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Examiner.com: "Amy Munz and the Art of the Live Moment"
May 10, 2015
" Theater should be with the community and for the community. 'The small stage is great for finding the theater of the future,' she says. 'You can link up with local resources and tie into theater-communities. I like looking at theater as an actor, videographer, editor, scene-designer and business-person.'
The small stage is an adventure where everybody is challenged to build a sustainable model, a new wave of theater. They abandon the tradition of the ‘real’ mainstream job and get paid for acting. 'We have an opportunity of changing the industry, making art a necessity of culture. The unknowns are to be welcomed. Focus on what theater can be.'
...Lauren Dunagan will be directing Amy Munz in a new play reading in July. Dunagan says about Munz 'I love working with Amy because she is such a responsive and receptive actress. She’s the best kind of scene partner— tuned in to what she’s getting from you moment to moment, and responding with her voice and body. Working with her is like playing, with every night a little bit different, but the energy and commitment never waning. Plus, she’s incredibly smart in her approach to text, and takes her work seriously. During THE BALCONY, she always arrived early to spend time warming up and preparing for the performance, which I appreciate deeply.' "
"Patterns" is Theatre Bay Area Magazine "Editors' Pick" by Lily Janiak.
July/August 2014
"Munz has a dry, whimsical sense of humor that leavens her lovely, imagistic character studies of disparate souls all in the throes of deeply unsettling emotion; they are connected less by plot than by what they feel. "
July 22, 2014
"The New Stage's premiere of company founder Amy Munz's solo work is one of the more intelligent and sophisticated debuts (by both a new company and a young artist) in recent memory. It's an ambitious and notably subtle, serious, unsentimental exploration of love, in which a dynamic Munz — on a wide bare stage bounded on three sides by her own wonderfully evocative three-channel video-scape — plays several characters, and three in particular: Amot, Abigail, and Ava, whose stories are slyly interwoven.
Amot, the principal focus across two discrete acts, is a young woman raised by her widowed father in his butcher shop, who later falls in love with a young man. But her story, like that of the other young women, comes to us in a form more like the stream of consciousness, fractured and expansive in the disjuncture and interplay between Munz's ardently committed performance and the shrewd audio and visual environment surrounding the audience — a manufactured landscape of memory, desire, and role-playing in which to some extent the audience is free to find its own way and discover its own truths. Part two further integrates the voices of the other young women, Abigail and Ava, forming a mesh of narratives and associations stimulating in their intellectual, visual, and aural juxtapositions.
This is a work that demands a kind of letting go, but also invites full participation of the viewer's imagination, as the rich mise-en-scène and Munz's intense, unflinching performance unfold with unexpected abundance. "
"'Patterns': Amy Munz layers video with live performance" Interview with SF Chronicle by Chad Jones.
July 16, 2014
" Video may have killed the radio star, but it has inspired a young performance artist. Amy Munz has launched her own theater company, appropriately called the New Stage, and a new show, "Patterns," which incorporates video in a big way. "
July 24, 2014
" Munz portrays [Amot], a young woman trying to find the logic in her own narrative, the how of her recent love affair.
In other words, we enter the chaotic, sacred and imaginary landscape that is [Amot's] past tense. (...)
'Patterns' is the kind of art piece that requires theatergoers to make a choice, too. We must choose to actively invest in our own sense-making. At the same time, our job is to stay open to the possibilities of what [we] can’t know about Munz’s decisions. Where we are open-minded and generous, we are rewarded."
July 14, 2014
"Patterns, Amy Munz’s energetic one-woman show in San Francisco, frolics around romantic encounter. She assumes an array of personalities in love with someone, flipping through accents, ages, and genders juxtaposed with natural and urban projections peopled with more personalities.
.. I liked how the stories are not spelled out but are revealed in disjointed fragments. Like life itself, assembly is required. Some illustrations supplied."
" Emotionally Ticklish Amy Munz Talks Love in One-Woman Show," Interview with SFWeekly by Jenny Singer .
July 1, 2014
" The list of Amy Munz's accomplishments in the arts is exhaustive and exhausting. We'll give you the CliffNotes: non-annoying, tri-lingual wunderkind Munz has an impressive resume that "performance artist" hardly covers. (...)
Your show focuses is about love -- did you struggle to produce original work on that topic? To what extent is it autobiographical?
I didn't really struggle because I did think about my own experiences with love...I guess the reason why I really liked the idea of writing about love is that in performance in general I like being super passionate and romantic and energetic and I liked writing scenes with high emotional stakes starting from a feeling and going in that vein, because what really interests me is love as a paradox -- one moment love makes sense in our world and then it feels impossible and then you feel alone but you're not, and you feel like you understand someone and you don't -- how can it be both? That's the show for me."
Jul 28, 2014
" Amy Munz, The New Stage founder and the creator and performer of Patterns is obviously a talented artist. "
July 20, 2014
" I loved her physicality; she was able to take up the entire stage with her voice and physical presence so that you felt like you were watching a big production even though it was a solo performance without big props or costumes. That’s a talent. (...)
Honestly, the biggest feeling that I got was that this woman has amazing creativity, intelligence and potential. (...) I think that this play foreshadows things that she’ll be doing in the years to come that will be impressive, attention-getting and headline-worthy."
July 22, 2014
" San Francisco performance artist Amy Munz clearly has a lot of energy, ideas and chutzpah."