Gallim Dance performs February 8 & 9, 2013 as part of the Performing Arts Series.
This spring at the Center for the Arts we bring you work that is of today: innovative, inquisitive and sure to surprise and engage you. Continuing our exploration of Music & Public Life, we bring you a concert of music from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello–what you might have heard both in the mansion and in the slaves’ quarters–where audiences will have the chance to experience the first glass harmonica on the Crowell Concert Hall stage. The great activist and trumpeter Hugh Masekela will bring his band to Wesleyan, and our own West African Drumming ensemble will have the chance to open for him. In dance, we bring back Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance after their performance at the DanceMasters Weekend Showcase in 2011 brought audiences to their feet. Her piece Mama Call investigates her Spanish-Sephardic heritage, and the reprise of Pupil features the spirited music of Balkan Beat Box. In theater, we bring the master innovator Lee Breuer to campus with his newest work Glass Guignol, a compilation of texts from Tennessee Williams’ women, performed by the indomitable Maude Mitchell.
In Zilkha Gallery, Lucy and Jorge Orta’s Food-Water-Life will be on view. This is the first-ever solo show in the U.S. of work by these Paris-based artists, who stage performative events to bring attention to some of the world’s most urgent environmental and social issues. The colorful sculptural works, including a large canoe, and three parachutes, will take advantage of Zilkha’s scale, and a series of food events is being staged to more deeply connect you to the themes of the show.
CFA Arts Administration Intern Monica M. Tinyo ’13 spoke with Nicholas Orvis ’13, a Theater major with a concentration in directing, who is in the midst of his honors thesis, a production alongside a paper focusing on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” (Dec. 6-8) and what it means “to die well” on and off stage in Western Europe during the Renaissance.
What enticed you about Shakespeare’s The Tempest?
“My paper is about the act of dying well on Medieval and Renaissance stages. I started with the realization that the language in The Tempest is similar to [that used by contemporary] long-care terminal patients. Beginning with the language, I started exploring what it means to die on stage in Shakespeare’s time. Part of the paper is arguing that The Tempest mirrors what Shakespeare and his audience would have considered the correct way to die.”
“The concept of dying well has changed tremendously since the Renaissance. The paper starts with the morality plays in the Middle Ages which were very prescriptive, allegorical descriptions of how to die well. There is then a major shift, that I think Shakespeare and his culture are in the middle of negotiating between the old, universalist Catholicism and newer, rigorous Protestantism. The debates over predestination caused panic. [People wondered,] ‘How can we ensure that when we are dying, we are going to Heaven and leaving a good legacy on Earth?’ It was a time of social and religious upheaval. Instead of the universalism previously accepted, the question was then how does an individual person ensure a good end? Because of the Protestant shift, the two realms of social afterlife and literal afterlife were beginning to blur.”
Officially England was Protestant during Shakespeare’s life but Nicholas explains, “many argue that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic; no one is sure what Shakespeare was personally.” What is clear is that religious debates manifest in Shakespeare’s plays.
“Current theater and culture at large has seen an interesting shift where we are no longer willing, at least publicly, to make judgment on what is a good or bad end. I am thinking of the [contemporary] play Wit, which is inevitably about the process of dying but refuses to make any qualitative judgments on whether the protagonist is dying in a good way or a bad way. The focus is on the struggle to stay alive rather than the negotiation with death.” This is because “as a whole, we live a more pluralistic, religiously divided society…[so there is] less room for people to make dogmatic statements [about how to live life and how to die well].”
Why do you think Shakespeare can still resonate with a contemporary audience while still being so specific to his time?
“Think of Shakespeare’s Tempest like a spider web; it has all these different strands. One is religion. There is also politics, pop culture, the new world, colonialism. What we are doing [in our production] is just pulling at one strand of that web and looking at it very closely. I think [Shakespeare] is universal because he always has all these strands going on simultaneously.”
“Our production of The Tempest is using [only] four actors, all of whom are masked except Prospero.” Nicholas and his cast are focusing on the “negotiation between Prospero securing a future for his daughter with Ferdinand and reconciling the war within himself and with his brother, the King of Naples and all these other people who have done him wrong. We have not added anything; everything in the production is Shakespeare’s words but we removed minor lords that have only a few lines, knowing we could either have someone else say the lines or it could be ignored all together.”
If those characters and subplots were able to be cut without hindering Shakespeare’s ideas, why are they even there? Shakespeare was so deliberate; how could something be extraneous?
“First of all, we are focusing on one strand in The Tempest. The Tempest has many subplots about power and usurping power which are all very interesting, but they are not crucial to this question of how the individual comes to terms with other people and himself. Also the way in which the play is written reflects the traditions of Shakespeare’s time—the Shakespearean audience expected that if there was a king on stage, even if he was shipwrecked, he would be accompanied by well dressed servants and such. Our modern audience doesn’t miss these markers of status.”
“The Tempest is usually very lavish and exotic. Our production is stripped down. Our magic is usually a very small moment instead of fireworks and people flying through the air.”
You keep using the term “we”—would you say this production is a collaboration?
“I tend to be democratic as a director. Also this is the first time that I am working on a script as a director that I am also editing myself so [the team] has been very useful in rehearsals. We have spent a lot of time questioning what lines are needed. The five of us really worked together to make it as precise as possible.”
Minimalism seems to be trending recently in traditional modes of performance like opera. Do you think this is true in theater?
“There seems to be a general shift in modern theater away from the old, early twentieth century theater in which there is one scene, the curtain comes down, then the curtain lifts onto another scene, and so on. We have shifted towards the even older tradition of continuous action; there is less theater with long episodic moments. In our production, four blocks, a cloth and the props that the actors carry are the only entities that set the scene—the actors change the scene by moving the blocks around the stage. I wanted to keep with continuous action rather than episodic moments. I firmly believe that, particularly with Shakespeare, one must let the audience focus on action, language and characters rather than setting.”
Don’t miss Nicholas’ thesis production of the timeless—yet always contemporary—Shakespeare’s The Tempest!
The Tempest by Shakespeare A Senior Thesis Production by Nicholas Orvis ’13 Presented by the Theater Department Thursday, December 6 through Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 9pm
Patricelli ’92 Theater , 213 High Street FREE! Tickets required.Tickets will be made available on the day of each performance at the Wesleyan University Box Office. Off-campus guests may call the box office at 860-685-3355 after 10am to reserve tickets to be held in their names until fifteen minutes prior to curtain. On-campus guests must pick up their tickets at the box office. There is a two-ticket limit per person for free ticketed events.
Center for the Arts Director Pamela Tatge talks about the commission and research process for Rinde Eckert’s “The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy” (Nov. 15-17).
Rehearsal of Rinde Eckert’s “The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy” in CFA Theater. Pictured: Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14 (sitting), Christine Treuhold ’13 (lying down). Photo by John Carr, Wesleyan University Professor of Theater.
I met Rinde Eckert for the first time in 2008 at a gathering of universities who had been awarded Creative Campus grants from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Rinde had just finished creating a work entitled Eye Piece at his alma mater, the University of Iowa. He worked with theater students and faculty to research the effects of macular degeneration and the experiences of people dealing with eye disease, including those who have lost or are losing their vision. A Grammy Award-winning musician, writer, composer, librettist, and director, Rinde is one of this country’s most innovative performance artists whose work spans music genres of all kinds, experimental theater and dance. When he spoke about his work in Iowa, I was struck by his generosity of spirit—how he took students into his production that other faculty members were unable to cast in their productions. I saw how moved he was by the process of making the work and how it was every bit as meaningful to him as the end product. I thought, this person can collaborate with anyone in the world, but he chooses to work with university students—this is a unique and special artist, a perfect fit for Wesleyan.
The Center for the Arts is in year three of the four-year Creative Campus Initiative, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of the Initiative’s primary goals is to support generative artists in theater, music and dance (including faculty artists and visiting artists) who work with scholars and materials in both arts and non-arts disciplines to advance the artists’ research and extend the arts into campus curricular and co-curricular life.
Rinde became an ideal candidate for a commission. We invited him to Wesleyan in November 2010 (he remembered his first trip to Wesleyan was when he was attending graduate school at the Yale School of Music). Rinde Eckert has built a dynamic theatrical logic that he describes as “fiercely interdisciplinary.” When Rinde met with the Theater Department and Center for the Arts staff he discussed the idea of writing a play about “otherness.” In the spring of 2011, Eckert was invited by the Theater Department to create a work over the course of 2012 that would result in a Department production in the fall of 2012, devised by Eckert, faculty and visiting designers, and theater students.
During the summer of 2012, Eckert was awarded a Creative Residency by Wesleyan’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). He spent a week working on the piece in the Bessie Schönberg Dance Studio; discussing his creative process with ICPP students and students at the Center for Creative Youth; working with music collaborator Ned Rothenberg; and meetings with scenic designer and Adjunct Associate Professor Marcela Oteíza to prepare for the fall rehearsal period.
The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy emerged as a work about a man raised by wolves who finds himself toward the end of his life at the top of the food chain. Powerful and erudite, he longs for a return to the wildness of the wolf he was—but how does one recover one’s original, less conditioned or acculturated self?
Marcela became an essential collaborator in the development of the piece. She devised a visual identity for the work anchored in 144 small wooden benches that measure 10.5” x 18” x 8”. The benches are unfinished, in their natural state, but at the same time, they are hand-crafted, “man-made.” The actors arrange them horizontally when they form the camp-fire but as the world of the play becomes more “civilized,” vertical structures emerge. As the play develops, the actors literally sculpt the set before our eyes. The effect is tremendous.
In his program note for The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy, Rinde writes: “I’ve been thinking about nature and culture. I’ve been considering wolves. I’ve been interested in our self-descriptions, the line we draw between ourselves and the rest of everything. We are storytellers. We tell stories around the fire, protected by it, warmed by it, and if we get too distracted, burned by it.”
This is a play with big ideas enacted by Rinde Eckert and eight student actors: Sivan Battat ’15, Solomon Billinkoff ’14, Mikhail Firer ’13, Audrey Kiely ’13, Matthew Krakaur ’14, Jiovani Robles ’13, Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14, and Christine Treuhold ’13. This is a world premiere, developed by an extraordinary artist with the help of Wesleyan faculty members and undergraduates—don’t miss this, it’s Wesleyan history in the making.
The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy World Premiere Written and directed by Rinde Eckert
Performed by Rinde Eckert and Wesleyan students Thursday, November 15 & Friday, November 16, 2012 at 8pm Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 2pm & 8pm
CFA Theater
$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $4 Wesleyan students
Click here to watch a preview video of “The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy” which features interviews with Rinde Eckert and Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14.
On Saturday, September 22, the Center for the Arts presents Liebe Love Amour!, an interactive work by Anonymous Ensemble. CFA Intern in Arts Administration Monica Tinyo ’13 interviewed Jessica Weinstein ’02, Anonymous Ensemble member and Wesleyan alum.
Did you love Hilda? If you saw Hilda in the interactive video preview or on stage in Liebe Love Amour!, you undoubtedly love her. I had the fortune of talking to the creator of Hilda (also known as Tall Hilda when on stilts), Jessica Weinstein, who is just as dynamic and charming as her alter-ego Hilda. Jessica is an actress and performance artist currently with Anonymous Ensemble, as well as a Wesleyan alum. As explained in her bio, “Jessica believes in life as theater and theater as life, has insatiable wanderlust, speaks and sings in many languages, and has a thirst to explore new forms of performance every day.”
Jessica has been creating fantastical characters since her time at Wesleyan. Her bio goes on to say that she “has a history of renegade solo missions […] She was […] part of the infamous DOUFAS. When Doofa disappeared in 2004, Dufa embarked on a worldwide quest to find her lost soulmate. Jessica’s latest partner in crime is a body double who is an exact replica of herself, who she has taken on adventures including a 30 hour Amtrak train ride from New York to the Florida Keys.” Jessica’s characters are not created for a specific performance piece but rather are born organically. Hilda first appeared on stage as the MC for the performance piece, TheBest [Weinstein’s first performance with Anonymous Ensemble], in which she walked around the stage on stilts. Hilda has been living both on and off the stage for almost a decade.
Jessica’s current company reflects her creativity. Anonymous Ensemble describes themselves as “the intrepid pioneers of stage and screen.” They “manifest the extraordinary by refusing to be daunted by boundaries between genres, barriers between cultures, discrepancies in budgets or the limits of what is possible. […] When approaching a new project AnEn starts out with an insane premise: a narrative dance party, an opera imagined by a computer, a cinematic love affair with an audience, or a piece of children’s theatre that is actually cool!” Jessica explains that anything can happen in live spaces with real bodies [both the audience’s and artists’ bodies]. In Wanderlust, another piece by Anonymous Ensemble, the audience was moved through multiple spaces in a massive circus tent. Audience members played the non-speaking roles, which enables a distinctly different experience every time. Jessica describes a nervous energy when using non-actors that always adds a layer of excitement. Although it was scripted, the audience was intrinsically part of the narrative: “AnEn [always] creates audience-based work and considers the audience to be the co-creators of each event.”
With each new piece, Anonymous Ensemble continues to conceive structures that involve the audience and act as a platform for flexibility and spontaneity. In Liebe Love Amour!,the ensemble toys with the idea of how to create a “live film” and how to bring in the audience even more so than in the past. The ensemble combines the most magical aspects of film, the intimate gaze into someone’s soul, with the real time and space of the theatre. “AnEn accepts the pervasive power of the Screen in our current times but demands that the screen be transfigured by the unpredictable, the human, the never-to-be-repeated possibilities of the Stage.”
Although Jessica wasn’t with the company when the title was created, the title of the company always made sense to her in terms of their performance practice. When asked how the company came up with the name “Anonymous Ensemble,”Jessica explained the project always seemed more important than the “ensemble;” whatever project Anonymous Ensemble is doing is the focus rather than a manifestation or showcase of the company. She talked about the fact that the company is always changing; everyone who has been part of the ensemble at some point is and will always be part of the ensemble. The common thread between the projects that are seemingly so different is that there is always a quest. In Liebe Love Amour!, the audience goes on a quest for love with the insatiable Hilda. At the Wesleyan performance, the audience was seamlessly, lovingly, and humorously incorporated into the quest; the audience, as “co-creators of [the] event,” were so enveloped in the narrative that magical “Old Hollywood” notions of love seemed plausible.
We hope you enjoyed the performance Liebe Love Amour! on Saturday and will return to see Jessica in Lee Breuer’s Glass Guignol on February 16, 2013!
(Quotations are from Anonymous Ensemble’s website.)
A scene from “Liebe Love Amour!”
Anonymous Ensemble: Liebe Love Amour!
New England Premiere
Saturday, September 22, 2012 at 8pm
CFA Theater
$23 general public, $19 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty & staff, non-Wesleyan students, $6 Wesleyan students
“Behind all the frenetic and seemingly spontaneous activity is a very cleverly constructed ‘performance script,’ with the audience expertly managed to suit the show’s needs.” —Circus Sideshow Magazine
Liebe Love Amour! is a theatricalized “live film” of an epic search for love. In this latest work of interactive theater, Anonymous Ensemble creates Hollywood magic using cameras, a green-screen, live video processing software, and the opulent imagery of silent film director Erich von Stroheim. The show unveils a panoply of love affairs between Tall Hilda and a string of paramours including a fictionalized Erich von Stroheim, a devout Gloria Swanson, and the audience in the theater. Throughout the narrative, the audience is drawn into and onto the silver screen as their own stories become part of the fabric of the piece. The show is a tryst between cinema and live performance that invites the audience to voyeuristically participate in the artifice of cinema and the magic of theater simultaneously. With its lush, cinematic orchestration and rapid, real-time editing, Liebe Love Amour! spins layers of romance and reality as it reels towards its inevitable Hollywood finish.
Tickets are available online or by phone (860-685-3355) or in person at the Wesleyan University Box Office in the Usdan Center at 45 Wyllys Avenue.
To learn more about Anonymous Ensemble, click here:
Rama Vaidyanathan performs on October 21, 2012 as part of the 36th annual Navaratri Festival
Over the course of the next year, a campus-wide steering committee has put together a far-reaching series of global performances, talks and participatory projects, all with the intention of bringing us into an examination of the role of Music & Public Life. We will celebrate and study the sounds, words and spirit of music in public at the local, national and transnational levels, all designed to cross disciplines and to engage the campus and community-at-large. From performances by Middletown’s own Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem to the legendary Hugh Masekela; showcasing student research in the role of music in the current political campaigns; to the creation of MiddletownRemix–there are points of entry for everyone.
In September, we feature dance and theater companies who are exploring the role of the audience as actively engaged in the live creative process of the theatrical event. In ZviDance’s Zoom, patrons use their smartphones to integrate their own photos and text into the work; in Anonymous Ensemble’s Liebe Love Amour!, the audience is engaged in constructing the “performance script.”
As a member of the Outside the Box Theater Series planning committee, Assistant Professor of Theater Rashida Z. Shaw ’99 said this campus needs to see Javon Johnson. She and Dr. Johnson were Ph.D. students together at Northwestern University, he in Performance Studies and she in Theater and Drama. Because these are sister programs, they had a number of classes together and became friends.
Javon, a spoken word artist and scholar, is now based in Los Angeles, where he has a huge following. He has performed at major venues around the country and has been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, among other television programs. Next week, he’ll be in residence visiting classes and meeting with members of WeSLAM and other poets and theater students on campus. And on Thursday evening, February 23, he performs in Crowell Concert Hall , as a part of this year’s Theater Department/Center for the Arts “Outside the Box Theater Series”.
“I used to have Javon come and perform in all of my political theater courses and in classes that dealt with solo performance. He has the ability to integrate popular culture with scholarship and political critique – all in a humorous package. Spoken word artists straddle the line between poetry and theater. What I remember most about Javon is his captivating energy – he has a vocal dexterity and a physical range that make his performances interesting not only on a textual level, but you also get caught up in how he is delivering his poems, and that makes you want to know more about who he is,” said Dr. Shaw. “Not all spoken word artists can hit all of these levels.” Dr. Shaw and Dr. Johnson were reunited at Northwestern when they both graduated last June, and Dr. Shaw looks forward to welcoming him to Wesleyan and to Middletown next week.
An Evening of Spoken Word with Javon Johnson Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
$15 general public; $12 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students
Center for the Arts Director Pamela Tatge discusses “RISK!” (Feb. 10) and “SPILL” (Feb. 25 & 26).
Carolyn Cohen ’12 came to the CFA with an idea. She and members or her comedy improv troupe said they wanted to bring Kevin Allison (of MTV’s The State) to Wesleyan to do a story slam with a twist. Mr. Allison has created RISK! – a program that he has taken to college campuses around the country where he pairs luminaries in the comedy scene with students and other members of the community (check out what they did at Brown University here). They all tell stories that show sides of themselves that they never thought they’d dare to share in public (that’s where the “risk” comes in). Tonight, Wesleyan will welcome Mr. Allison and San Francisco-based comic W. Kamau Bell to tell stories alongside Wesleyan students. The 7pm performance will include stories told by Jana Heaton ’14 and graduate student Jakob Schaeffer. The 10pm performance will include stories told by Carolyn Cohen ’12 and Virgil Taylor ’15. Both performances will feature music by Samuel Friedman ’13.
RISK! Friday, February 10, 2012 at 7pm & 10pm
Crowell Concert Hall
$12 general public; $10 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $5 Wesleyan students* *Wesleyan Students may purchase advance tickets to both performances for $8. Students that have already purchased tickets to one of the performances, may add the other performance at the discounted rate. This discounted rate is available through the Wesleyan University Box Office in the Usdan University Center.
SPILL
I also want to encourage all of our CFA friends to save the date to see the first-ever public showing of a play commissioned by the CFA through the Creative Campus Initiative. SPILL is a stunning new work co-created by Leigh Fondakowski (Head Writer, The Laramie Project), and visual artist Reeva Wortel, and is based in part on interviews with people from the Gulf Coast of southern Louisiana in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of April 2010, the largest environmental disaster in the history of the United States. The performances at Wesleyan are the first public showing of the performance/installation and will feature life-sized painted portraits of the interviewees, along with a choral reading of the play.
We met Leigh for the first time in 2008 when the Theater Department and CFA brought her to campus to lead a workshop on the Tectonic Theater’s “moment work” in conjunction with a residency by Moises Kaufman (founder of Tectonic). In 2010, the CFA invited her to co-teach an environmental studies course with Wesleyan scientist Barry Chernoff. Together the pair developed the Deepwater Horizon Tragedy: A Scientific and Artistic Inquiry course. By exploring the oil spill from both an artistic and scientific standpoint, students learned the science of the Gulf Coast region and the ecological impact of the oil spill as well as artistic tools and methods that enabled them to understand the science at a deeper level, and make the research and the meaning of that research visible to an audience through their art.
Leigh was so taken by what she saw and heard, she decided to create her own piece in a first-time collaboration with visual artist Reeva Wortel. The text for the work is created from transcripts of interviews with people across the political spectrum – from Tea Party Republicans to life-long environmental conservationists, families who lost loved ones in the explosion on the oil rig, as well as oil-rig workers, clean-up workers, scientists, politicians, priests, and members of the diverse fishing communities along the coast. What emerges is a story as complex as this region’s historic relationship to oil and the oil industry.
There are only fifty seats for each performance so we encourage you to reserve your tickets early. Every performance will be followed by a talk-back with the creators. They are anxious for your feedback as they prepare to take the work to New Orleans for the second anniversary of the spill in April, as well as an anticipated national tour in 2013. We hope you will be a part of the birthing of this new work, and will be able to join us on February 25 or 26.
SPILL Saturday, February 25, 2012 at 7pm & 10pm Sunday, February 26, 2012 at 2pm & 7pm Fayerweather Beckham Hall , Wyllys Avenue $12 general public; $10 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students, $5 Wesleyan students
Tonight and Saturday night, the Theater Department and the Center for the Arts present Great Small Works, a New York-based theater collective that creates work about contemporary issues. CFA Intern in Arts Administration JoAnna Bourain ’12 interviewed co-founder Mark Sussman ’85 about his time at Wesleyan and about the production you’ll see this weekend.
JoAnna Bourain ’12: Great Small Works’ website lists the company’s major influences, many of whom I’ve encountered in my coursework at Wesleyan, namely Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht and Erik Satie. Tell me about some of your Wesleyan classes that influenced your creative process.
Mark Sussman ’85: At Wesleyan I was a double major in Theater and Religion. The theater side of my education was mostly in directing and design and I knew that after Wesleyan I didn’t want to join the workforce of the American Theater. After working in a collaborative setting at Wesleyan with groups like Second Stage I knew I wanted to have a company and to work collectively in a series.
I bring from my own years at Wesleyan an interest in working in a more collective situation- this comes from the late Fritz DeBoer (Theater Department) who really inspired me. Certain experiences that I had in the Music Department along with the atmosphere within that department were really important to my creative development – both experimental music and world music. Susan Foster and Alvin Lucier co-taught a class that was essentially about site specific performance art, as well as a class by Jon Barlow who taught the work of John Cage and Erik Satie that brought together a really interdisciplinary vision of art. These classes helped me to make connections to my experience in theater. All of those experiences have stuck with me and help me to inform my every day creative processes.
JB: Your website cites that Benjamin’s theory of the ‘state of emergency’ was an early catalyst for the first miniature theater piece. Considering the group’s beginnings in Bread and Puppet (a Vermont-based political theater company directed by Peter Schumann, who is speaking in CFA Hall on April 9) how do politics figure in Great Small Works?
MS: I think we imagine everything that we do as having a political aspect. I think the reason that we are really drawn to Benjamin (who I first read in a tutorial in the Religion Department) was due to the fact that he looked at both aesthetics and politics and their inseparable relationship. If you look at something like the Republican Primary, we see that images play such an important role in how people are politically perceived. In Benjamin’s essay, The Thesis on the Philosophy of History, he talks about the notion of a Marxist view of history in which a state of emergency is used to encourage and create the rhetoric of a crisis where, actually, that state of emergency is a constant in capitalism. It’s a falsification to even think of it as a momentary state of emergency rather than a constant. That idea was we eventually applied to the toy theater.
Jenny Romaine, during the first Gulf War in the late 90s, remembers how the war was portrayed as a catastrophe day after day, and was filtered through us in the everyday banal act of openingTheNew York Times. The idea was to communicate this sense of every day terror as it is read in banal everyday actions.
The toy theater is an outmoded form that is low tech, handmade and has associations with folk theater. It was a form we rediscovered from 19th century Europe that was a popular amateur form you would perform in the home. It was something kids and adults would do together. Very often the scripts were melodramas from London’s West End. The popularity of the form coincided with colored lithography and with mass communication and mass culture; it’s a form that existed between printing, book making and puppetry.
JB: Can you talk a little bit more about translating this particular process, a form that has more associations with the home than with the high-theater, into an actual show? I have read that you use a camera to project the miniature theater onto a screen in order to show the piece larger. This process creates an interesting tension between what the form stands for historically and what it becomes on the stage.
MS: We started these [miniature theater] shows before we were even a company. We found that using the toy theater was a quick and easy way to talk about big ideas- there is a weird inverse relationship between the scale of the show and the ideas. In [Toy Theater of] Terror as Usual, one of the shows we will be performing, we see the performers operating the puppets. In a lot of puppet shows you never get to see the puppeteers. You see us operating the puppets, singing and talking and making sounds. That Brechtian act of revealing the performers is a big part of the show. I think that still works when we use the video camera and the projection when we are creating it before you. The image is taken apart and constructed in front of you. For an audience, this shows how history is created and constructed.
JB: Why do you think that it is important that people see Great Small works?
MS: It’s interesting and fun and unexpected. It is interesting how you see an idea and stories. Much of traditional theater expresses characters differently than we do – we present a story within a larger set of ideas with an analysis. We provide a visually appealing message and a way to comprehend and digest complicated ideas in an accessible form.
Great Small Works Friday, February 3 and Saturday, February 4, 2012 at 8pm
CFA Hall, 287 Washington Terrace
Tickets: $15 general public; $12 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students Each performance will be followed by a post-show discussion.
Cassandra Burrows, John Bell, Trudi Cohen, Jenny Romaine and Xavier will perform the works “Short, Entertaining History of Toy Theater”; “Toy Theater of Terror As Usual, Episode 12: Desert and Ocean”, a surreal serial drama using excerpted texts and images quickly cut from The New York Times, Hans Christian Anderson, Grace Lee Boggs, and Democracy Now!; and “Three Graces”, a “cantastoria” (picture-based storytelling work) in which three mythical graces – Harmony, Strategy and Splendor – float down to earth for an op-art romp inspired by Grace Paley, Grace Kelly, Grace Jones and Grace Lee Boggs.
From now through January 17, share your thoughts about the spring events at the Center for the Arts in one (or both!) of the following ways:
1) Like us on Facebook and write something about our spring events on our Wall.
2) Follow us on Twitter and compose a tweet about our spring events (be sure to mention @WesCFA).
Everyone who writes about our spring events on Facebook or Twitter will be entered to win some excellent prizes, including the following:
We hope that you will take advantage of all that the Center for the Arts has to offer in the coming months:
In keeping with our tradition of welcoming the world to Wesleyan at the CFA, you will have the opportunity to discover one of Australia’s most adventurous contemporary dance companies (Chunky Move); a sizzling jazz guitarist/vocalist from Benin (Lionel Loueke); and an Argentine quartet that celebrates the tango music of Buenos Aires (Fernando Otero).
And in keeping with our interest in the intersection of art and science, the CFA has commissioned two works that will have their first performances at Wesleyan in conjunction with Feet to the Fire: Fueling the Future. SPILL, by Leigh Fondakowski and Reeva Wortel, is a visual art/performance installation that explores the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The work will debut at Beckham Hall in February. Composer Paula Matthusen, new to Wesleyan’s music faculty, will premiere work divided by time at the Van Vleck Observatory. The sound installation is a reflection of how the scientific definition of energy resonates and clashes with cultural and historical concepts.
Other highlights include the world premiere of a new multi-part suite by jazz vibraphonist and music faculty member Jay Hoggard; the U.S. premiere of Quicksand, a provocative new work by inDANCE, the highly acclaimed Toronto-based contemporary dance company directed by Wesleyan Artist in Residence Hari Krishnan; and a 21st-century examination of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, directed by Theater Department Chair Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento.
We invite you to stretch your imagination, contemplate new ideas and celebrate all that the CFA’s faculty, students, and visiting artists and companies have to offer.
Best wishes,
Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts
P.S. If you are looking for arts interaction over the holidays, please attend Middnight on Main, New Year’s Eve on Main Street in Middletown.
