Chimera: Blog

Here's a piece by John Bueche, of Minneapolis' Bedlam Theatre, on what he liked about Chimera last year. My favorite part: 

"Toward the end, the play got inside of me, I felt conscious of and curious about my cells. I went beyond getting the story the character was telling to feeling the unsettling question of who you are on the genetic level...I don't want my skin—well, really my cells—to crawl every time I go to see a play, but for this play, that's what it was about, so, hell yeah, make me feel it."

Thanks, John!

Deborah recently wrote about our Chimera process (among others) over here, in this post at Polly Carl's awesome Howlround journal.

In June we were invited to travel to Perry Mansfield in Steamboat Springs, CO to workshop Chimera as a part of their New Works Festival. This invitation was extended to us by Actors Theatre of Louisville and Amy Wegener, the Literary Director at Actors, traveled with us as our dramaturge.  We were also able to bring Tara Webb, our costume designer.  We spent the week at extremely high altitudes really digging in to the play and meeting some really fantastiv theatre artists who were likewise digging in to new work and taking some really extraordinary risks.  It was a cool opportunity to work on the play and to share its development with the community out there and to drum up interest in the show in NYC as well.  We were really encouraged by the response and look forward to sharing the work with some of these same folksi n January and seeing their projects develop too.

We inspired a lot of curiosity out there from the other artistic teams because no one was collaborating quite like us.  Probably the most surprising was that we had shown up to what is essentially a staged reading festival with our costume designer.  And she wasn't there to build costumes.  Deborah and I realized pretty much from the conception of this porject that we wanted to prioritize what we came to call 'the dramaturgy of design.' We had a theory that went something like, if we invite our design team to make proposals from the very beginning of the process then we are going to end up with a theatrical event where all of the elements feel essential, we are going to end up with a design that is as eloquent as any words can be, and we are going to be working in a mode that is as truly collaborative- as opposed to prescriptive- as possible.  And we found designers who are not only game to work this way but who prefer to work this way.  So Tara was in Colorado to help us build the play- it was time for us to revisit as a group the existing costume design, which had actually been devised by Tara before we even did our first workshop.  We had all done some dreaming together and then she went off and created a treasure trove of costumes that we went off and worked with.  Now we are editing and rewriting the event- costumes, video, sound, light, text, set, staging and all, and we chose to begin by working pretty meticulously through the existing costume design- how, when and why each element of the design eneters, performs and exites the event.  We knew that this would raise essential questions about all of the other design elements, particularly video because we are working on integrating the video and costume design more, and also about the Story.

It might not be readily apparent how the discussion of the history of women's undergarments or the implications of a rubber dishwashing glove vs a latex laboratory glove or the evolution of the female power suit might lead to the revelation of structure or story- it is not always readily apparent to us either- but it all feeds the engine of our process and hopefuly adds up to something surprising and rich and complex and true all at once.

In my last post I mentioned that I’ve been carrying this guilt about how damn long it’s been since we updated this blog. And we're about to jump into the next phase, heading to Perry-Mansfield in Steamboat Springs, CO with Tara Webb, costume design wunderkind. But a lot has happened already, so I’ll make a list. Looking backwards:

-After Minneapolis, we packed up the set and shipped it to New York, where we set it up in a corner of HERE’s Varick Street rehearsal space.

-We taught the show to our awesome assistants, Zane and Gwen, in mid-December. Tara got to come back and make some costume adjustments. Trey started to layer in new sounds. We started to see how the show would continue to swell and grow and develop with more time—I was reminded acutely of how we stopped the creative development of some aspects (script, costume, lights) in late October in order to focus on building and completing other aspects (video, sound, set, staging). Suddenly all the balls were moving in the air again – and we were starting to see how we could muck it up to make it better. The scariest part of revising. Except this wouldn’t be revising, it would be continuing a process that was paused.

-And then, that process got paused again in order to do the show again. At Culturemart. Two sold out performances, lots of friends and family and a warmer reception than we had dreamed. After a non-stop 48 hours of tech, during which we: cut a projector, added new sound, loaded-in and re-teched the whole thing. In under 48 hours. Which is standard for Culturemart, but as is our habit, we’d bitten off more than should have been possible to chew. Rather than presenting something that felt like a work in progress, we wanted something that felt like a full evening of theatre. So even though we knew we weren’t finished, we still were aiming for something that was fulfilling and satisfying and worth our audience’s time and attention. Getting that done in 48 hours (!) would not have been possible if it hadn’t been for the overly generous Playwrights’ Center and Workhaus in Minneapolis, which had given us a combined eight weeks in the theatre to build the thing between June and November. So the tech process was about recreating what we had already made, rather than building from scratch. (Although, of course, we’re always restless and trying to improve/experiment, so we were making changes and adjustments anyway…but having the bulk of the thing solidly under our belts was key.)

And looking forwards: now we can un-pause the creative process for a while. Dig in and muck up the script (scary. necessary. exciting. ack!) and build new costumes and dream big about the video and sound and lights again.

And, in a few weeks we’re heading to Perry-Mansfield (at the invitation of the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville). It will be me, Suli, and Tara—so we’ll be focusing on some storytelling issues, some character stuff, and starting to dream big again about the interaction between Suli, the costumes, and the projected image.

And planning to premiere the show in January…more details soon…!

—DS
 

It’s funny—or maybe, not all that funny—that we seem to be so delinquent updating this blog. It’s not very funny, because we’ve been doing so much and have so much to report. On the other hand, it does make me smile because the more we work on this show, the more evident it becomes that one of the themes of the play is our uneasy encounter with technology. And this technology right here, this blog, is a medium I am trying to embrace as part of my art practice—trying to conceive of it as a creative act, an engagement of our phantom audience (are you out there?) – rather than “marketing,” which I am dubious about the powers of my ramblings to sell tickets or rustle up interest anyway…

And there, right there, in that previous sentence, is an example of my innate skepticism. I seem to always be the one asking “why?” Why do we need that? Why do we need video? Why does Suli need to be on microphone? I always surprise myself when that’s my reaction—I think of myself as an open and curious person, restless even; someone who will say yes before no, someone who will try the new closed door instead of the old open one. So why the skepticism? Why the questioning?

And we keep returning to the same answer: it’s got to be necessary. Don’t want video for video’s sake, or cool sound tricks just because they’re, well, cool. Suli and I don’t always agree on this, especially (I think) the definition of what is “necessary.” And this, I think, is part of the foundation of the heat of our collaboration – we are both driven and stubborn and precise, and also respectful of the given circumstance of, if one of us strongly believes that something (be it a character choice or a design element) belongs in the world of the play, we’ll find a way to make it work. And the hard sweet labor of “making it work” is where this is a true collaboration: we are building, bit by bit, a piece that contains material that we both believe in, inch by inch and moment by moment, and it is turning out to be deeply layered and textured in unexpected and, I hope, beautiful, ways.

More soon.

—DS
 

We spent much of this past fall back in Minneapolis, developing our script at the Playlabs Festival at the Playwrights' Center, and then a fully designed workshop at the Workhaus Collective. Check out this great blog about Playlabs written by our kick-ass intern, Molly Budke. (Scroll down for some nifty rehearsal candids...that's the day we busted out the suitcase full of costume ideas that had been sent from Philly by our costume designer, Tara Webb.)

Thanks to everyone at the PWC and Workhaus for supporting our intense, intensive, and extremely productive process!

More about our time there coming soon - in the meantime, we hope you can come check out Culturemart, where we'll be showing the Workhaus draft of the show.

We had an amazing time in Minneapolis. We worked for three weeks and performed the piece four times for audiences and held talkbacks after each performance. Folks stayed and talked about science, about idenitity, about mothers and sons, and about belief systems and meaning. We presented the work as a “to be continued” and presented what we had created in an order that was not necessarily “the show” and that changed from night to night as we continued to create.

We also used the time to establish a working vocabulary with the designers who will be continuing to work with us throughout the life of the process. Jeremy Wilhelm, the set designer, and Deborah salvaged a basic set, a discarded kitchen, that we then adapted and manipulated throughout the process and will continue to dismantle and rebuild. Jeremy is an incredible theatre maker and we are excited to have him on board. Also on the team is Zach Humes, our sound designer, who created a number of dense soundscapes including recorded text as we experimented with characters both live and recorded and played with the transition between the two. Paulina Jurzec, video, introduced us to the Isadora program, a computer program that allows for incredibly intricate manipulation and projection of video onto the stage. We have only scratched the surface of what video can do, and it is already opening a lot of doors in terms of movement, space and story. As we prepare for the next phase of work we are bringing on board a costume designer and a lighting designer.

We’ve been invited to participate in Playlabs at the Playwrights Center so we’ll be heading back to Minneapolis this fall. I’m really excited to return and hope that we can maintain the level of play that we had last time. It really helps to open up the material when everyone is enjoying themselves! We will be working towards a finished draft this time, a version that will be produced by Workhaus in Minneapolis directly following Playlabs. We’ll then bring this version to CULTUREMART in January. The key is to keep in mind that this is still a stage in our development, as each of us on the team—writer, performer, designers—will want to “finish” the work but there is so much we want to try that we’ll have to save some of it for the next round of development.

Deborah and I are looking forward to a retreat in late August when we will have a week for research, writing, and planning for the fall and winter. We will be focusing on the development of one of our central characters, finding her story, as well as experimenting with a section of video and live performance to see if we can crack the code of performing dialogue and movement while engaging video on a small piece. We will hopefully develop a vocabulary that we can share with the team as we move forward.

—SH

Next up: a three-week workshop hosted by the Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis. Four open rehearsals on June 4, 6, 11, and 12. Click here for more info.

We just finished our first exploratory workshop, diving into the muck and seeing what sticks. We spent five great, intense days at New Dramatists working, researching, and playing with the research, joined along the way by Rachel Chavkin, Nichole Canuso, Matt Hubbs, and Paulina Jurzec. Check out our blog from the workshop.

Next up: a three-week workshop of new material at the Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis, May 24-June 12. Stay tuned for info about our open rehearsals in early June.

Some images related to the research we did in preparation for our first workshop in April, 2010.

Some background research - a video of Doris Taylor, who brings dead hearts back to life.