The Imago Blog

Yesterday I blogged that I tried to dismantle any meaning when meaning began to arise in a scene in Tick Tack Type. I wrote that doing this was to free the play and not have it land in a didactic world. Today I will contradict my thinking saying that for every action in the play (or for most) I tried to find meaning in it.

Is this a contradiction? Yes and no. I think it’s a fine balance between an abstract work that has no means of a handle and an abstract works that resonates for audiences. I am not interested in pure abstraction, if I was, I would imbed the work in pure movement and dance and not try to create theatre of it.

So to get back to my opening statement, for every action I tried to find meaning yet at the same time dismantle it. (I hope this blog makes sense to someone, cause writing about movement is not easy, if it was easy, then I would assume the movement theatre has little merit.) In its simplest terms, when I had a character execute an action I tried to find one level or several of dramaturgical importance.

I assume this blog is vague since I am not divulging any of the action of Tick Tack Type. I apologize for this, but I am doing this for your sake (that is if you plan to see the work.) By discussing the action I am robbing you of the experience of it. What I see in an action may not be what you see. I can say this about Tick Tack Type, in many way it’s about “seeing” or “not seeing.”

Tick Tack Type plays March 11 to 14. All tickets are free. Go to www.imagotheatre.com for info.

In my last two productions APIS, or The Taste of Honey and The Cuban Missile Tango I kept my cast in the dark for several weeks and then revealed to them the narrative structure of the play. For example in APIS I worked on movement and character development before I revealed to the cast that their prison was a beehive - those inside were honey bees and those outside were bee keepers. In my next play Tick Tack Type (TTT) there is nothing to reveal to the cast. TTT began as an abstraction and will end that way.

In TTT, I have a hierarchal structure and there is narrative. There is a typing instructor (ruler) and typists (who serve the ruler.) There is action, for example a typist performers badly and is punished. Yet despite the presence of a narrative the work remains an abstraction. I intentionally worked to insure that no symbolism or didactic context was present or at least I tried to subdue those directions. I tried to dismantle meaning when TTT started to lean in ‘meaningful’ directions.

Where am I heading or what it is, is not as important to me as to what qualities or situations arise. I think it was Godard that said that a film must have a first, second and third act but not necessarily in that order. Tick Tack Type must have dramatic builds, releases, peaks, valleys, scenes, acts and resolutions – but it needn’t have clear precise meaning.

Theatre can create a world that defies a tangible lucid reality. If I have create a completely cognitive world then I have missed the ‘other stuff.’ That ‘other stuff’ is when our explanations don’t meet and we see something else. Can I create a convincing universe that exists on its own merit? A world that does not fit our common understanding of reality then perhaps I have created a new world, one in which I have not visited.

I was in New York last week. Saw over 250 actors auditioning for FROGZ, Biglittlethings and ZooZoo – Imago’s signature works of mask theatre. It’s exciting to see young actors who were not yet born when Carol and I first launched FROGZ who will probably be cast in the show – this work is certainly generational.

In 1992, we had decided to not venture further into mask theatre because we had explored it for over 14 years. One day back then, Carol and I walked into our agent’s office in New York and announced we were closing FROGZ, he nonchalantly said to his assistant “Ok Beverly call and cancel those $250,000 of contracts” His gambit worked. We went back to our hotel, thought about it and then called him back and told him not to cancel. I don’t regret that phone call. At the time I wasn’t sure.  I had believed I knew all there was to know about mask theatre but after another 16 years I’m still exploring.

Last week Carol and I met the folks at our new agency Opus 3 Artists. www.opus3artists.com We’re honored to work with this prestigious group and who knows what the future holds.

I am entering my third act with mask theatre. I don’t know where it will lead. I certainly thought Imago’s debut on Broadway in 2000 with FROGZ was the apex of my mask theatre career. Now I’m thinking more is to come.

Biglittlethings opens Dec 11.

www.imagotheatre.com

I designed the set for No Exit which tips with each actors’ step. The inspiration for the set came from Imago’s mentor Jacques Lecoq.

The year is 1977. The place is Portland, Oregon.  I’m in enrolled in The Hayes-Marshall School of Theatre Arts, a year-long course based on the teaching of Lecoq.  We are studying a Lecoq concept called “Balance of the Stage.” The thirteen students in the class stand around the 30’ perimeter of an imaginary plate. The plate floats on an imaginary vat of oil. The instructor asks one of the students to step on the imaginary plate. The student is asked to imagine the plate sinking slowly with his weight. Now at the right moment (Lecoq work always seeks the right moment, not to soon, not too late) another student is coached to step onto the plate 180 degrees across from the first student. The two students move like gunslingers in a western facing one another to balance and imbalance the plate on the vat of oil. The movement is mesmerizing.

In 1997, I transplanted myself from the conventional theatre department at University of Oregon to The Hayes-Marshall School . At U of O, I was trying to be other people on stage - characters in the playwright’s mind. How to be other people? I didn’t even know how to be myself. I am to be Henry IV? Theatre confused me. I was lost. But now here in a Lecoq class – I’m not asked to be anyone but myself.  Just be me standing on a plate on a vat of oil.  I can do this. I can see this. This I could visualize. I understand. Yes! I feel the plate sinking. Yes, I sense the balance tipping and the balance restored.  In Jacques Lecoq’s world, my world changed. And thus, my life in theatre began.

It’s been over 30 years, and Lecoq’s teaching continue to unfold. The journey hasn’t stopped. In 1998, I was fortunate to take Lecoq’s concept and make a physical realization of his concepts of balance when I was designing No Exit.  Mr. Lecoq died in 1999. I wish he could have seen our production of Sartre’s play. I would have been grateful to get his notes on the show (but I would have been very nervous.)

No Exit opens October 16 (Oct 15 is a preview)

It’s 3:07 AM and I can’t sleep.  Why? Because at rehearsal I climbed a mountain, got to a valley and tomorrow will climb another mountain. Theatre is scaling, climbing and short breath.  I hear it’s different in Poland where the arts are heavily subsidized. In Poland, the valleys and mountains must be spread out with their long rehearsal periods lasting months, maybe years.   Here in the United States we gotta hike rough to rich artistic gold.  Whether I am working at a large regional theatre, or at our comfortable little niche of a laboratory at Imago, the valleys and mountains are plentiful. 

 3 Weeks before opening – Climbing, climbing trying to find a clear view of the play, been at it for weeks.  Weeks to go before I sleep.

 2 1/2 Weeks before opening – Climbing. Do I see the clearing?  Is there something here? Maybe that’s a shape ahead! Or a mirage? No, it’s a shape! A shape! I’ve find form!

 (small valley of hope,  start again at dawn)

 12 Days before opening – Climbing the great wall of technology.  Complex design! Ouch! (the curse of a designer/director.) Climb color palate, climb style, climb all the senses. Climb the silences.

 11 Days before opening – Harsh awful steep terrain, the sound design is killing me.

 10 Days before opening – Almost fell off, the multimedia is treacherous and deadly.

 9 Days before opening –Walking in the dark. I don’t think I’ll I make. Why did I start this journey?

 8 Days before opening – Oh ?%!#, the lighting, do I have to design everything? Why do I do this myself?

 7 Days before opening – What happened?  I’m at a clearing.  How the hell did I get here? The techno mountain fell away.  The play is not 3 hours long. It’s under an hour?  How the  ?%!#  did that happen?

 (small valley, tomorrow I go on, pray for me)

 And so it goes.

Maybe being American we see art like business — as mountains and valleys.  Maybe the Poles see it as one long horizon with no end in sight. mmm? ….I doubt it.

The Cuban Missile Tango opens Aug 17 (in 7 days, yikes!)

After two days of rehearsal for The Cuban Missile Tango I find that plates, cigars and keys are giving me inspiration.   Early in the process of this movement, dance, mime,  vaudeville play-without-word, it’s the action that gives it the drive.  I have these headlines in my head, which I don’t reveal to the performers.  These headlines will be projected like a teletype onto the set.  The first one is something like “New Years Day, 1959: Fidel Castro overthrows brutal dictator Fulbencio Batista to liberate Cuba. Castro’s world-wide celebrity intensifies.” My actors are at a party, a dozen men and women finishing a meal, wait staff come and go, bits of business fill the scene.  In my mind I see the headline, but how to bring it to life at the party? What will make it interesting for the audience (and for me.)  Soon I have one actor tell a story of his climb in a business scheme, the group cheers – this all with music blasting, thus the audience can’t hear specific dialogue only the gist of the scene. I am not interested in narrative, but action. 

But still how do I drive it forward? The party celebrates the businessman hero.  I  add dance/movement. It’s getting better, but no spark.  Then I discover what I’m after – the plates.  The glass plates at the dinner party!  I work a movement sequence were plates are handled by the ensemble, they move here, there, fly, dart  in a dangerous sequence.  The plates look like they are executing guests.  Now the muse has struck (will she stay around?)  With the movement, the plates, the choreography, the unintelligible voices and the overhead teletype – I’m getting close to what I’m after.

What am I after?  An event – a party – that resembles and takes the shape of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Rational men, if you can all them that, came very close to ending the world.  Thus, a party that comes dangerously close to ending the lives of all that are present.  But I can’t rely on that motivation alone, thus the plates. Yea, for the plates! The plates give it metaphor, and give it spice and lift. 

I will continue to work with more headlines tonight. I’m having the prop master bring in cigars and keys.

The Cuban Missile Tango opens end of August at Imago Theatre.

In The Cuban Missile Tango, I am looking for a collision of two worlds.  Currently I am writing outlines. I begin rehearsal in a month.  The outline is only one or two pages but it provides a very important framework from which to build the play.

The Cuban Missile Crisis took the world dangerously close to World War III.  Kennedy and Krushchev, with a little help from Castro, played a game of chicken with the lives of all on the planet. This crisis took place in 13 days in October of 1962.  On Halloween day during the crisis a Soviet submarine came very close to launching a nuclear war head attacking US forces in the waters off  Cuba.  Three years earlier, on New Years’ day, 1959, a revolution led by Castro overthrew a dictatorship in Cuba, beginning a shift in the political climate in our hemisphere, and in some minds shifting the balance of communism on the globe, which ultimately led to the Cuban Missile Crises.

So there’s my collision – two holiday events, a New Year’s Eve party and a Halloween party colliding with a political military chess game.  I have two social classes at the party, those having a luxurious meal and a kitchen staff.  Two classes of people.  

The tricky part is not to make it too obvious, too complex or too easy.  I am not interested in creating a social political piece but would accept social political situations that may arise.  I will begin as I did with my last movement work APIS, with exploring movement, dance and vaudeville.  I have an idea of a noisy swinging kitchen door inspired by Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holdiay.   So with a big idea, the danger of World War III, I start with a couple of waiters and a swinging door.

I don’t want to tackle the entire crisis. That’s why I will begin with two waiters and a door. This is not the Cuban Missile Crisis, this is The Cuban Missile Tango – an entirely different event. 

The Cuban Missile Tango opens Aug 21.

My staging comes from discovering the space.  The actors first move in the set and then I rediscover the space as they feel  freed or trapped by it.  It is always unique and heartfelt and then I impose my own movement style and choices on top of that. I like song and dance. . All people can dance and sing, just maybe not in the Broadway musical sense. The voice and body are your own and I try to bring out what each actor can bring to the stage in voice and movement. If they actors say they can’t  sing or dance, the will in my work. I sprinkle in realistic staging, otherwise there is no reason for the environment. If I were to completely ignore the set and do funny business with songs and dance the audience wouldn’t take the content of the story seriously.  Homeless executives is both humorous and tragic.

I intentionally keep actors in the dark as to why am I directing  in certain ways.  I want to watch their discoveries. Actors and directors can’t exist without each other’s input. We are like food to one another. As the rehearsal process deepens I become more specific in directing the actors.  Then we reach a phase where both freedom and frustration sets in.  Eventually the actors reveal  a character state.  Once in the state is inhabited then  we can then travel anywhere.

I make changes in the script late in the process because writing words and hearing them are different.  What has made sense on paper doesn’t always translate to the stage. Or I see that one character may not be able to say the thing I wrote, and then realize it was meant for the other character. And frankly, there is the simple fact that sometimes I just don’t know what I am doing. I have to wait for it to become apparent to me.

My story is simple. Everyone knows what has happened with the economic crisis. Sometimes an object or a pet was left behind because they were forced out of their home.  This detail has great significance. Sometimes I leave in the cliche and sometimes I take out the obvious. Sometimes by overstating certain content the story becomes absurd and perhaps meaningful or humorous.  By not giving all the information to a piece, the work is then open to interpretation.  I want the audience to feel more than the information of a story without too much emotional manipulation.  I want the characters to reveal inner feelings and passions. Being homeless is being faceless.

I always start writing from simple moments in my life.  Usually something simple happens and I over react and write a play.  But in this case it was not that simple.  Many people’s lives were changed by the world economic disaster.  Lives were changed and my perspective on life changed with it. Our shabby existence is now truly happening. Everyday I hear new sad stories of ordinary people, helpless due to the world economic crisis.

Even in crisis we  fall in love and the events of the crisis impact on the path we take. I am trying to show the pathos in someone in high places and what they feel when they fall.  This fall though is within a comedic music-theatre genre.

All the actors are non-realists but with a harsh real quality. I cast for the individual qualities of an actor.  How they feel, how the look, how they respond to my language, how they themselves position themselves in the world is part of my casting process. The actors cannot be replaced because they are real.  All the characters are waiting for something to happen in the real world but on my set they react in an unreal way.

I think the play is linear, sometimes there are abrupt changes in topic.  That is perhaps why it gives the sense of a non-linear work.  Maybe its better to call it crooked. And the music makes shifts happen as well.  Songs can take you places words alone cannot. Ultimately that is one of my goals, going places.

Simple People opens May 28