Chimera: Blog

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.