The Civilians at CUNY

As part of our Investigative Theatre Education Program, The Civilians is Artists-in-Residence at CUNY this year. Our first leg of the residency kicked off at CUNY Kingsborough this past month, where Associate Artist Alison Weller taught a class of 16 students The Civilians' methodology. The class culminated with a student-created performance from interviews they conducted in their community based around the theme of What is Brooklyn to you? Read below for excerpts from the students' interviews!

Associate Artist Alison Weller & Dir. of Artistic Programs Ian Daniel
with CUNY Kingsborough students in the Dept. of Communications & Performing Arts

"I always say to myself if Jay-Z wasn't from here he wouldn't be who he is. He probably would still be great, but he wouldn't have that swagger like he does. It's pride really." 






"Brooklyn will always feel like home, there's something about driving over the Verrazano or coming into Kennedy Airport and having that sigh of relief. I'm home."




"I know I should have just gave him my phone, but I got really mad that he was trying to rob me so I just quickly kneed him really hard and ran away!"






"I can go on and on about the things Brooklyn has taught me. Brooklyn raised my kids. Brooklyn taught me how to be a lady and how not to be a lady. Brooklyn taught me how to fight."

We will be teaching at two other CUNY schools this year so stay tuned for updates from our Residency! 

We Want Your Stories!

Hi Friends of The Civilians,

Our “Let Me Ascertain You” series returns to Joe’s Pub on Saturday, May 17^th at 7pm. We’re hoping you can help us with our next installment: “F*cking and Dying.”

If you didn’t notice, we’re a bit obsessed with sex and death at The Civilians and this cabaret explores what happens when those fixations collide. We will look at the duality of human nature and our competing sex and death drives - our instinct for life, love and reproduction against our instinct toward death, aggression, and repulsion...and we need your stories!

If any of you or anyone you know might have good stories about sex or death or tales where the two collide -- please send details our way!

We’re looking to hear stories about…

- Wild coming-of-age sex stories or sexual explorations

- Sex addiction or Nyphomania

- Auto-erotic fetishes

- Dominatrix work

- “Terror sex” following disaster or trauma

- Sexual encounters near or connected to dying, funerals

...or of course necrophilia 

Please send us a brief summary of your story or shoot any questions you might have to projectmanager@thecivilians.org and if we think your story might work for us, we’ll be in touch about setting up an interview. Any and all leads are helpful. We’re looking forward to hearing your stories. For more information click here. 

Yours,

The Civilians

Photo Credit: Antoine D'Agata 

Let Me Ascertain You: Sex Variants 1941

Do you consider yourself a “Sex Variant?” Don’t know what that is?

Well, dig out the skeletons from your closet and join us for the next Let Me Ascertain You. Joe’s Pub is having us back on Monday Feb 3 at 9:30 pm for a stimulating look into America’s secret sexual past. Get your tickets HERE!

Ever heard of Havelock Ellis? Magnus Hirschfeld? … no? How about Alfred Kinsey? They are the forefathers of a global sexual liberation movement started in the late 19th century toward the acceptance of people who identify as something outside the norm: Sex Variants.

Another less known (perhaps less liberated) pioneer in the field of sex research is Dr. George W. Henry of Cornell University. In 1935, he teamed up with the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants to publish the subject of next month's LMAY cabaret. "Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns" hosts 80 interviews with volunteers who ran the risk of losing their jobs, blackmail, or arrest. We hear everything from the early childhood exploration of the body to orgies. Sometimes funny, often shocking, these stories illuminate the myriad of ways that humans have always explored and expressed the most animal of our instincts.

Here’s a little bit of what we’re talking about...

Nathan T’s personal sex history:

“Since puberty I've had a vague sex interest in dogs. For more than ten years I used to get them to lick my penis. I still feel vaguely sexy about dogs I like… If I saw anybody having sex with a dog I would think it rather nice.”

Rowena K on her endurance: 
“Sex averages four or five hours. We just stop and wait and keep feeling good all the time. It takes her that long. In five or ten minutes I have an orgasm but I continue feeling good. I can have ten to fifteen orgasms and still feel good.”

Henry divided the subjects of his study into three groups: Homosexual, Bisexual or Narcissistic. He was determined to make progress on the treatment and prevention of “sexual maladjustment,” so he evaluated the family history, psychology and physiology of the subjects hoping to find a pattern, maybe even a cause. And there are graphic physical examinations too and diagrams to prove it.

Yes: in the book, you can see a gay vagina compared to a ‘normal’ vagina; there’s a cross-section showing how a dildo works; you can witness studies of dozens of labial folds and areola.

From SEX VARIANTS

Myrtle K: “My clitoris enlarges when I get steamed up...My clitoris natural is two inches long. Enlarged it’s three inches and the thickness of a little finger. I think it’s grown half an inch in the past year. I’ll have to get a jock strap if it gets much more.” 

Salvatore N: “I often ask myself whether I am really a homosexual or merely a person who performs homosexual acts through association. I never want to have an affair with another homosexual. Taking the penis in my mouth does not satisfy me. Homosexual practices disgust me. Men who speak with an effeminate voice, who refer to each other as “she” or who make feminine gestures, are repugnant to me." 

Join us on Monday, February 3rd at 9:30pm at Joe's Pub as we transform these graphic first-person accounts into a provocative, pansexual cabaret of monologues and songs about first times, dreamy fantasies and excessive fetishes. 

The evening will feature original songs written from material in the book from these exciting 8 composers:

Tim Acito, César Alvarez, Maggie-Kate Coleman and Erato A. Kremmyda,  Michael Friedman, Andrea Grody, Grace McClean, Jill Sobule, and Max Vernon.

Pictures and quotes from: Henry, George W. Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc, Medical Book Department of Harper & Brothers, 1941. Print. 

Meet The R&D: Mary Kathryn Nagle

Mary Kathryn Nagle, a playwright in this years R&D group, recounts the process of her most recent investigative theatre project, Sliver of a Full Moon. The play was performed on October 14^th by the Native American women who included their stories as victims of violence. For more information on the show, please click HERE.

Sometimes I have a hard time calling myself a playwright.  When I write, I don’t invent stories or characters.  I don’t search deep down into my creative soul to discover a story- I go out into my community and I listen.  And through the act of listening, I inevitably discover stories that must be told.  Stories that the world needs to hear, and that the community needs to share.  For a long time, I felt that made me a fake playwright.  All I do is listen to others, record their words, and then I cut and paste them into a format I find to be compelling.  I’m not really making up anything on my own.  What kind of a playwright does that?

The most amazing part about writing these sorts of plays is that you never know where the story will take you.  You start with something you want to investigate, something you don’t understand.  And you ask questions.  And after you take account of all of the answers that come back to you, you realize the story you’re telling is a story you could never have imagined yourself.

Most recently, when I sat down to conduct interviews for Sliver of a Full Moon, I thought the piece I was writing would just be a series of monologues that I cut and pasted together from the transcripts of the interviews I conducted.  When I was asked to conduct these interviews, I had no idea where the story would eventually end up.

It was February 2013, and tribal leaders from several different American Indian Nations were in Washington, D.C., lobbying for the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act (“VAWA”).  More specifically, they were asking the United States Congress to pass a bill that would recognize the inherent sovereignty of American Indian tribes to prosecute non-natives who come onto tribal lands and commit acts of domestic abuse against Native women.

In 1978, the United States Supreme Court declared that Indian tribes no longer have jurisdiction to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on reservations.  Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Oliphant, Native women were hit the hardest.  Native women are more likely to become victims of violent crimes such as sexual assault and domestic violence than any other race—and yet 88% of the perpetrators of these crimes against Native women are non-native.  So when the Supreme Court stripped tribal governments of their ability to prosecute non-natives, tribal governments lost their ability to protect Native women in their own homes.

    Press coverage for Mary Kathryn's play Sliver of a Full Moon 

  
It was February 2013 and I had come to DC not to lobby or help with the effort of VAWA, but rather, to socialize with some friends, and suddenly, in the middle of dinner, I was facing some important questions:

How can we share the stories of our Native women survivors?

Can you interview them?

Can you write a play?

My answer was YES.  I was honored to take on this task.  And  in the middle of dinner, our plan became clear.  We would interview a group of survivors, and their stories would be transformed into a series of monologues that would become a play- and then we would take the play directly to Congress.  We would perform the monologues of their stories in DC for the entire government to hear.   How could Congress deny tribal governments the right to protect Native women after hearing their stories?

But the thing about this form of art is that, as a “playwright,” you have no control.  You start out taking interviews with one thought in mind, and six weeks later you realize you’re involved in a project that is larger than life and taking you in a completely opposite direction. 

Two days before I was scheduled to take my first interview, I received a text message from my friend.  “VAWA passed!!!!”

What?!   No one thought that would happen! 

The whole purpose behind taking these interviews and writing this play was to help the effort in getting VAWA passed—because everyone agreed the House would vote against it!  Now that VAWA has passed with the tribal jurisdiction provision in it, what’s the point of writing this play? 

After much discussion, we decided to go forward with the interviews.  As I listened to their stories, their words, I realized this play was not what I thought it was.

The women I was interviewing weren’t just survivors.  They were warriors.  They didn’t just survive the violence that was inflicted upon them—they took their experiences, their stories of survival, and they started a grassroots movement to change the law at the national level.  All of them had been involved in change at their local level, and now the result was change at a national level.  A change that restored a portion of their tribes’ pre-1978 sovereignty to protect them in their own homes. 

Suddenly I realized that the play I was writing wasn’t about the violence that had happened to these women.  No—this play was about their success in changing the law so that what happened to them would never happen to their daughters.  Or their grandchildren.

This past Monday October 14, we held a reading of Sliver of a Full Moon.  The women warriors who I interviewed played themselves in the play—they read their stories for all to hear.   I am honored to have worked with some incredible women: Lisa Brunner (White Earth Ojibwe); Diane Millich (Southern Ute); and Billie Jo Rich (Eastern Band Cherokee).

Representative Tom Cole and the woman interviewed for the project.

And although there were monologues of survival in the play, the majority of the play covered the true story of Native women warriors, as well as tribal leaders, who used their stories and their life experiences to achieve one of the greatest victories American Indians have ever seen since 1492. 

Having recently joined the Civilians R&D Group, I have learned that this kind of theater is known as “investigative theater.”  I love that.  I love that we have a title for the kind of sacred story telling we Natives have been doing for hundreds of years.   I am very much looking forward to this year with my fellow collaborators in the R&D Group.   If my experience doing investigative theater with the R&D Group is anything like the investigate theater I’ve done in the past, I know it will change my life.
                                                    

President Barack Obama,survivor and actress Diane Millich and Vice President Joe Biden                    

Thanks for sharing your process, Mary Kathryn. For other posts about our R&D Group artists, please click HERE

SHARE YOUR STORIES: WEDDINGS

As a toast to the defeat of DOMA, we're launching a new interview-based project exploring the surprising, funny, remarkable and wild side of WEDDINGS in America.  Our investigation will include interviews from all demographics, cultures and sexual-orientations with real-life couples, wedding guests, vendors, officiants and others about the most astounding events ever encountered at weddings.

We are looking for your contribution. If you have outrageous TRUE wedding stories from anywhere in the U.S., we would love to hear from you!   Are you a mail-order bride?  Were you married as teens or really late in life?  Were you married via a vending machine?  Did you set fire to your wedding in order to get out of it?   We want to hear any and all things jaw-dropping.

If you or someone you know has a good story, shoot it our way to projectmanager@thecivilians.org. We'll be in touch!

We are looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks so much!

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Psychic Medium

Our R&D Group Coordinator, EllaRose Chary, interviewed Therese Relucio, a New York based Certified Psychic Medium (Intuitive Consultant).  Learn more about Therese's work HERE, and also be sure to check out her development group HERE.  
This interview is part of our broad investigation into death, dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale in Ft. Greene Brooklyn. Details HERE!

Therese Relucio

Check out some excerpts of Therese's interview below:

I remember seeing my first spirit when I was three years old. I was actually born in the Philippines, but I remember seeing it - I was still in the Philippines at the time and I remember seeing a male spirit outside of my window on my second floor so I know that it was definitely a spirit. And I pointed it out and I remember nobody else being able to see the same spirit, so from then, from that first memory, I remember seeing a lot of other spirits coming through. 

I was not scared until probably about 9 or 10 when I started seeing, um, a spirit that was laying in bed with me, a male spirit that was laying in bed with me, smiling at me all the time and I would see him for probably a year, two years straight no matter what house I lived in. Um, yeah, and it was scary only because he was smiling at me and not saying anything. It was a little bit creepy, but um, as it turns out, as I got older, I realized that that was my spirit guide.

Yeah, so a spirit guide, I say spirit because you know, uh, depending on what you want to call it—you could call it ghost if you want—but a spirit is just basically a soul that is not in, that is discarded, meaning not in—not in a physical body.  So they're not human, they're not in a physical form. But a spirit guide, you can relate it to something, some people say a guardian angel, you know, someone that is there to protect you to guide you. That's what a spirit guide is. They guide you towards your direction, towards your life's purpose.

I mean really I've always believed that we're on earth to learn things. So earth is like a boarding school for our souls. When we die and when we pass, we're just going back to where we came from. That's it. There’s nothing unnatural about it, it's just a euphoric process and we go back to where we came from. 

Thanks so much to Therese and Ella for sharing. 

To read other excerpts from our investigation for "Be The Death of Me" go HERE

R&D Group Reading Series and Public Presentation

Our R&D Coordinator EllaRose Chary shares her experiences working with our R&D Group and gives details about their current Reading Series and public presentation that will take place next Wednesday May 29th at 7:30pm in The Great Room at 138 S. Oxford St. in Ft. Greene Brooklyn. 

Last week we kicked off our R and D Group Reading Series with presentations of work by Emily Ackerman (Working Title: “Forgiveness & Revenge” directed by David Mendizábal) and Carly Mensch (“The Untitled Raymond Project directed by Mei Ann Teo). We’ll continue with the series through the summer, with presentations of work by Mia Rovegno (AFFLICTED directed by Gina Rattan), Matt Dellapina (directed by Snehal Desai), and César Alvarez (THE UNIVERSE IS A SMALL HAT directed by guest director Sarah Benson). The pieces presented in the reading series are in various states of development. The series is an opportunity for the writers to see their work – wherever it’s at at this point – up on its feet with actors. Most of the actors come from The Civilians’ core of Associate Artists, who are familiar with the process of developing work created with the investigative method. These presentations are, in the words of Artistic Director Steve Cosson, a “culminating something,” and a chance for the writers to assess their project with the help of directors and other artists.

If you need a refresher, read all about our R&D artists here or check out my blogpost about them from November.

One of the most fascinating parts of being R and D Group Coordinator is watching these our artists’ projects grow from a blurb on an application into a piece of theater up on its feet. There are so many things you learn about a piece from working on it with a director and actors. In Emily Ackerman’s reading on Wednesday, the physical presence of having two characters talking about separate ideas and occupying two clearly delineated spaces showed how the different perspectives in the piece are beginning to layer with each other. Likewise, when Carly Mensch started out with her research, she wasn’t sure whether or not to include a certain character. For this presentation, she did include that character, and that choice illuminated elements of the storytelling that had not been there in previous drafts. I can’t wait to see what comes out of the other writers’ pieces as they get to work with their directors and actors in the coming weeks.

Because of the nature of the projects and because many of the writers have come to the R and D Group to learn about the Civilians’ unique method for approaching theater, the reading series presentations are often closed to the public. However, over the course of this year, a number of people have asked me if there would be an opportunity to see work from the group and to learn about the process. In response to this interest, we have decided to add a public event to the reading series schedule – An Evening with The Civilians R and D Group. 

This public presentation will take place next Wednesday May 29^th at 7:30 pm in The Great Room at 138 S. Oxford St.  in Brooklyn. It’s open to the public and we hope that if you’re interested in learning more about the R and D Group, you’ll join us (and if you’re not already interested, check out these amazing blog posts from the members, and you will become interested!). It’s going to be a fun and informal evening for the group members to share their work and their process. Space is limited so please RSVP to rdgroup@thecivilians.org.

To learn more about the event, check it out on Facebook. To learn more about the projects visit the R&D posts on the blog here. 

Meet our Literary Associate: Micharne Cloughley

This post is by our current Literary Associate Micharne Cloughley. Micharne shares some of her experiences working with The Civilians and gives insight into her own work.  Check out Micharne's website here 

Micharne at our Annual Spring Benefit

BEHIND THE SCENES… A METAPHORICAL DVD EXTRA…

In the world of investigative theater, the ‘making of’ can often be as enlightening and entertaining as the material being uncovered. If we worked in the medium of video, I’m sure these moments would end up in a DVD extra. As we are indeed in theater, it felt right to share a little about my time as Literary Associate in blog/script form, from the beginning…

DECEMBER 2012: 50^th Street Station on the Red Line, Winter, in that little alcove where a man sometimes begs with his collection of cats and hamsters.

STEVE: (on phone) So I just wanted to check in with you as the focus of the role has expanded a bit. We’re going to be doing a project about death, all about death and New York. Would that be okay with you?

ME: (on cell) Yes, for sure, absolutely.

Of course. Totally normal. Back home in Australia I had come to know The Civilians while researching for my final work in the Playwriting Program at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. I was actually looking at plays about contemporary Christianity, so another less common subject for a play was well, what I now refer to as ‘Civiliansy’.  

Also coming from a background in reality/non-fiction TV and development, I’ve researched a lot of different topics of human interest. Death was perhaps less strange than missing persons, gang crime or you know, swingers clubs. One of the most interesting differences in moving into non-fiction theater are the discussions surrounding the creation of a work. In R & D Group we talk for literally hours about questions that simply don’t exist in TV, for example, there is a grey-ness to deciding what is compelling material in a script, that is in practice much more quantifiable on a screen.

JANUARY 2013: The Civilians Office, Brooklyn.

ME: (on phone) ‘we’d just like to speak with you about your thoughts about death, generally speaking … yes that’s right, and we transcribe the interview, and then yes, someone would be playing you, if you were included in the final script… an actor, yes…  you can be anonymous if you prefer?’

This unusual request has been received with so many a cool New Yorker reply of ‘let me look at my schedule’, this city most definitely still believes in risk-taking art and taboo-breaking conversation. While I still feel new (I’ve been here almost 1 year) to be deeply commenting on the overall cerebral state of New Yorkers, I confess that from Jonathan Larson’s RENT, I (along with many of our teen selves in suburban places, I know) declared myself a New Yorker at about 14. While on the subject, if anyone reading this knew Jonathan, I would love to speak with you for the project. My interviews for the project have so far seen me from speaking with different people at Columbia University, to midtown, literally during Act 1 of a Broadway musical, to Bedford Stuyvesant Ambulance Corps that was featured in our blog two weeks ago. So many incredible stories.

FEBRUARY 2013: The Great Room, South Oxford Street Art Space, Brooklyn, the first Share Meeting for the Death Project, where interviewers share highlights of their transcriptions.

ME: (as an ‘oh-so-funny’ aside) And of course, no one needs to actually experience a death first hand for the project… (Laughter as appropriate in a meeting talking about death)

The first ‘Death Share Meeting’ brought the words of transcriptions to life in the voices of their own interviewers. As this was the first time we had had the whole team of interviewers together, we also spoke about the process at large. You quickly realize how limited our use of language is today for dealing with death. How do you say that someone has just shared a ‘good’ story about death? We immediately recoil in feeling disrespectful, but the reality is there are helpful and sometimes humorous aspects of dealing with death as well as terribly hard parts.

For example, after making the comment above, a few weeks later I found out my Nanna died, literally at my desk in the office. I fell apart then, but, now, one can see the irony if not humor in that co-incidence. That laugh/sigh balance of life. And death.

JANUARY – present: Repeated inside my head, Bart Simpson writing on a chalkboard style…

ME: ‘I will not be that literary person that does not get back to you about your play’

In addition to specific projects, I also look after the day-to-day literary side of The Civilians. I have had the pleasure of reading many courageous new voices, wrestling with social issues in a theatrical space.  I look forward to reading more from the incredible volume of new plays that lie often unseen beneath the surface of this city.

Perhaps this was slightly more in depth than your average DVD extra. But then, we are theater. Depth, with the lightness of being, is what we all do best.

Thanks for sharing Micharne!

INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Father Sebastiaan, Vampyre

Our Artistic Intern, Leonie Ettinger, recently interviewed Father Sebastiaan, a self-defined Vampyre, Fangsmith, and author of occult literature, on his thoughts about death and dying for our new project.  

Father Sebastiann is one of the co-founders of The Sanguinarium, a social network for the Vampyre subculture and created The Endless Night Festival, one of the largest Vampyre gatherings in the world. To learn more about him, click HERE 

Check out a few excerpts from Leonie's interview below. 

What exactly is a Vampyre?

Vampyres are energy beings. They are not a blood drinking physical entity because blood is useless for Vampyres. Instead, they need to leach life force of other human beings because they don't have a body to generate their own. The Vampyre is not about death - like a zombie or demon or death itself. The Vampyre is about life and a cure to death.

The human body is like an embryo to the Vampyre, a place where he lives within like a human in a spacesuit. Immortality must be earned, practiced and refined through mediation, energy work, validation and interaction with the Ancestors ('undead'). If successful, the Vampyre will survive death as an 'undead'. At this time, the 'undead' do not want to be known to the “mundane world”. They are in between life and death. However, when they reveal themselves to the mundane world they appear as magickal friends, angels, spirits, faeries, and more recently some say even aliens.

The grandson of an orthodontist & nephew of a dentist, he also hand-carves custom fangs. 

What do you think happens when we die?

My belief is that when you die, your energy is released into the universe and recycled. The church tells you that if your physical body dies, you die. That makes sense but what happens if that's not the case? What happens if your body dies and you avatar continues? The internet will eventually become something like the Matrix. Our bodies will be useless and our consciousness will be inside the computer. So does that make us energy? Yes. You become immortal and the technology becomes the God - not God. This is a fear and why Vampyres have been given such a bad rep throughout all the centuries.

Can we really achieve immortality?

The only thing that is going to keep the human race alive and give immortality to everybody is that we get off the planet as soon as possible and in the largest numbers possible. We need to colonize Mars or Venus, and then get out of our solar system, and spread out as far as we can into the universe. I want to collect a bunch of people, use the Vampyre as a metaphor, live an amazing life, and reject death. 

Father Sebastiaan's Fangshop established in 1995 is located in the East Village NY

Thanks Leonie and Sebastiaan for sharing! Check back here every Thursday for a look inside our investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NY. Stay tuned for details about our upcoming performance on June 28 and 29th!  

INSIDE LOOK: Death Project 2013 Investigation: New York City Ghost Bike Project

We’re doing an exciting investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NYC for our next project this season. Our team is interviewing tons of amazing people with various spiritual, cultural, professional, and personal perspectives. We want to share our investigative process with you, so every Thursday check here for a glimpse into the worlds we’re entering and the people we're interviewing.

Our Associate Artistic Director Ian recently interviewed Jessie Singer, founding member of the New York City Ghost Bike Project, to learn more about bicyclists killed on our streets. Check out that project HERE

 

Here’s a glimpse of what Jessie had to say: 

“A woman named Brandie Bailey was killed on Houston Street and we painted this bike and locked it up on the street and we all looked at each other and said “Holy crap let's never do this again.” Then the next week after that, a block away, a young man named Andrew Ross Morgan was killed on Houston Street again so we built another bike and then we couldn't stop. It became as much a burden as it was, you know, our gift in a way. I've never had anything in my life to force me to think about strangers so much. People you would never meet. To spend so much time with their deaths and therefore their lives and their families, um, which has become a big part of the project. I think it was Brandie Bailey's sister who contacted us and said “I was able to take my parents. My parents came to the city to clean out Brandie's apartment, and I told them that this bike was there. They said before that they would never go to the crash site, that they would never go anywhere near that block ever again.” And this made them feel like they could go there and they could have a moment and put down flowers and spend time with this space where their loved one had died which otherwise would've been kind of sullied. It was dirtied before and now it was a space for them maybe...maybe it was a little reclaimed.”

"Death is something that is out there, sure, but the only thing that matters is what you do when you're living and what I do when I'm living is helping these people that have to deal with death. The process of memorializing is a process of memory but it's a process for the living. This is not a stairway to heaven. It's for the people who are still here who still have work to do, good to do, hopefully, or at least bad to correct. The vast majority of these deaths are preventable. They are caused by someone doing the wrong thing, someone is driving carelessly or irresponsibly or dangerously or drunk or on their phone. That's not an accident, that's an intentional decision that killed somebody. If anything the goal in all of this talking about death is to actually talk about, like, doing better in life...creating that new culture of respecting each other so people aren't dying like this or at the very least if they are dying then people are taking the time to remember that some terrible shit happened on that street corner."

Please donate to the Ghost Bike Project HERE

And join them for their 8th Annual Memorial Ride on April 21st. 

Photos from www.facebook.com/NYCGhostBikes

Share Your Story!

We're excited to announce the launch of a new interview-based project exploring the many aspects of the subject of death, dying, and after-life in New York. Our investigation will include a variety of spiritual, cultural, professional, and personal perceptions about death and dying as a universal human experience. We'll be working on a full-scale production using a large number of the collected interviews.

We are looking for your contribution. Have you had a near death experience and seen the white light? Do you believe you're immortal? Have you worked in hospice or worked closely with the terminally ill? If you deal with death in your profession or if you have a surprising personal story about death, we would love to hear from you! The only requirement is that you live or work here or that your story relates somehow to life (and death) in NYC.

Please send us a brief summary of your story or shoot any questions you might have to projectmanager@thecivilians.org and we'll be in touch about setting up an interview with you. As we are creating a verbatim theater piece, we would record and transcribe the interview; and you can absolutely choose to remain anonymous.

We are looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks so much!

Remember that time we did a cabaret all about death? (If not, take a listen to our three podcast episodes from the performance: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3!)

Meet the R&D: Mei Ann Teo

This post is by R&D Group director, Mei Ann Teo about the piece of investigative theater that she created in China, working with students and members of the community (...civilians, in the vaudevillian sense). For more about her, click HERE!

In the summer of 2012, I accepted an amazing invitation to make a documentary theatre piece in China, hosted by the IFCHINA Documentary Participatory Center and funded by the Asian Cultural council. Steeped in the rich history of Jiangxi province, the seat of the Cultural Revolution where the Long March began, I worked with international artists and translators from Singapore and the U.S. to make theatre with university students and community members with a wide range of age and experience. Together, in a short though intense month, we created a piece entitled Wo Men Zhi Yang Kai Shi: This is How We Begin - documentary theatre made from the fabric of their own life experiences and centered around the education and re-education of Chinese society. Perhaps “This is How We Begin” is synonymous with “This is How We Are Changed”; for in this process I was transformed and renewed.

Process: A breakthrough. The day started with a trust circle with Xiao Tuan Zhang, the leader of the Tea Pickers’ Troupe and the only one of the older performers who stuck with us. “The others are different animals from me”, he said. “They are mahjong animals – but me? I’m a performer.” Still – it’s not easy for him or us, and the truth is that our lives could not be more different. We’ve only read about the hardships he’s been through – he’s lived them. There are oceans of misunderstanding. We’re not sure when he’ll decide the work isn’t relevant to him and leave as well. Until.

Heng Mei chose to perform the moment she found out that her results were one mark away from getting her into university. She sat – completely distraught – staring at the number, as if it could change with her sure will. Actors entered as her friends. She ignored them. Another actor became her scolding mother who offered no compassion. Her head remained bowed. Then Xiao Tuan Zhang entered the scene as her grandfather. He approached her with his smile so gentle, and crouched next to her. He, only educated up to 5th grade, spoke to her in a soft voice that we could barely hear. But it is clear that she heard him as she turned to listen. We find out later that she doesn’t have a grandfather – perhaps this is the first moment she has experienced one. We continue with another’s story, working for about 20 minutes, and he interrupts, bringing it back to Heng Mei’s scene. Clearly it affected him. He tells her, in front of the group, how much he believed her and he’s amazed by what she did. His engagement with the work changes after that –though their life situations are completely different, he also understands utter disappointment and despair. I realize that the world is a better place because this happened. The generation gap is what we must fill to understand our history.

This scene doesn’t end up in the final performance. Many amazing scenes generated through the process of 4 weeks don’t – there’s just too much material. However, everything is in some way there – in the bodies of the performers, in the essence of the scenes. Nothing is wasted or lost.

One of my favorite scenes: The students are sitting for an exam, completely stressed out of their minds, and the examiner transforms into a character in his 60's. He looks at the students’ exams with wonder; he’s only had 5 years of school, and when he was 16, he had to learn farming. Behind him, the students transform into farmers, and he continues to tell us that he never had a chance to go to school, never had a chance to think about what else he could be besides a farmer. Never had the opportunity. He then notices what’s going on behind him and asks the students what they are doing - do they want this for their lives? They, with the toil on their brows, shake their heads. He says, “ Go, take your exams. Do well.” They transform back into students; their farming tools once again desks.

It’s not enough to just tell one story, but to tell many in order to truly understand the breadth of what has happened in a community. Not enough to complain about the education system – not enough to praise it. Not enough to talk about the brutal past, or dream for the brighter future. Progress demands us to investigate it all.

The Galvanizing Moment: I was sitting on stage with the actors – already so proud of them for their performances. The talk-back began, and we were asked the question, “ Why weren’t there any positive portrayals of rural education?” To my great happiness, the cast immediately took him on without any prompting from me. One of them gave the answer that makes documentary theatre bullet proof: “It’s true! We’re not making this up. It’s what they said, it’s what we lived. It’s TRUE.” Others defended the moments that they had in the play – asking him to reconsider his definitions of “positive” and “negative”. Their understanding of the process and the performance was astounding. This was THEIR show, made of THEIR stories, and they knew how to defend it better than anyone.

Another audience member stood up, a university professor who happened to come to a few workshops with us and also was a character in the play. Teacher Soong’s experience and articulation of the pressure of the education system really galvanized their voices. Through his participation he also understood the process from the inside, and through being an audience could experience the performance from the outside. He stood up and told us this: that these 4 weeks in which we created this work was worth more than 10 years of education.

I think about this show often, and of the cast. New memories surface, as they are too many to come all at once. Today, I remember the scene when the boy comes home from school one day to find his entire house reduced to rubble due to an earthquake. He searches around and then collapses, crying. He hears his family’s voice in whispers, saying, “Don’t worry, we are here with you.” I can still hear their voices – the gentle intonations and the care in which they spoke. They carried him then, and they carry me now.

Many thanks to Mei Ann Teo for sharing this experience with us!