Chimera: Blog

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