Party Soft
Party Soft is Flux’s gathering of ease & care. We share things that bring us softness. We celebrate our victories. We trade practices of self and collective care. And we offer witness for the hard things: loss, despair, and the smaller frustrations. Part performance, part ritual, part care network, and part party, Party Soft has been collectively created by Heather Cohn, Lori Elizabeth Parquet, Rebecca Ana Peña, Corinna Schulenburg, Isaiah Tanenbaum, and Salma Zohdi. Party Soft is part of Flux’s new ROAR: Rituals for Abundance and Renewal. ROAR is a series of virtual, in-person, and hybrid events intended to renew the spirits of the participants during the pandemic years.
Co-Creators
Heather Cohn, co-creator, (she/her) is a producer, director, fundraiser, and strong believer in collective leadership. She is a co-founder and Creative Partner with Flux Theatre Ensemble, an Indie theatre company founded in 2006. With Flux, Heather has produced nearly 30 full productions, including 18 world premieres. She directed 9 Flux productions, with playwrights including Corinna Schulenburg, Kevin R. Free, Kristen Palmer, Erin Browne, and Johnna Adams. She served as Assistant Director to Austin Pendleton on Johnna Adams’s Gidion’s Knot and most recently as assistant director for Andrea Thome’s Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes). She has also directed with companies including Rattlestick, Lark Play Development Center, Planet Connections, the EstroGenius Festival, MTWorks and Cherry Lane. She has also served as the Executive Director of En Garde Arts, the Director of Development for Epic Theatre, and prior to that worked with New York Theatre Workshop, The Pearl Theatre Company, and Theatre Communications Group, also in development. She previously served as a Board Member of the League of Professional Theatre Women (LPTW) and was co-chair of the Task Force for trans inclusion. She’s an alum of the Producers’ LAB with WP Theatre and the Cornerstone Theatre Summer Institute where she helped produce Octavio Solis’ LETHE. Heather is a graduate of Vassar College where she majored in Latin American Studies and spent time living in Cuba and Chile. And most importantly, she’s a proud mom to Mercena.
Lori Elizabeth Parquet, co-creator, (she/her), is a Flux Creative Partner and actor, director, and playwright from New Orleans, Louisiana with a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University. Her New York City stage credits include Macbeth, Dispatches From (A)mended America (Off-Broadway, Epic Theatre Ensemble), The Providence of Neighboring Bodies (Dutch Kills Theater/Ars Nova), The Honeycomb Trilogy: Sovereign (Gideon Productions), Medea (Phoenix Theatre Ensemble), Dog Act, Ajax in Iraq, Honey Fist, Operating Systems (Flux Theatre Ensemble), and Republic, Baal, Murder In the Cathedral (JACK/Hoi Polloi). She made her international debut performing in Pillars of Society at Teater Ibsen in Skien, Norway. She also performed in The Providence of Neighboring Bodies at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018. In 2019 she was nominated for and won the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Lead Role for her performance in Operating Systems. As a director, Lori has directed Topdog/Underdog at Princeton Summer Theater and assistant directed The Public Theater’s most recent Shakespeare in the Park productions of As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. She was alsoas an acting coach on Disney’s Hercules, a Public Works production. Lori just served as Associate Director of New York City Center’s Encores: Off-center production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Promenade and has directed many readings and workshops with Public Works, Flux Theatre Ensemble, The Brooklyn Generator, and other theatre companies across New York City. As a playwright, Lori was selected as one of six featured playwrights for Season Five of The Fire This Time Festival, which produced a reading of her full-length play In Communion, and her short plays have been produced through Flux Theatre Ensemble, New York Madness, and other NYC indie theatres and festivals.
Rebecca Ana Peña, co-creator, (she-her), is a Cuban American artist based in New York City. Trained as an actor, vocalist, and dancer at NYU (BFA Drama), she has worked in theatre, film, and multimedia. Credits Include: “Metra: A Climate Revolution Play with Sons” with Flux, “The Bacchae” (NYTimes Critics Pick) at The Classical Theatre of Harlem, “What Happened In Skinner (Ambie Award Nominated), and most recently leading the one-woman show “My Fellow Americans” at The Secret Theatre. When not performing, she works as a visual artist and writer. In any capacity, she loves working on projects that investigate people’s duality and humanity and allows all people to celebrate and explore their legacy.
Corinna Schulenburg, co-creator, (she-her), is a Flux Creative Partner. She is a trans artist and activist committed to ensemble practice and social justice.As a playwright, her work with Flux includes Riding the Bull, Rue, Other Bodies, The Lesser Seductions of History, Jacob’s House, DEINDE, Honey Fist, Salvage,The Sea Concerto, and Operating Systems. With Flux, she directed Ajax in Iraq (NYITA nomination), A Midsummer Nights Dream, and the Food:Souls Goldsboro and Volleygirls. As an actor with Flux, she has played Sam in Metra: A Climate Revolution Play with Songs; Max in World Builders, Dr. X in Hearts Like Fists, Ezekiel in 8 Little Antichrists (NYITA nomination), and the Professor in Rue.
Isaiah Tanenbaum, co-creator, (he/him) is a Creative Partner at Flux Theatre Ensemble. Favorite NYC roles include Jake (Operating Systems, Flux), Foster (Mary Brigit Poppleton, NY Fringe Festival), and Napoleon Bonaparte (Lickspittles, Buttonholers, & Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens, Boomerang Theater Company). Film work includes Stateside, Zelimo, and Troma’s Poultrygeist. A graduate of Amherst College, Isaiah lives in Brooklyn. He takes photographs of actors, plays, weddings, and events, and is Head of Marketing & Sales at Eldritch Foundry. With love to Jenna, Samson, and Juno. AEA / SAG-AFTRA. isaiaht.info // it-photos.com
Salma Zohdi, co-creator, (she-her), is an Egyptian dramaturg and theatre practitioner based in New York City. A cross-cultural storyteller who strives to align theatremaking with social justice movement-building, Zohdi is passionate about facilitating and using the power of storytelling to amplify and uplift a wide range of voices as well as to challenge injustice.
What Our Community Says About Party Soft
“Party Soft is a space for sharing ideas that nurture us as people and as artists in surprising, supportive, gentle, intellectually challenging ways. The word ‘party’ can conjure frivolous (or socially awkward, or tedious) associations. But Flux’s Party Soft has done the impossible: created a party I’d be sad to miss. It’s amusing and practical and challenging. Each time I attend, I come away with new ideas that spark creativity and with gratitude for the kindness of a loving community of artists who delight in helping one another grow in every aspect of our lives.”
“Party Soft is the sort of experience that finds its way around the armor the world has forced you to strap on. It finds the wounds you didn’t know you had and salves them.”
“Party Soft was a creative oasis where I felt artistically inspired and connected to a caring community. There isn’t an ounce of pretension, only a steadfast dedication for communal care and individual introspection through a wide variety of artistic exercises.”
“I still have a PINGO game card from the Party Soft event that I attended. It has the words Joy, Hope, Love, and Free Hugs, among others, which I find help me appreciate the day more. I love the concept of Party Soft because it reinforces everything that attracts me to a theater community and allows me to bring those qualities into my non-theater world where I need to use them more. Party Soft encourages people to practice and develop their soft skills: empathy, communication, listening, emotional availability, self-care, and care for others. It is based on the need for kindness and community in a world that has been unkind and fractured over the past few years.”
