June rehearsal approaching and Design meetings begun…

Vanitas has been simmering on the back burner while we have been birthing many other projects, but now it resumes the focus for a brief moment. We are working with an incredible prop and set maker, Niell Duval (who built the magnificent Phonoautograph – below – for Look Out Below! in 2009) to help us construct our set, which will be a mobile Cabinet of Curiosities.

Sabrina is also set to meet with Rachel Schuldenfrei  to begin concocting costume ideas. Then in June Karen Hansen will arrive to work on our other show, Diz and Izzy Aster with Special Guest Shorty McHansen that is going to be performed at the Greenbelt Arts Center, and during her time her we will squeeze in a Vanitas rehearsal. We are also considering having 2 additional performers in the show as puppeteer/facilitators to carry out some of the visual spectacle we envision. More on that soon…

We are very excited about the work that is emerging…Vanitas is going to be stunningly beautiful.

Progress indeed

After several weeks of being in residence at Happenstance studio, Karen Hansen has flown home to Vermont. This latest work period has been immensely fruitful. We have a beginning and the overall shape is emerging. We started our meetings with a recap of all that we have been digesting since our last session. One of the things that helped us move forward was letting go of the idea of story. It has become clear that we are not interested in beginning with a story or even in arriving at a story along the way. It seems inevitable that when we set out to create a beautiful series of images, part of what makes them beautiful, what makes them hold together, what causes poetic transitions, is the underlying story-projector mechanism that is always at work in the act of crafting. This mechanism is always functioning on one level of the craftsmanship. Then there is the rotating focus. We will spend some time brainstorming ideas, then we do some research, then we stand up and move around in a choreographic exploration of a moment, objects are introduced, we reflect, we do some writing. Then we take some time away and allow all of this information to be digested, to trickle through the sediment and become clear, potable.

Vanitas Continues

Here is the new Vanitas progress journal. In the next couple of months we will fill these virtual pages with our thoughts and process as we endeavor to create Vanitas.

Fuel Vanitas

We are raising money for this piece. Make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation today!
https://www.fracturedatlas.org/s/campaign/138?
We also received a generous $3500 grant from the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. Our budget for this piece is $30,000 so help us get there by contributing today!

Memento Mori in the Morning

This is a repost from our last session:

So we have been working for the last few days brainstorming, making meals, going for walks, and building a task list. We acknowledge the chaos of our approach, but have decided that it’s not a problem since we have scheduled sufficient time and accept that it is the nature of this first phase. This time together allows for tangential outpourings, that then return to the point of origin while we prepare for the next departure. We thought it a good idea to decide what we want to accomplish while the three of us are gathered and have come up with the following tasks for the week:

1. To make a video that offers a flavor of the piece. A teaser. Which we will post here!
2. To begin collecting scene ideas and compiling images, moments.
3. To listen to the musical themes Karen has written so far and discuss our impressions.
4. To continue to understand each of the planes and think about how we might move between them.

This morning we had breakfast then went for a walk. We were all feeling very playful. Mark brought up the idea of “the artist” as a character and we discussed the queen as artist. Then landed on the artist’s subject, and the queen’s subjects. We passed lots of joggers and joked about what it must be like to overhear our passionate discussion.

We got off the main path and went into the woods. There was vast wreckage of fallen trees, the result of winter weather. Snapped and cracked limbs in strange piles, leaning precariously, dangerously suspended. Not long on the path we came upon a deer skeleton. It was perfectly intact, revealed by the melted snow, rotted clean and resting peacefully. So strange to be fully immersed in discussions of death and decay and stumble upon a skeleton. The incredible beauty of bones in nature’s artful arrangement. The anatomical grace of the interlocking spine after connective tissue has vanished, the architecture of the pelvic girdle, the ribs like fallen sticks, leg bones that make a line to scattered toes. We took the skull, but were careful not to disturb the other parts of the form. Karen said she might come back for the toes and shared with us the story of Tuvan throat singers who had an instrument made out of sheep-knuckles. We headed home.

Back at the house there were two turkey vultures that often gather on our roof for its warmth and safety, leaping from roof to chimney to oak tree.

We spent the rest of the morning listening to Karen’s compositions. We decided to give each theme a name so we could identify them. The exercise of listening to them, discussing our impressions and titling them also helped us begin to see how and where they might underscore the action.

We are also discovering the process for this Vanitas piece. It is like a Dutch windmill: we gather at the mill, excavate ideas, lift them out of the mud, sift out what’s useful,  hone them into material to craft into scenes.

Vanitas Begins

This is a repost from our last session:

Karen Hansen is arriving next Tuesday for two weeks of intense play making. She, Mark and I have been Skyping during the winter months, sharing ideas, and she has begun composing some incredibly beautiful musical themes. I spent a couple of hours in the rehearsal studio at Round House listening to these themes over and over again. Starting to play with movement. Segments. Moments are emerging borne of this sound. Heart-wrenching, thrilling, joyous, contemplative sound.
Mark and I also spent a couple of hours doing an exercise of setting up a still life table. We gathered objects that we wanted to include in the composition. We looked for objects symbolic to us, objects that looked like they might have been in a 17th century Dutch still life, things that we had available from the kitchen table, an apple, a baguette. Here are some photos:

Now off to run errands and earn some money…

The initial concept

Mark and I have begun meeting twice a week for 3 hour sessions to brainstorm. This usually happens around the kitchen table. We make our morning drinks, him coffee and, now that I’m off caffeine, teeccino (thanks to Ami Hattab!). Then we sit and talk. First we share what we have each been mulling over about the piece over the past days and evenings. Then we land on something that ignites. This kernel is like a tulip bulb that bursts and stretches into a flaming bloom. We chew on it. Back and forth, yes! no! Until a consensus comes.
We are applying for a grant, The New England Foundation for the Arts National Theater Pilot grant, and it’s a doozy. It has required that we funnel our brainstorming into a concise vision. The proposal. It is a first shape of the thing that has been swirling around. A first definition, a first manifestation of the idea into form. So here is the description so far, and the personel on board:
Our Vanitas project will be an hour-long devised theatrical work inspired by Vanitas still-life painting, a genre that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, that depicts collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience of earthly achievements and pleasures, and exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and spiritual life.
Our Vanitas piece will transpose this visual/graphic arts idiom into a theatrical one, animating it through movement, object manipulation, text and design. We will explore the action of time on a still-life and 3 characters. How do they respond as death approaches? What happens as the composition and its objects are inevitably deconstructed by the passage of time? We will manipulate depictions of time through movement styling and sound. The play will illustrate 3 planes: the still-life table of symbolic objects; a plane where these objects and symbols explode into the idea or history of what they symbolize. e.g. Focus narrows to a peeled orange on the table, then we illustrate the macroscopic life-cycle of the orange from seed to fruit; and a timeless archetypal character plane. The primary characters of the play are 3 intersecting portraits: The Queen, The Fool and The Musician. They are represented in the still-life by a Tulip, Skull and Hourglass. The Queen represents beauty. She feels time passing away; the Fool is Hamlet’s Yorick and knows the ephemeral nature of time; the Musician measures and keeps time through music.
The timeline for creating Vanitas is 10 months of development, which began mid-January 2011, a work-in-progress showing in February 2012, 3 months more of rehearsal and a premier in the summer of 2012.
The main collaborators are Mark Jaster, Sabrina Mandell and Karen Hansen. It will be our 3rd collaboration.
We are so excited to have Justin Thomas designing lighting that will emphasize the contrasting play of light and darkness that, through this chiaroscuro, will have a voice in the play’s themes of time’s passage and the transience of worldly things.
Lisi Stoessel will be collaborating on scenic design and props. She is a scenic designer, figurative artist, and puppeteer who has worked with Pig Iron Theatre Company, Swim Pony Performing Arts, Forum Theatre Company and others. She recently moved to DC from Philly and we found each other through the love for visual Theater. Lisi’s designs create meaningful compositions of the figure in space. She draws on her studio art background to bring a painterly aesthetic to her designs, paying special attention to color, line, and texture.
Our dear friends Mollye and Kelly Maxner of Kicking Pig Productions will be our “outside eyes” and choreography consultants once we get the piece up and moving.
It is also incredibly exciting that Round House Theater is acting as our “organizational and presenting partner” and are going to host first a work-in-progress showing and then a the official premier of the piece! We will keep you posted as the exact dates are confirmed. ROund House continues to be so incredibly supportive of us after all these years. It is like having family fostering our development, nurturing us, and spurring us on. I have been meeting with Danisha and Katherine about the grant and I feel like they are two sisters who are teaching their inexperienced sibling the ways of the world.
More blogging to come…