september 15 //
Tenement street's john macdonald
This week, the Incubator's Producing Assistant Ilanna Saltzman sat down with current artist
John MacDonald to talk to him about the premiere of DUST this week at the IAP.
You have so many projects going on on both coasts! What defines a Tenement Street Workshop piece? Is there something that connects all the work you do?
That's a difficult question because I think the work we do is very diverse and divergent in nature. But if I had to give one element that is a relative constant throughout our work it is language. All of our work is very text driven and poetic in nature. Our core group of writers, Patrick, Nick, Rebecca and myself, all have distinct poetic voices and our goal has always been to use our poetic background and the jumping off point for pieces of theater that can tell a fluid story. We also really like making messes.
How has Dust developed/changed from the January 2011 Irondale workshop to the premiere at IAP?
“Dust” was written as a response to Rebecca Berkman-Rivera’s play “Rubble.” After our initial workshop at Irondale, we had the opportunity to run “Dust” and “Rubble” back-to-back in Los Angeles. We thought it fitting to have them run together. We were also interested in the idea of inserting new cast members to a fully rehearsed show. We kept half the original NY cast, and recast using local actors from LA. Overall it went quite well because the actors from New York really had to take an active role in dissecting the text for the new cast and that allowed for a really powerful rehearsal process. That in turn led to new and expanded ideas within the text, many different interpretations, and ultimately a much clearer vision for the piece.
What are you most excited for people to see?
I'm most excited for people to see all the different ways we try to communicate with them. We use many theatrical devices simultaneously to tell different aspects of the story. Because the play is text-heavy, it has been a problem in the past to get the communication flowing in order to see the scope of the story. For this run I think Patrick and our cast have paid especially close attention to that problem and have found ways around it.
SPEED ROUND!
Sum up your show in one word: dust
Define the Incubator Arts Project in one word: haven
What's the first thing you will do after strike? Get back to work on our new plays "All Our Pets Are Dead" and "Rough Approximations"
september 1 //
Exploding Moment's Catharine Dill
This week, the Incubator's Producing Assistant Ilanna Saltzman sat down with current artist
Catharine Dill to talk to her about the premiere of YE'RE HERE CUZIN this week at the IAP.
Ye're Here Cuzin' has been in development for some time- Can you briefly describe where the idea came from and how it came to exist in it's current form?
Ye're Here...came from a memory of a billboard I saw when my family moved to Arkansas when I was a kid. The unfamiliar spelling coupled with the supposed intimacy of the word "cousin" had a strange effect on me. I think I associate that sign with the alienation I felt toward my parents, and that I think all kids experience as they enter adolescence. That memory, and the consistently conflicting memories I share with other members of my family, inspired me to start a project in which opposing narratives are represented within the language of the script.
You say you have a "chroma-key enhanced video setting"--could you explain what chroma-key is, and where the idea to use it came from?
Chroma-key is also known as "blue-screen" and/or "green-screen" video technology, and is a cheap device used in film to create a moving location background for a segment shot in a studio. The subject is shot against a green or blue screen and then all the parts of the image that appear in the particular color are replaced with an alternate image--a monster in the background, a city, or a moving landscape for a car scene. For Ye''re Here, I knew I wanted a lot of the action to take place in a car, but I didn't want to use the traditional staging of car scenes, with the family bunched together. Steve Boling and I were brainstorming and decided to create these separate camera stations to reflect the increasingly separate worlds the characters live in while maintaining the image that they are traveling together.
What's the one thing you are most excited to share with audiences from this production?
That's hard to pin down. Ye're Here...represents a lot of new material for us--our first experiment with Chroma-key, our first time working with kids, my first attempt to write an original work. Probably my favorite thing about this project is it's the first we've developed over a long term residency. We've wanted to work this way for a long time, and being an AIR at Brooklyn Arts Exchange has afforded us an opportunity to integrate all the elements of the piece more thoroughly than we would have been able to otherwise.
SPEED ROUND!
Sum up Ye're Here Cuzin' in one word: ambitious
Define the Incubator Arts Project in one word: new
What's the first thing you will do after strike? I will take a two week break, then begin work on a new project called Hot Dust.