An Overview of this year's R&D Group FINDINGS Series

By EllaRose Chary

EllaRose Chary

Today we’re kicking off FINDINGS, a presentation of the new work that has been done in The Civilians’ R & D Group over the course of the 2014-15 season. We have 7 presentations, our most ever. Rather than thinking of these presentations as “final” or even as readings, we consider them more open rehearsals. This is a chance for the writers and directors to invite us in to the process and see where these pieces have ended up after 9 months of investigation. FINDINGS will be happening May 7 – 21 at 138 S. Oxford Street in Brooklyn.

When Steve and I put together the new R & D group at the beginning of the season, we often identify themes across the diverse projects, looking at how these new works will speak to each other over the course of the development process.  The broad conversation that appears to be happening between these new pieces this year has to do with larger questions of community and origin stories. How are we connected to each other, and in turn how do those connections play out in a larger societal framework?

In Caroline V. McGraw’s BELIEVELAND, Carrie – based on the playwright – looks at the relationship of her parents to the talented, but now obscure, poet D. A. Levy, and in doing so reveals a larger narrative about the city of Cleveland and America’s rust belt. Caroline took over the Civilians’ social media pages this week, and she posted photos and primary sources for her research which you can check out here and here.  The presentation will be directed by R & D director Jay Stull. Catch Caroline’s presentation this afternoon (May 7^th) at 2 PM.

Show & Tell

Next up will be Max Vernon’s SHOW AND TELL, a night of adult show and tell set in the hours before the sun explodes. Perhaps the opposite of an origin story, this piece still grapples with questions of human connection in light of much larger social and environmental distress. Max’s songs have been a regular presence in The Civilians’ Let Me Ascertain You Cabaret series in recent years and I’m excited that we’re now getting to look at one of his full pieces. We’re excited to have Civilians Associate Artist and former R & D Group member Sam Pinkleton back to direct. This presentation will be Friday, May 8 at 7 PM.

Winter Miller’s SPARE RIB is one of our more experimental pieces this year and digs into the topic of abortion. The piece has cross cultural and historical elements that wind through a stream of consciousness narrative, that speaks to both community and origin. Directed by R & D Group director Alex Keegan, Winter will present her work on May 11 at 2:00 PM.

Bull's Hollow flag

Associate Artists Donnetta Lavinia Gray’s LAID TO REST focuses on the mother of a son killed by police violence after years have past an the cameras are gone, directed by R & D director Ilana Becker, it will be presented on May 18 at 7:30 PM. Followed on May 19 by Rob Handel and Kamala Sankaram’s THE PRIVACY SHOW also directed by Jay Stull, an interactive musical project that will make you think twice about your digital and personal security. May 20  at 7:30 PM will bring us to BULL’S HOLLOW PART 1: THE FOUR FATHERS, our most direct origin story, literally set in the belly of the beast (a whale named Burton), developed this year by Jaclyn Backhaus, Mike Brun and Andrew Neisler…this is the first of a 3 part trilogy.  Finally, on May 21 at 2 PM Krista Knight will take us to the San Francisco Airport Hyatt with KIRK AT THE SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT HYATT, using primary source recordings and personal experience, Krista tells the story of her father Kirk Knight, living beyond his means at the Hyatt, expecting to die, any day, and having hung on for 29 years and counting.

You can read more about the shows and get the full schedule and locations on the R and D page of The Civilians website here.

After many months of research and development, we’re excited to share these FINDINGS. If you are a project creator or director, applications for next season’s group are open, but remember they are due June 15. 

Meet the R&D: Tommy Smith

Tommy Smith, an artist in this year's R&D group, blogs about his decision to delay development of his NFL project and shares his short play based on his investigation.

Sometimes plays don’t work out.

I had been developing a piece called NFL with Woodshed Collective's Teddy Bergman via The Civilians R&D Group. It was going to be a document-based play about football players who go haywire and murder their loved ones. After working on the draft for a couple months, I found out that Ridley Scott is planning a movie about the same subject. Then Berkeley Rep announced their season with a play about the same subject. Instead of pulling a Dante's Peak, Teddy and I decided to shelve developing the project until it seems relevant to dust it off.

NFL would have been presented during the R&D Reading Series, May 21-30. In lieu of this, please read this short play, The Death of Justin Strzelczyk, based on a section of NFL, about the demise of Steelers' player Justin Strzelczyk.

Thanks for sharing, Tommy. For other posts about our R&D Group artists, please click HERE!

Meet The R&D: Maggie-Kate Coleman

Maggie-Kate Coleman, an artist in this year's R&D group, shares her unique developmental process.

Hello, my name is Maggie-Kate and I am a musical theatre writer.  There.  I said it. I’m still not sure how this happened.  And I’m not sure that I’ll ever be totally comfortable calling myself that.  Usually I call myself a playwright - not untrue, but sort of a lie of omission, because, hey I write a lot of lyrics too. Sometimes I opt for the all-encompassing and slightly vague “writer” and sometimes, depending on my motives, generalize even more and refer to myself simply as a “theatre artist.”  The truth is that I am just profoundly uncomfortable with people singing at me. Especially if they happen to be singing about their feelings. It’s just bizarre.  Am I right?  And singing and dancing?  Forget it. 

But I have written musicals in the past, and I am currently writing a musical in collaboration with composer Erato A. Kremmyda and Director/Choreographer Sam Pinkleton. And I assume that I will continue to write musicals well into the future. Sam once described us as a team of folks who all allegedly work in musical theatre by trade but tend to have a difficult relationship with the form and a lot of its output.  We’re not allowed to complain about it if we’re not working to change it, however, and aiming to make something as messy, huge, and impossible as this project seems like a good start. 

Why would three people who are somewhat uncomfortable with musicals want to write a musical together?  Well, first of all, the fact that musicals are bizarre and unnatural by nature gives you a lot of freedom as a creator. People are singing, so we’ve already tossed any semblance of realism out the window. So, if for example, you want to create a piece of theatre that is purportedly about Marie Curie and her life and work but probably actually about America’s long and troubled relationship with kitsch and terror in the post-nuclear era, and, if for example, you want to set it in an abandoned amusement park with attractions exploring the devastating (though indirect) repercussions of her work, specifically the five occasions post-Manhattan project when life has been threatened on a wide-scale by atomic devices (the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the outdoor testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada and the South Pacific from 1945-1980, the reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, the reactor explosion at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and the multiple reactor failures at Fukushima in Japan in 2011) – if that’s what you want to do, then it seems pretty obvious to us that a musical is the way to go. Plus, we need each other.  We can’t create this monstrosity alone.  We’re a team of folks who sometimes if we’re honest about it are really just writing/composing/directing/choreographing because it gives us a legitimate reason to delve into a giant, messy pile of research, ask questions, and see what it’s all about. 

So what’s our process?  What we don’t do is sit down and make an outline of events and actions and say, this is the song moment where Marie discovers radium and this is the love ballad between Marie and Pierre.  We do a lot of research, we ask a lot of questions, we make a lot of lists, mostly on large sheets of butcher paper with sharpie.  Like this one:  

I also sometimes make collages.  This is largely a stalling tactic that keeps my hands busy and makes me feel productive when I don’t know what to write. It’s also a way of avoiding writer’s block, which is mostly about being afraid to write bad stuff. Since I am in no way a visual artist, I don’t have the same qualms about making bad collages that I might when I go to the dark place and worry about making bad writing and/or bad theatre.  Plus it’s a helpful way for me to hone in on how the piece feels or should feel.  Tone is super hard to describe in words, and it’s easier to show what it’s supposed to feel like than describe it.  Or at least that’s what I tell myself to justify the time spent making collages instead of writing. 

As a team of three, we give ourselves a lot of assignments in order to generate a giant pile of source material that is ours, and not dry, academic or biopic in nature.  We use a random number generator to determine who is doing what in order to break down the roles of writer, composer, and director/choreographer so that we all share ownership of the piece equally.  Here are some of the early assignments:

1. Make a list of what Marie would cook during the day.

2. Design some radiation related tattoos.

4. Find the most boring piece of Curie-Related writing – 1 page max

5. Find Pierre and Marie’s favorite (post 1980s) dance song.

6. Build a giant Pierre or Marie using 10 people (like Voltron or Lion King Dad Face).

7. Make a list of 50 things that wash up on the shores of distant lands after Tsunami.

8. Come up with a game for Russian Children to play in a playground after Chernobyl.

9. Write a scene in which Godzilla comes to dinner at Marie and Pierre’s house in the style of kitchen sink American realism.

10.Write the worst version of a love scene between Pierre and Marie Curie

11. Come up with a game for Russian Children to play in a playground after Chernobyl.

12. Explain the history of French music in 1 page or less.  Do NOT research first.

13. What time of the day would Marie and Pierre have sex and where?

14. Make a list of actual celebrity biography titles.

15. Make a video of yourself listing as many elements from the periodic table as you can recall.  Do Not Cheat.

What comes of all this?  A lot of stuff that I’m definitely not going to share with you under any circumstances (except for #7 which you’ve seen above).  But it led us to think about a lot of things we might not have thought about if we just sat down and wrote an Opening Number with capital letters and an “I want” song. For example, it led us to an image of a roller coaster submerged off the coast of New Jersey post-Sandy, which led us to the Golden Age of theme parks in America, which led us to think about how American culture is still so saturated with the colorful, kitschy images of the Atomic era that we often dismiss the reality that we (humans, earthlings) have put ourselves in the almost incomprehensible position of trying to find a way to mitigate the risk of living in a world we are undeniably turning into an apocalyptic wasteland, which led us to wonder who might be the radioactive superhero we can turn to save us from the horror we’ve created?  Is it Marie Curie? With jazz hands?

Thanks for sharing, Maggie-Kate. For other posts about our R&D Group artists, please click HERE!

Meet the R&D: Sean Cunningham

Sean Cunningham, an artist in this year's R&D group, blogs about his recent trips to Peru, and shares his thoughts on "Making Americans Drink Like Peruvians."

I enjoy drinking. Indeed, with composer extraordinaire Michael Friedman I once wrote a song called "I Enjoy Drinking" for the show God Hates the Irish. (The song was ironic... but not that ironic, if you catch my drift.) So when I get a chance to experience a new culture and learn about international marketing while my hosts not only allow but actually encourage me to have another drink and then a few more after that, I'm there.

In 2013 I went to Peru twice. The first visit was with my then-girlfriend and some mutual friends. We visited Peru's current capital, Lima, before heading to its capital during the time of the Inca, Cuzco, and spent four days hiking the Inca Trail to reach the ruins at Machu Picchu. Click HERE for a recap of the lessons learned on that journey. 

It was something of a transformative experience for me, both because I was concerned enough about being in shape for the Trail that I started jogging (inexplicably, I continue to do so to this day) and, far more importantly, it was the first time I encountered Pisco.

Pisco is a brandy made from grapes beloved in Peru and in Chile, inspiring an epic rivalry over which nation is its true birthplace: since I’ve gone to Peru twice and only visited an airport in Chile, I say Peru. The most famous cocktail is the Pisco Sour, consisting of lime juice, simple syrup, egg white, ice, and Angostura bitters. There are assorted variations, such as the Coca Sour, which I favor because of the extra touch of bitterness. (Sadly, the U.S. bans coca for its connections to cocaine even in this decidedly non-Tony Montana-esque form, meaning one of the minor casualties of the war on drugs is my ability to get my pisco cocktail of choice.)

At this point I should note that, as someone who’s written for an odd mix of publications ranging from Maxim to The Knot, I have wound up on a diverse collection of PR lists (and wound up friends with other people on even more wide-ranging lists), with the result I periodically receive offers to fly away somewhere utterly unexpected for a bit.

And that is why I was pleasantly surprised when, not long after my return, I received an invite to a press trip organized by Pisco Portón. 

This time Pisco wouldn’t just be an aspect of the trip: it would be the focus. That was particularly appealing to me because on my first trek I acquired a taste for drinking Pisco straight, which requires a better class of Pisco. Portón was one of those Piscos that caught my eye -- seriously, it is an impressively cool bottle -- but for the most part it remained defiantly out of my price range. Click here for some quick info about the brand.

Throw in that the journey would take me to a part of Peru I’d yet to visit (in the Ica Region along the southwest coast), and I quickly signed on.

I again flew into Lima before going south to the coastal town of Paracas and finally reaching the Hacienda La Caravedo. Founded in 1684, the Hacienda is the oldest distillery in the Americas (every bottle of Portón pays tribute to it), and this was where I had the chance to chat with Johnny Schuler/consume a huge amount of really choice Pisco.

Johnny -- @piscojohnny -- has been a tireless champion of Pisco for decades, as well as a restaurateur and, as one article in Peru This Week noted, a general “Renaissance man.” (After an American who made a fortune in Peru and married a Peruvian woman purchased Portón, he had the company approach Johnny to see if he would sign on with them. By Johnny’s account, he said he would do it… if his new boss immediately invested an eight-figure sum in the company. The check was written and Portón acquired a master distiller.)

Johnny and I wound up discussing the long-term objectives of Portón: most notably, they want to crack the American market. (This goal is shared by a handful of other Pisco makers.) Indeed, they seek to gain a large enough wedge in the market so that, instead of seeking gin or vodka or another clear liquor, there will come a day when an American can walk into a corner bar and ask, "Do you have Pisco?" and it won’t be strange at all.

(Ideally, they’ll then ask for Portón.) 

Johnny said there would be differences between the American and Peruvian markets, starting with the obvious fact that everyone in Peru knows what Pisco is -- the Pisco Sour is the national drink -- and virtually no one in the U.S.A. has a clue.

Beyond this, since Pisco usually is served as an ingredient in a cocktail in Peru, Peruvian bars often give in to the temptation faced by speakeasies all over the globe: get the cheapest brand possible, based on the theory the other ingredients will hide the low cost/quality.

An example of a "less" upscale Pisco brand

Finally, Peru is a nation where only a small percentage of the population has the disposal income necessary to indulge in top-shelf liquors: the per capita income is $6,796, compared to $11,340 for its neighbor Brazil or $51,749 for the United States.

The U.S. Pisco approach is different.

To crack the American market, the initial outreach would be aimed at tastemakers in select cities as something for the sophisticated and adventurous palette. (Indeed, ideally it would be taken straight so people could learn to appreciate and enjoy the nuances, just as they do with scotch.)

It would also be put forward as a decidedly upscale product, which is why a press release for “Portón Pisco” described it as an “ultra-premium brand made specifically for the U.S. market.”

And thus America would get to experience the most Peruvian of beverages…only not in the most Peruvian of forms.

I’ve been exploring the question: can Pisco manage this conquest? It’s certainly established a foothold with me personally. I even brought some back and shared a bottle with my coworkers, which they enjoyed far more than they expected.

That said, to the best of my knowledge none have consumed any since then, despite the fact we’re one of the rare American offices located within a block of a Peruvian restaurant. (I’ll be at your sensibly priced Happy Hour again soon enough, Raymi.)

And yet…

I still remember as a 7^th-grader in Carson City, Nevada having a teacher bring in this exotic treat called “sushi” -- “Come on, Mrs. Pown, we know it’s not really raw fish” -- and being one of the few students crazy enough to eat it. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I didn't mind the taste, but I also assumed it was something I wouldn't experience again unless I unexpectedly found myself in Tokyo.

Now it’s my comfort food.

I have no idea if Peru will equal Japan’s achievement and a significant number of Americans will reach the point where, after a tough day, they get home and instinctively reach for the Pisco bottle, but the attempts of Pisco Portón and other Pisco makers to make that a reality are oddly inspiring to me.

Maybe they’ll be a huge success, and Portón will find itself with the equivalent of an iPhone in liquid form.

Maybe it won’t ever quite mesh, and it will turn out to be a drinkable DeLorean.

Maybe America will change it into something so heavily modified for our tastes it will be rendered unrecognizable by the nation that originated it.

And for me, the challenge is locating the core to all this so it isn’t just an accumulation of data: I’ve increasingly found I’m combining aspects of my two trips together, so that while the story is about the challenge of taking something central to one culture and trying to make it palatable to another culture all the while turning a profit (which I learned about on my second visit), the action takes place on the hike to Machu Picchu (which occurred on my first).

Machu Picchu was a magnificent experience, but also at times a grueling one (and a humbling one, particularly watching the porters literally sprint up the mountain ahead of us to set up the base camp before we arrived), and I’ve found there’s something nice about having people talk about matters of finance and national identity while what they’re really thinking is, Holy shit do my knees hurt…

Finally, all this is shaped by the fact that on my first visit I was in a relationship with one of my traveling companions, on my second I was traveling alone (and we were essentially separated) and now I look back on all this knowing that we’ve gone our different ways, giving the whole thing a pleasantly bittersweet quality, which I tend to enjoy in theater (if not my personal life: nothing but unadulterated sweetness for my personal life, please).

Whatever the future holds for Pisco, it’s a fascinating journey and I remain appreciative of Portón for letting me take a few of the steps with them, as well as to my ex for booking a trip to Peru in the first place.

I’ll be at the bar if you need me.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Sean. For other posts about our R&D Group artists, please click HERE!

Meet the R&D: Jeanine Oleson

Jeanine Oleson, an artist in this year's R&D group, shares the process of her most recent investigative performance project. 

It’s been so great to be an R&D fellow in the past few months. I’ve learned a lot and admired my current fellows processes and work. I’ve felt like a bit of an outlier as a visual artist who also makes performance work, but I think I’m soaking up some of the craft that is so important to theater. I’m working on an experimental opera that will be performed in May at the New Museum.

A poster I made while looking for interview subjects

At first, the performance seemed like it would be partially constructed from interviews with cultural connoisseurs who have particular interest in their motivations, and then move this through a story about care for the external world and conditions of life. I spent time finding, interviewing and thinking about people who have no professionalized motivation and gain for their enthusiasm, but hold vast amounts of knowledge and love. (I’m still looking for people, so email if you know of anyone or ARE one of these people: msjeanineoleson@gmail.com)

While I love this idea, I have come to realize (yet again) that this isn’t exactly how I work. I love the idea of enthusiasm for external objects as a queer lineage and quasi-Marxist discourse against the subject’s role on Capitalist imperatives, but this is not the actual way I can tell this story.  Instead, I have a huge pre-occupation with staging, objects used in performance to mimic or change the body, and found text. So I will write this blog post with videos, images, and references to my performance in an excited attempt to communicate what I’m excited about.

I. CONNOISSEURSHIP

I began thinking about this idea after seeing a documentary about Fran Lebowitz a few years ago. She was talking about AIDS and the effect it had on cultural projects like the opera, dance, and music in New York. I don’t remember exactly what she said but the general sense was about how the amount of erudite gay men who died in the 1980s gouged the engaged audience that existed to remember and in some sense, hold the works of culture in an unofficial archive of their memory. I love that this was said by Lebowitz–it codifies the lives of people lost, and reminds me that culture is nothing without an audience that creates and archives with their attention and care.

        

            Lebowitz on our current audiences and the blind art collector. 

From these initial ideas about the interviews folding neatly into a script, my actual process has left me to examine how to move from paper to staging in ways that can engage the audiences I am considering.

One of the people I interviewed, Joe, an avid opera fan, explained how he first came to love singing. It was Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso – he said he went into the theater a child and came out a lover of the human voice. When I asked how it really affected him, he made a zone over his body from neck to mid-thigh and said, “here.”

I’m left to consider how to create a sonic space that can re-activate this zone for Joe!

Werner Schroeter was a queer, underground German filmmaker who was driven to make work based at least partially on his love and care for opera. His films are dense, visually amazing, and packed with so much detail and research, but become elegiac and absurd. I think of him as being somewhere between Jack Smith, Luis Buñuel, Antonin Artaud and Werner Herzog. In The Death of Maria Malibran, a performance-driven, over the top dramatic meditation on the tragic life of the 19^th century opera diva opens into many more visual and aural spaces. Schroeter’s later film, Love’s Debris, brings together a group of well-known opera singers and actresses in a French villa for a documentary under the premise of what love means to each of them. Ultimately the film is about Schroeter’s love for each of them. It’s really touching to see him literally meeting and directing these objects of great love and obsession. There’s a scene where Anita Cerquetti arrives to the villa and he literally falls at her feet with joy and gratitude. Talk about a connoisseur.

Der Tod der Maria Malibran by Werner Schroeter (sorry, I could only find w/o subtitles)

II. HEARING/SAYING

Vocal chords

I’m interested in ‘voice’ as conveyor of meaning, subjective agency and musicality; and narratives like apocalypse, ethics, and a kind of epic intersectionality between these parts. I’m also interested in what forms sound and light emit from to create the staging and meanings, but am returned to the previous section’s idea of how what’s heard can alter someone. How can it alter them? Through the ecstasy of music and the human voice like in the case of Joe and Werner Schroeter? Also through hearing a truth that alters someone’s sense of the world and their place and role in it?

I’ve been trying to critically connect some of these ideas to Photo Requests from Solitary, a project I’ve been working on where we invite people, many who have been incarcerated in isolation for years, to request a photograph of anything in the world, real or imagined. We are working to match responses to the requests, asking artists/photographers to provide images for the written prompts. Through making images from someone’s voice and desire, an audience is willing and able to understand the ethical dimensions of individuals affected by this administrative violence of the State. It hopefully leads to an organic advocacy against this all too common practice. This is a project with Parsons The New School for Design (where I teach), Solitary Watch and Tamms Year Ten that is currently spreading to New York and California after it’s inception in Illinois’ notorious Tamms supermax that was closed at the beginning of this year. These requests and images are meant to provide advocacy and outreach for the organizations working to end solitary confinement by informing and creating an audience of dissent against this issue as well as all of the contingent issues of mass incarceration, ethical relations of citizens to the State, racial inequity, poverty, policy, etc.

Democracy Now interview with Anthony Graves on solitary confinement

This extension beyond genre and traditional discipline is something that everyone in the Civilian’s R & D group is grappling with. Also in the art world where I’m usually situated, there is much discussion of engagement with social issues, but how is that actually happening? Who are we engaging and what do we want from these audiences?  It doesn’t always match up, and while I’m not saying my project will, I am at least interested to try.

III. LOOKING

In thinking through my process for the piece I’m developing, I realize part of it started with a trip and set of questions for a landscape. In June 2010, I was in Longyearbyen, Svalbard which is an Arctic archipelago north of Norway. It was a long trip to an island where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated. I had originally thought of this as a symbol of institutional response to the perceived threat of an "end time" but through further research before my trip and interviews while I was there, I came to realize that it’s a completely flawed plan to actually provide seeds in a catastrophic situation, and paradoxically, the collection of seeds by an NGO funded largely by seed engineering companies is fraught with ethical issues. Also, while I was there, Norway and Russia signed treaties that basically allow the first large-scale off-shore oil drilling to begin, which is another important strategic part of this site. So, this new knowledge largely became my interest. Alongside the larger ethical issues of science, I began to see the landscape as not really yielding knowledge about the complexities of site. I found that my original ideas for working in this location weren’t that effective, so I adapted. I spent a lot of time meeting and talking with people on the island, who worked in the tourist industry, also scientists, and students at UNIS, the small research university. I also walked for miles every day (but was careful to avoid polar bears). I ended up also thinking about light and energy a lot with the sun perpetually overhead which ended up in later, related photographic work and even in the eye/light object for the project I’m currently developing (see below). I wrote a great deal and took a lot of photographs, none quite like what I thought I’d take in preparation, but that is what happens in experiencing something. It was only through actually going to Svalbard that I was able to have the complex thoughts and reactions as a means of sorting out ideas about apocalyptic thought, and connected neoliberal policies of assistance. What does it mean that seed companies are replacing heritage seeds with GMO crops is now sponsoring and storing those displaced seeds in a sealed vault?

In this image, you see the mountain that the Global Seed Vault is in, and on top is a series of satellites in an international security project.

 

 Image of Svalbard

For this piece, I’m building a set that is a mountain and cave, reversible, for use in the two-act experimental opera. I’m thinking of this as an internal and external space and working with a lot of paradoxical meanings like exploration/vulnerability, masculine/feminine, fiction/reality, epic/mundane, progress/prehistory, far/near sight. The mountain is based on the image above, and the cave is a re-imagining of Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Image representing Plato’s Republic

In Alain Badiou’s writing about Plato’s cave, it is called “the situation,” or maybe another way of saying a world formed by all representation as shadows on a wall. Within it, opinions are formed as lower case truths that are packaged into neat boxes of knowledge. It’s only when an ‘event’ or rupture occurs that a Truth or momentary glimpse at the form in light. This is a notion of the Real. What can create this type of fissure? What highly questionable notion of T/truth? I’m proposing the human voice is the wedge into this fissure, the objects in this piece represent the paradoxical nature of knowledge and that there are possibilities for World-making that extend beyond hierarchical traditions of narrative. (Wish me luck on this)

Paradoxes of Neoliberalism

IV.  AND MORE OBJECTS

Language doesn’t come first in shaping this work–space and objects become far more important in dictating the outcomes. It feels off to say objects form space, but they make the only sense of how and why I would occupy any time. Not to dismiss what I just said, I am much more interested in language that’s spoken and sung than in written words. I feel like a fraud when I write my “thoughts.” (Oh, irony!)

Other objects I’m building are an inversion of bodily function: an ear that is a brass instrument and an eye that projects light. I’m currently working with Chuck at The Brass Lab in what is turning out to be a can of exciting worms.

                  

Maynard Ferguson on the horn

Eye As a Screen

V. “OH, THESE TIMES!”

In this image, I wanted to enact how banal it is to recognize terrible things happening and keep living, so I used my body in an obvious way to “black out” a portion of the landscape on Svalbard. I had no words for what I felt, only that creeping revelation of everything terrible being revealed by what’s been sitting in front of me for a while. I am now trying to find those words and reactions, and hope this piece can in some way work to bring some light to specific stories and the affect it can have on an audience.

Michelle Alexander on her experience of writing The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Diamanda Galas asks if you were a witness in Plague Mass

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

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

Meet our 2013-14 R&D Group

Here's a post from our R&D Group Coordinator, EllaRose Chary introducing the new 2013-14 R&D Group. 

The Civilians 2013-14 R and D Group is up and running. We have our largest group ever this year, and the lines between the traditional roles of writer and director have started to blur with this unique group. In previous years, most of our writers and directors have come to the group separately, getting paired up for the reading series later in the season. This year, half of our projects are being created by collaborative teams of writers, directors and project creators from day one.

This year’s artists are a mix of familiar Civilians faces and new folks we’re excited to get to know. Associate Artist Robbie Sublett joins the group as a writer with his interview based project East 4^th Street, which looks into a mysterious death in the small Texas town he was raised in. Director/choreographer Sam Pinkleton joins the group fresh off of choreographing The Civilians commissioned hit MR. BURNS at Playwrights Horizons. He is teaming up with writer Maggie-Kate Coleman and composer Erato A. Kremmyda to develop a multidisciplinary musical theater project anchored by the character of Marie Curie that explores the forces of radiation and love. Writer Sean E. Cunningham, a collaborator of Civilians Associate Artist and founding member Michael Friedman, is going to be working on a new play that investigates how Peruvian companies are attempting popularize the liquor pisco in the United States market. Tommy Smith, who has worked with Artistic Director Steve Cosson in the past, comes to the group with his collaborator, director Teddy Bergman. They will be working on a piece about NFL players who move from being sportsmen to criminals, and the possible connections between them. Mary Kathryn Nagle will be working on a play about climate change and community (a favorite Civilians topic), and Riti Sachdeva will be looking into the ways that racism, misogyny, economics and violence trigger symptoms and effect recovery of mental disorders.

We’re also excited about the R and D group’s first foray into more experimental projects with the inclusion of interdisciplinary artist Jeanine Oleson, who will be working on a performance and exhibition about connoisseurship in a neoliberal culture increasingly alienated from affective enthusiasm. Experimental theater artists Juliana Francis-Kelly and Tony Torn also join the group to work on a more traditionally structured theater  piece called THE REENACTORS that is a darkly comic exploration of stories in art – who gets to tell them? Why are they important? How do they get told?

We have 3 additional directors joining the group, who will attend meetings and participate in the dramaturgical process for all of the pieces. They each will direct one of the projects in the reading series in May. Morgan Gould, Melissa Crespo, and Michael Liebenluft all come to us with varied experience with and training in investigative theater. However, their work shares the common themes of questioning and collaboration that are vital to Civilians’ style projects. We know that they will be dynamic and instructive voices in the room over the next year.

As Steve and I went through the nearly 150 R and D Group applications this year, we were struck by the variety and creativity of the proposals. Within this spectrum of ideas, we found a theme emerging between the projects that we were drawn to. These 8 pieces, while vast in scope and diverse in investigative method, are linked in that they each ask fundamental questions about the relationship between politics and the arts. Whether it’s directly questioning this relationship, making art rooted in political questions, or examining the machinations behind drinking culture and professional sports, all of these projects advance theater as an engine of artistic and social innovation.

I can’t wait to see how our talented artists tackle this complex and exciting subject matter over the next nine months. Keep an eye on the Civilians blog for our monthly R and D posts where you’ll get to hear directly from the writers about their projects and other investigations they’re working on. Also, check out their full bios and project descriptions HERE.