MFA Cohort V GradLabs
by admin • April 25, 2018 • Uncategorized • 0 Comments
GradLabs: Two Years of Training, Study, Performance and Reflection Brought to Life in One Performance Piece.
The GradLabs are a fundamental component of the MFA program pedagogy, the realization of a personal project for each student. They are an opportunity to mix the material and concepts learned and experienced during their previous work in the program while sometimes also integrating students’ work or ideas from before the program. GradLabs are also an opportunity to explore and experiment. Many of the MFA students collaborate in another student’s GradLab. They can also be an opportunity for undergraduate physical theatre and dance students to work and collaborate with the MFA students.
Cohort V’s GradLab pieces were presented over four evenings of public performances. We checked in with each MFA student, who was the creator of their piece and often served in other capacities, including: actor / performer, director, dramaturg, designer and producer. Excerpts from our conversations about inspiration, process and experience are below.
Evening One: April 9 at 8:30pm and 9:30pm | Venue: La Stalla
8:30pm | The Actress | by Burton Thomas
9:30pm | their eyes were the color of ripe apricots and the intersection of joy and grief | by Nicole Nigro
Can you provide a brief description or synopsis of the piece?
NICOLE: In the summer of 2015 I returned to Tuscany from a choreographic workshop in Germany. My partner picked me up from the airport in Florence and we drove out to the country to have a bonfire. We were outside in the golden fields drinking prosecco, stargazing, and playing music when a motorino pulled up and the driver, a stranger to me, delivered news about my partner’s mother: she had fallen, had some kind of seizure and was on the way to the hospital. Within the next hour we discovered that she had a brain tumour the size of a grapefruit and needed emergency surgery. I thought about the way grief collides with joy. I began to examine these moments in my past and in the years that followed.
NICOLE:
perhaps the thin wire of words is enough, but we are made mostly of noise.
dry electrical hisses and bottled sunlight.
if you come up for air she’ll be someone you haven’t even met yet.
‘acid and tender’ interested in certainty and stiff limbs.
sometimes our smiles collide with grief. this is the shape life takes.
and laughter is found, not in the absence of broken-hearts, but despite the abundance of them.
What do you hope to learn or discover through the process and the performance of the piece?
NICOLE: I hope to gain creative and collaborative tools that will aid in working with diverse groups of artists. I hope to bring skill, diligence, honesty, and play into the studio and onto the stage. I hope to find truths about our humanity and how we possess the ability to experience life’s magic in both joy and grief.
Did you participate in any other GradLabs? In what ways did it/they compare to your project?
NICOLE: I am participating in Faith Sullivan’s gradlab and Heidee Alsdorf’s gradlab. Although we all share some similar themes we express them in very different and unique ways. Faith dives into what I would describe as a floating, cerebral, dreamlike world and Heidee explores the depths of our visceral impulses and desires! I am enjoying our time together immensely!
Evening Two: April 10 at 8:30 and 9:30pm | Venue: Villa Godiola
8:30pm | Monachopsis, Dism(ember)ed | by Sloane Teagle
9:30pm | Viaggio | by Ruta Marcinkenaite
What did you hope to learn or discover through the process and through the performance of the piece?
SLOANE: I’m really eager to learn how to spearhead a collaborative creation process. I don’t like being in charge, so this has definitely been an eye-opening experience for me. It’s been a challenge to direct seven people while also being in the piece, but I am truly lucky to have wonderful assistant directors that are my eyes while I’m working inside of the piece.
RUTA: It was really great experience to create and to perform in my piece. To create was big challenge, because sometimes I didn’t know how to solve some theatrical ideas so filming really helped. Also I learned that I have to trust more my instincts and go for it. Less doubt. For me any feedback was really helpful but having too much feedback put me in the big doubts about my ideas. So after all process I decided that I have to trust myself as an artist and do what I love. And I don’t have to impress all people in the world.
What was the catalyst, inspiration or starting point?
SLOANE: The Black Girl Magic movement was definitely the catalyst for my piece. I really believe that the tenacity and determination of black women is remarkable, but I also believe that there’s been so much emphasis placed on the magical black girl narrative that people often forget that we are humans with doubts and fears like everybody else. I wanted to create a piece that allows the audience to see a black woman that is relatable and wholly anchored in her experience and her humanness while trying to navigate a society she doesn’t necessarily feel a part of.
RUTA: Inspiration came from traveling and living in different countries. I am interested in languages. So for me was the goal to perform in different languages and how my presence as an artist changes speaking in different languages.
Can you provide a brief description or synopsis of the piece?
RUTA: So in my piece were three people. Myself, Becca Canziani and Matteo Trimigno. All three from different countries. Lithuania, USA, Italy. Performance was based on music. So I chose Kurt Weil songs. Two in German, one in English. In the beginning I had Lithuanian folk song, and in the middle between songs I used some Italian text. So really performance was mix of languages and I explored movement with these songs. So piece was musical but combined with movement.
SLOANE: Monachopsis, Dism(ember)ed gives an intimate and honest look into the everyday experience and struggles of the black woman, namely the obscure sorrow known as monachopsis, the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. With the support of other black women, who have all experienced monachopsis in some way, the Figure finds the strength to navigate a world dominated by white men, despite being plagued with doubt and fear, and ignites her inner fire to live boldly no matter what.
Did you participate in any other GradLabs? In what ways did it/they compare to your project?
SLOANE: I was in both Nicole and Faith’s GradLabs, besides my own piece. While each of our pieces are about women, the three of us have different perspectives as women, which is such an exciting thing to be a part of. It’s a wonderful gift to have a platform that allows us to share our perspectives and stories about the female experience with each other and the audience.
RUTA: I participated in Faith Sullivan’s gradlab and Heidee Alsdorf’s gradlab. Although we all share some similar themes we express them in very different and unique ways. Faith dives into what I would describe as a floating, cerebral, dreamlike world and Heidee explores the depths of our visceral impulses and desires! I am enjoying our time together immensely!
Evening Three: April 12 at 8:30pm and 9:30pm | Venue: La Stalla
8:30pm | Thirst (And Other Dreams of Drowning) | by Faith Sullivan
9:30pm | The upside Clown | by Lindsay Root
Can you provide a brief description or synopsis of your piece?
LINDSAY: “Familiar strangers, giant pigeons, and a sea of blankets; a clown’s nightmare.” This piece is about exploring a clown’s nightmare. In order to do so, we establish an everyday routine in which the “normal” can be seen in order to create abnormal circumstances that could be considered a bad dream, all with a clown spin, of course.
FAITH: The piece is about dreams, and how certain anxieties about being a woman (regarding taking up or claiming space, our bodies, appearances, and voices) manifest in dreams. This anxiety, as well as a sort of self discovery that goes along with it, also manifests in this metaphor of drowning, or being underwater, which is depicted through the use of large sheets of cellophane hanging from the ceiling that the performers interact with throughout these retellings of their dreams.
Did you participate in any of the other GradLabs? In what ways did it/they compare to your project?
FAITH: Yes! I was in Nicole’s piece “their eyes were the color of ripe apricots and the intersection of joy and grief” and Heidee’s piece “O How Flesh Folds.” I am not performing in my own piece so I was very excited to be able to perform in theirs. Both pieces are in quite a different world from my piece, but actually I find us to have many thematic and stylistic preferences in common, so it was super interesting to see the different ways that we went about depicting them. Additionally, the worlds that these pieces live in are very clear, specific, and expressive, and the processes have been very collaborative and free. I’ve had a lot of fun working with them and been challenged in ways that I’m very grateful for.
LINDSAY: I participated in Burton’s piece and Nicole’s piece. Both, I feel, are different in their own ways from mine, but I also found something similar in each that helped me with the process for my own project. Burton’s project was a Commedia type show in which there are similarities with the “mask” to that of a clown’s nose. And Nicole’s was quite different from mine, but in exploring the collision of joy and grief moments we have in life, I was able to find many of my own moments of that within clown.
What was the catalyst, inspiration or starting point?
LINDSAY: The inspiration for my project came from working with Andre Casaca on clown. As he chose our costumes for our clown presentation, my clown ended up being quite dark with a black dress, black shoes, black hat, AND black nose. Being the only one without a red nose I was curious about exploring multiple reasons for why she became different and how that affected the world around her (or vice versa).
FAITH: At first I was inspired by Opheila and the image of her drowning. I’ve always been fascinated by her and curious about how I could create these images on stage. This brought me to the idea of using cellophane as a material that, when someone stands behind it, creates a similar image of the body “underwater.” From there, the piece really moved away from Opheila and into a world of dreams.
What do you hope to learn or discover through the process and the performance of the piece?
FAITH: The process has taught me so much! I feel like I learned a lot of surprising things about my personal style or aesthetic. It sounds silly, but I hadn’t realized how interested I was in object manipulation until I looked at this piece we had created that really used objects in interesting ways – the cellophane of course, but also umbrellas and mirrors. Something about changing the meaning of an object or using it on stage in a different way than it’s intended use really coincided with the strange logic and sense that we experience in our dreams. I also learned that I’m very inspired by imagery and that is always my starting point in creation – I have an image in my mind that I know I’d like to create, and then I kind of work backwards (or forwards… or backwards and forwards) from that image. And I learned that when creating a piece, it’s important to me to get clear about the aesthetic and the “world” of the piece in order for everything else to fall into place. I think that’s why it was so helpful and important to decide on the cellophane right away and let it really define what the piece became.
LINDSAY: I am excited to have an audience, everything changes with an audience. I think learning what the public finds funny within the piece will be surprising and rewarding and hopefully inspiring for future works.
Evening Four: April 14 at 8:30pm and 9:30pm | Venue: La Stalla
8:30pm | O How Flesh Folds | by Heidee Alsdorf
9:30pm | Looney Tunes | by Brandonn Christopher
Can you provide a brief description or synopsis of your piece?
BRANDONN: A trio of clowns has volunteered to assist in the clean-up of Cohort V’s Grad Labs, and been promised that should they finish on time they can attend the after-party with everyone else. However pesky flies, empty bellies, unexpected romances, and time are all working against them. Set the whole thing to a few classical pieces of music, and you end up with some truly Looney Tunes.
What was the catalyst, inspiration or starting point?
BRANDONN: I’ve always enjoyed primo piano work, and I took to clown as well. Combining the two seems natural, and lets me revisit a piece I’ve done before with a new perspective and some drastic additions.
What do you hope to learn or discover through the process and the performance of the piece?
BRANDONN: My hope is to explore how I can apply the training I’ve done here at the Academia to an old project, and how that will cause it to change and evolve into something new.
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