Lesbians, Gurdjieff, in a garage

Last week I attended a little performance in the garage of Arwen Wilder and Heidi Eckwall's house. A work in progress, it was conceived by Arwen and co-created by Emily Zimmer and Arwen and Heidi's daughter, Ea (I'm not sure how old she is- maybe 4?) The topic for the play centered on a group of queer women- artists, writers, intellectuals, actresses- who were all weirdly obsessed by the guru Gurdjieff. The night I saw it Corrie Zoll was also in it, although there were other performers on different nights.

I first heard about Gurdjieff maybe 10 years ago when I knew a guy who was really into the teachings- he'd be on these Gurdjieff forums all the time and even went to a conference. Gurdjeff's main thing was that everyone was asleep, and he was all about being more aware of everything you do. He had several schools at various times and one of them was with a group of lesbian women who, at least according to one author, called themselves "the rope". You can read more about the group of women here.

Arwen played the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, a Dadist and all-around eccentric who wore crazy outfits and allegedly gave Duchamp the urinal he used for his famous piece. Emily played an American writer who belonged to the group (unfortunately I can't remember the name- apparently she was famous enough to have a feminist bookstore named after her, which she resented).

When I asked Arwen how she came upon the topic, she said she was fascinated by this idea of this group of brilliant, strong women under the tutelage of this rather authoritarian man who was constantly insulting them and calling them idiots. Today I was doing a little google searching about the women, and it turns out that Margeret Anderson, who along with along with her lover of one time Jane Heap, formed The Little Review, which incidentally was the first magazine to serialize Ulysses by James Joyce.

Also in the piece was a performance of Macbeth, performed by Ea and Emily. Arwen said the idea for that is that she is fascinated watching her daughter "play" and how that activity is so different that "acting", because when Ea plays, she believes what she is doing 100 percent. Apparently in Gurdjieff's teachings he talked about performance not as theatre really, but as a way of being.

There was also a section where Ea interviewed Emily about her character, which was very delightful. There have been several living room performances in Arwen and Heidi's living room, and there is always an interview section, which sometimes are short but can also go on and on forever, depending on Ea's mood.

Anyway I really enjoyed the performance. I hope that they continue working on it- I'd love to see what becomes of the ideas.

Techiti Tech

Oh my goodness The Keys Experiment opens at Artery 2010 in one week. Ah! Getting a bit nervous to say the least. Trying to keep cool about it. I had a good meeting today with Dixie Treichel at The Soap Factory working on the sound design. There were like a million people there working on their Artery pieces, which is great. There's this amazing energy in that space. Fiona MacNeill, the curator, says this year has an A List of artists, and she's not wrong. I'm honored to share the bill with the likes of Annie Rollins, Jaime Carrera, and Kats Kats D Fukasawa, who I met for the first time today, and many other very talented artists. I kind of think of Artery as the fringe alternative. Like the Fringe Festival, there's a sense of the eclectic, but I think audience members are more guaranteed to see some performance that is really pushing the boundaries in terms of form and content (I speak of my fellow artists, not myself- I obviously can't be the judge of whether what I'm doing is worth seeing or not).

I've decided, as I did when I did the show at the Red Eye, to err on the side of simplicity. I've decided against the video projection idea, even though I have images and archive footage to use, because I would rather spend my energy working on the movement and text, and choreographing the piece in the very unique space (I'm performing in the Video rooms toward the back of the gallery). Dixie brought me some sound mixes for one of the new scenes, which I'm really excited about although she hasn't quite finished with it yet. The new movement sequence is the largest new section, although there are also a few new monologues (one by a girlfriend of one of the Conscientious Objectors, and a couple of new Ancel Keys monologues). There are a couple of aspects of the space that are challenging- probably the main difficulty being that there are limited outlets and we can't hang the sound speakers. But I trust Dixie completely and I think she has the thing figured out (in all tech matters I must defer decisions to my collaborators who actually know what they are talking about). Another difficulty is finding the time to rehearse. While the nice thing about doing a one woman show is that I don't have to coordinate schedules with other actors, I have found it's stressful to coordinate rehearsal times with my team of artists helping me (director, choreographer, and sound designer) plus the Soap isn't always available, and often there is a lot of commotion going on.) I think we've nailed some times down to meet in there, though, so hopefully I'll feel a bit better once we hammer out the details of how I'm going to do this thing.

Soap, Camp and Bedlam

Well last week I kind of got back to the real world following my month-long hiatus during the World Cup. It's been a brutal wake up call to reality, but I managed to get some writing done and work on my show.

Here's a piece I wrote for MN Artists about The Mystery of Irma Vep. I decided that since I had the time, I wanted to instead of just writing a review go a little bit more in depth about the style of the piece. I look at the Camp Style, and how the play exemplifies the goofiness of the genre while at the same time offers layers of deeper meaning through its many literary and cultural references.

While I was working on the MN Artists piece, I was greatly saddened to learn that Bedlam has been given notice to move from their current space. The Star Tribune broke the story, and I then I spent last Thursday and Friday morning madly completing an article containing little bit of the backstory of Bedlam's history, and tried to write also about the situation right now. I'm really sad to be losing one of my favorite venues in town to see shows and hang out (I would argue the building has the best deck for having a drink in summer), but hopefully the theater itself will survive and keep its multifaceted programming.

In the meantime, work continues with my one-woman-show, the Keys Experiment, which I'll be performing at the Soap Factory on July 30. I'm very grateful for having had the experience workshopping the piece at Red Eye, and I've been working lately on adding a few scenes. I met with my sound designer Dixie Treichel on Saturday and she's concocting a new soundscape for a movement section I'm going to work on this week. Also, there's an article in Lavender Magazine about the show, written by John Townsend, which I really appreciate him writing.

Andy Warhol the Catholic

So I recently finished a fantastic book by Eleanor Heartney called Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art. In it, she talks about some of the most controversial contemporary artists being either Catholics themselves or at least highly influenced by Catholicism. It's a fascinating read, and Heartney's style is very conversational and accessible.

One of the things I learned from the book is that Andy Warhol was a practicing Catholic. Heartney makes the argument that indeed not only was he Catholic, but his faith predominated his work if you look at it closely. He was obsessed with death, according to Heartney, as evidenced by his Death and Disaster paintings, and his "transormation of ordinatry objects with icons with multiple resonances."

Most of all, Heartney writes that Warhol's Catholic tendicies are seen in his exploration of the conflict between the Church's official teachings and Cathoicism's subliminal messages

Case in point- see the dyptich Last Supper/Be Somebody with a Body for a clear image of what she's talking about.

Heartney notes that Warhol, though he went to church several times a week, never went to confession or took communion. As a gay man, Warhol was both censured in his church, but was also provided a whole host (no pun intended) of images depicting homoerotic and male desire. The Catholic Church, she writes, while it officialy abhors homosexuality, contains in its history of art and literature a series of conflicts "that emerge in an outlaw sensibility and sensuality". Thus, in the Dyptich linked to above, Warhol sexualizes the Christ figure.

The chapter made me want to reexamine the Warhol pieces I'm familiar with, and look at some new ones. It definitely got me thinking about his art in a new way.

The Keys Experiment

Well, I performed The Keys Experiment at the Red Eye last weekend. I think it went pretty well. It ended up being a lot simpler than I intended, but I think it did resonate with people, from the feedback that I got. For the transitions between the characters, I found that if I took a pause and moved into the next person, I didn't need anything too clever to make the audience understand it was the next scene. We ended up not using any blackouts at all.

One thing that quite a few people said to me is that they were very drawn to the scenes that weren't just monologues. Barbra called them the "treated" scenes. For instance, when I eat my hands, or in my "assembly line" scene where I show time lapsing by repeating actions that the volunteers went through, warping the movements as the voiceover got continually more abstract.

When I do the piece at the Soap Factory next month, I'm hoping to add another movement sequence- this time focusing on what happens to the body in a state of starvation. I'll have to do some exploring about what that means. I also want to add another Keys monologue, speaking with wife toward the end of the experiment, and I want to do the scene which i didn't have time to do for the Redeye between one of the CO's and his girlfriend (played by a puppet). So that is quite a bit of work in less than two months but I'm pretty excited about it. I think three new scenes is a reasonable goal. I'd also like to add video, but that would be icing on the cake at this point- and i'm not positive it would work.

Sonnets

Last night I went and checked out The Complete Sonnets Festival, put on by the newly formed Classical Actors Ensemble at Intermedia Arts. The performance I saw was the second half of the two-part festival showcasing all 154 of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Filled with cameos from local favorite performers such as Jennifer Baldwin Peden, Barbra Berlovitz, Bruce A. Young, Sasha Andreev, Karla Grotting, Joe Chvala and Bain Boehlke, the performance was intended to be a fundraiser for the company, although unfortunately the night I went to see the show the house was only moderately attended.

At two and a half hours, the evening ran a little long, although there were definitely some gems. Jennifer Baldwin Peden's lovely sung performance of Sonnet #43 and Sasha Andreev's sung performance of Sonnet #27, (both directed by John Miller-Stephany and composed by Andrew Cooke) were among my favorite moments of the evening. Also, Joe Chvala and Karla Grotting danced a sweet interpretation of Sonnet #60.

For the most part, though, I preferred the performances of sonnets that weren't too "acted". In a number of scenes, sonnets were strung together and turned into a script of sorts. I didn't like these scenes as much because I felt that first of all I wasn't able to really listen to the words of the poem because I was too busy following the action of the scene, and also I felt that in a number of instances the words were misinterpreted in order to fit the put-upon circumstances of the scene.

In fact, by far the most rewarding performance was that of Bain Boehlke, who went on at the very end and just sat in a chair and read his sonnet. More than any of the other versions, Boehlke made me hear the words of the poem, and allowed me to appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare's language.

Trip to the University Archives

Well, I finally made it over to the University Archives to research for The Keys Experiment play. There was much new information that wasn't available to me online or in the books I've read so far. The librarians there were extremely helpful, and nice. They also seemed interested in my play, and want to come see it. Hooray.

Watching the footage from the experiment was extremely helpful, although it is so frustrating that I have limited movement right now. Some of the experiments that the CO's had to go through are such excellent fodder for intesting movement choices. Ah well, I go back into rehearsal tomorrow, so we'll see what I can incorporate.

I'm also thinking of using the video footage itself- perhaps not for the Redeye version, but at a later date. I need to find a video artist to collaborate with who will be able to help me.

Here's the link to find out more information about Redeye Theatre, where I'll be presenting 15 minutes of the solo performance on June 3-6.