. Originally from Colorado, Liz Stanton makes her home in New York City where she has performed Off Broadway at Lincoln Center Institute, (The Rover, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night) Raw Space (Hamlet, Hedda Gabler) and The Culture Project (Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Changeling) as well as at many regional theaters around the country (The Buddy Holly Story, Pump Boys and Dinettes, Cole, Closer Than Ever, Romeo and Juliet, Parallel Lives).
Liz Stanton recently completed her MFA in Theatre: Contemporary Performance at Naropa University. There she wrote her first short musical Vision of Flight and her first opera The Bacchae: In Song and Vocal Extreme. Liz Stanton is also a founding member and resident sound designer/composer for Holderness Theater Company in New York City. Past sound designs include: The Life of Spiders, Einstein’s Dreams, What You Will, Much Ado About Nothing, The Rover, The Changeling, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale; for NATIONAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY: The Tempest, As You Like It. REGIONAL: Romeo and Juliet at Burning Coal Theater, Raleigh, NC, Liz Stanton toured with the bowed piano ensemble for 5 years and studied new music and electronic music composition with Steven Scott at Colorado College.
Liz Stanton creates theater and teaches voice and acting in New York City.