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Flash Dispatch, 2-5:
Diary of a Residency
Faucets, Tubing, Pipes, a 13-year-old Rookie Drummer and a 75-year-old
Grandmother
By Rebecca Stenn
Copyright 2001 Rebecca Stenn
(Editor's Note: PerksDanceMusicTheatre
is in residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan,
Wisconsin this month. Rebecca Stenn, artistic director of the Perks
and the Dance Insider's features editor, will be sending dispatches
as her schedule permits. Jay Weissman and Dave Eggar are musicians
with the Perks; Michele de la Reza is a dancer with the company.)
SHEBOYGAN, Wisconsin
-- My company has been here for a week. I am sitting at my desk
in the cabin that Jay and I are staying in, looking out the window
at the snow coming down. We are in the middle of the woods. We are
in Wisconsin.
The Perks has been commissioned
to create an evening-length piece, with members of the community,
and to work here for a month. In the planning stages, we imagined
an incredibly diverse cast, with many nationalities and a wide range
of ages. When we actually arrived for our first week of workshops
last November, we learned the first lesson in community-based projects:
Be flexible. We'll take everyone, we decided, looking at a sea of
ten-year-old faces, a retired rag-time pianist named Al, an assortment
of families and teenagers including an adolescent heavy metal guitarist
who we've not heard from since, and one elderly woman.
After meeting our proposed
cast, the next step was to figure out what to create a piece about
-- how to give the best theatrical/collaborative experience to our
community members and how to best motivate and inspire ourselves.
This would mean asking some questions: What makes this community
unique? What are some of the things that are universally understood?
We looked around.
Sheboygan, Wisconsin
is a quiet place. It is a small town located on the shore of Lake
Michigan. The town is lovely, and the lake is especially beautiful
in all seasons; it is vast and seems like an ocean. But these observations
are an outsider's viewpoint. When we started asking questions about
the inner workings of the place, and listening to people's stories,
we realized that there is something quite unique about this town,
something that infiltrates just about everyone's life here, directly
or indirectly, and that is the Kohler Factory.
The Kohler Company (porcelain,
metal for faucets. etcetera -- your toilet is probably made by Kohler),
it turns out, employs a large percentage of the residents of Sheboygan.
Factory workers, designers, international sales reps, the John Michael
Kohler Arts Center (which has hired us) and countless other jobs
are supplied by the Kohler Company or Foundation. We realized quickly
that this would shape our piece and we set about looking for a story
to best express it.
Our first research trip
was of course to the Kohler Factory itself. This took some doing
-- we needed to be okayed at a number of checkpoints. When we had
finally signed our last waiver, we were ushered into a lobby where
we were issued steel-toed boots, safety goggles, gloves, hard-hats
and ear plugs. Our mission was actually the garbage room -- the
discards, really, seconds or things that hadn't come out perfectly
and couldn't be sold. We were awed and silenced by the factory itself:
It was exactly how I had imagined it to be and then much much bigger.
There was the fog and smoke, the cauldrons of fire, the blackened
walls. Men were welding and cutting steel. We got yelled at a number
of times to "stay in line" to avoid speeding forklifts, and to keep
our goggles on.
Downstairs in the dungeon-like
discards room, we collected our treasure: everything that could
possibly be used as a musical instrument or set piece. We loaded
up a van and were on our way.
Back at the Kohler Arts
Center, we got an artist to design the very first 'industriaphone,'
as our musicians have dubbed it: a rack where our 'percussion instruments'
are hung -- faucets, metal tubing, pipes, engine parts, anything
that makes noise. Barrels are used as set pieces and drums, and
long steel pipes are the anti-gravity machine. But more on that
later.
Now we had our setting,
and quite a few of our props. Next we needed a story. This is where
the universality of every community comes in. We have long been
interested in inter-generational relationships, and where better
can one explore this, than when one is presented with a cast with
an age range from four to seventy-five? How do the generations relate
to one another? What about the passage of time? How similar are
our journeys? How do they change as we grow older? We looked at
our cast. We had very few men. That decided it. Our piece would
be a woman's journey and we would hone in on a girl-child, a middle-aged
woman, and an elderly woman to illustrate our narrative.
A journey -- starting
with an elderly woman remembering. Can we all see through her eyes?
Her journey is nearing completion; she is peaceful. She is remembering
herself as a younger woman and she remembers the hardships and tribulations
of that life. Now she remembers herself as a child; the journey
of fantasy.
Day 1
We begin with Joyce (our
75-year-old) facing the clump of everyone else in the piece, about
thirty people. They mirror her movements. I am very moved by the
group's focus, the beauty of concentration in the eyes of a four-year-old.
The faces soften and crease with intent, eyes widen with meaning.
They follow this grandmother, they follow her quiet wisdom.
Next we have Susan (our
middle-aged character). She is a mother of four in real life and
three of her boys are in the show. Sometimes she straps Finn, her
youngest, to her back as she marks through her choreography. He
is oblivious to all the attention, quietly munching on his pretzel.
When Susan does the mirroring to the group her little boys are so
serious we can barely stand it.
Finally it is Greta's
turn. Joyce is her grandmother in real life. Greta is eight and
she plays our child character, the one that gets lost in fantasy.
Greta has the biggest eyes imaginable. After the opening sequence,
she and I do a duet together. The softness of an eight-year-old's
hands could break your heart.
Day 2
These are some of the
things that run through my mind as I watch our earnest community
members: Curiosity. Sheer joy of movement. Foreheads literally crisscrossed
with thought. The quiet dropping of the eyes and shy curl of the
lips into a small satisfied smile when we say, "Hey, that was good!"
Boundless energy. Jay has to "run" the boys. They have too much,
it bubbles over, he runs them and when they are exhausted, they
concentrate well.
Day 3
The company is jazzed,
exhausted, focused, bickering and, suddenly, crazily, jolting into
exalted agreement -- that "of course" feeling you get when it turns
out exactly as it is supposed to be.
Za (his real name is
a longer name that is difficult for non-Vietnamese speaking people
to pronounce and he asks us to call him Za) is in the hallway learning
complex drum rhythms with our cellist Dave. We haven't exactly banished
them, but they are incredibly loud. We count, we yell over the din.
Za has somehow been incorporated into the company -- we fight over
him. Michele and I want to make a trio with him, while Dave and
Jay want him to be a drummer. Za is thirteen.
Day 4
being played by various
cast members. Dave is a bit of a task master. "Again" he says to
the kids as they bang out rhythms. Again! Again! Again! Mabel, a
twelve-year-old, looks a combination of nervous, restless, bored
and excited all at the same time. I've just run over to Jay, and
asked him to simplify the complex rhythmic structure he has given
Za, who has developed an extremely worried look on his face. I don't
believe this kid has ever played drums before. We're eleven days
away from opening night. Eleven days and counting.
(Editor's Note: To read
more about the Perks, please visit its
web site.)
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