SDC Journal Winter 2018 by SDC Journal

JOURNAL HOWARD SHALWITZ

WINTER 2018

FORWARD MOTION NEVER STOPPING PATRICIA BIRCH

MAKING THEATRE + SHAPING COMMUNITIES CHRIS COLEMAN + DÁMASO RODRÍGUEZ

SUSTAINING THE STEPS OF BALANCHINE + ROBBINS ELLEN SORRIN ALSO VIVIENNE BENESCH JUSTIN EMEKA MAIJA GARCIA SAM GOLD EVREN ODCIKIN BARTLETT SHER

WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

OFFICERS

Pam MacKinnon PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Michael John Garcés VICE PRESIDENT

Michael Wilson TREASURER

Evan Yionoulis SECRETARY

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Julianne Boyd Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas Susan H. Schulman

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

Christopher Ashley Melia Bensussen Walter Bobbie Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Rachel Chavkin Desdemona Chiang Liz Diamond Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Joseph Haj Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Meredith McDonough Sharon Ott Lonny Price Ruben Santiago-Hudson Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Leigh Silverman Casey Stangl Eric Ting

Kate Chisholm FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Jo Bonney Graciela Daniele Liz Diamond Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Thomas Kail Robert O'Hara Ann M. Shanahan Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis SDC JOURNAL PEERREVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

David Callaghan Ann M. Shanahan SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Emily A. Rollie SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Anne Fliotsos Joan Herrington James Peck

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd Jonathan Cole Thomas Costello Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Travis Malone Sam O'Connell Ruth Pe Palileo Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum

Emily A. Rollie SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Seret Scott DIRECTOR

Ann M. Shanahan CO-EDITOR, SDCJ-PRS

Bartlett Sher DIRECTOR

WINTER 2018 CONTRIBUTORS

Vladimir Angelov David Callaghan CO-EDITOR, SDCJ-PRS

Shana Cooper DIRECTOR

Justin Emeka OBERLIN COLLEGE

Maija Garcia DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Sam Gold DIRECTOR

Harry Haun Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Linda Murray Evren Odcikin DIRECTOR + PRODUCER

Josh Prince CHOREOGRAPHER

SDC JOURNAL is published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036. © 2018 Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. All rights reserved. SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. SUBSCRIPTIONS + ADVERTISEMENTS Call 212.391.1070 or visit www.SDCweb.org. Annual SDC Membership dues include a $5 allocation for a 1-year subscription to SDC JOURNAL. Non-Members may purchase an annual subscription for $36 (domestic), $72 (foreign); single copies cost $10 each (domestic), $20 (foreign). Purchase online at www.SDCweb.org. Also available at the Drama Book Shop in New York, NY. POSTMASTER Send address changes to SDC JOURNAL, SDC, 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036. PRINTED BY

Sterling Printing SDC JOURNAL

| WINTER 2018

Patricia Birch in Martha Graham’s Every Soul is a Circus PHOTO c/o Patricia Birch

WINTER CONTENTS Volume 6 | No. 2

FEATURES 12 Never Stopping AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICIA BIRCH BY HARRY

HAUN

Sustaining the Steps of Balanchine + Robbins

AN INTERVIEW WITH ELLEN SORRIN WITH LINDA MURRAY

18 COVER

Forward Motion

37 PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

AN INTERVIEW WITH HOWARD SHALWITZ

Editorial Forum

BY SHANA COOPER

25 Making Theatre

SDC SUPPORT FOR DIRECTORS + CHOREOGRAPHERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION EDITED BY ANN

M. SHANAHAN + DAVID CALLAGHAN

+ Shaping Communities A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS COLEMAN + DÁMASO RODRÍGUEZ MODERATED BY LAURA

COVER PHOTO

Howard Shalwitz Teresa Castracane

PENN

WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

Cuba Libre at Artists Repertory Theatre, directed by Dámaso Rodríguez + choreographed by Maija Garcia PHOTO Owen Carey

5 FROM THE PRESIDENT

SDC FOUNDATION

THE SOCIETY PAGES

Foundation Awards

SDC-ATHE Cocktail Reception

The Zelda Fichandler Award Acceptance Remarks

Directors Lab Chicago

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR BY LAURA PENN

IN YOUR WORDS

Resource Q&A

What I Learned...

BY EVREN

Remembering Sir Peter Hall

BY BARTLETT

BY PAM

MACKINNON

ODCIKIN SCOTT

CURATED BY SERET

Why I Made That Choice BY MAIJA GARCIA

Pre-Show / Post-Show

BY JUSTIN

orking with Artists W with Disabilities in 20 Questions BY SAM

BY VIVIENNE

BENESCH

SHER

Chicago Fight Choreographers Meeting Minneapolis/St. Paul Members Meeting New England Area Theatres (NEAT) Agreement Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Flea Market & Grand Auction

LA Members Meeting

Chita Rivera Awards

Banned Together

Portland SDC Night Out

EMEKA

GOLD

Meet & Greet with NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio

Names of SDC Members appear throughout the Journal in boldface.

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Gregory Awards

Berkshire Leadership Summit

Broadway Salutes

SDC Founder Onna White

FROM THE PRESIDENT In like a lion, out like a lamb? Um, no. Not these twelve months. Instead, lions, tigers, and bears all year round. But also a lot of wildly committed people, willing to grapple with the times and see things through. I began my service as President in the wake of Election Day 2016. SDC, more and more, is a grounding place for its Members, a community to engage and work with to try to make a difference. And for directors and choreographers, we have made a difference. We believe we have helped to build and better the field. Naturally, this work is ongoing. Anniversaries are important markers and can be moments to reflect and celebrate as we set agendas and tackle new issues. This past year, we have achieved real, tangible successes from the great work of the last several years. We increased our jurisdiction by securing our first new multi-employer bargaining agreement in two decades with the New England Area Theatres (NEAT) Agreement. We expanded our working unit with the inclusion of fight choreographers in the LORT Agreement. We’ve also received over 20 promulgated Agreements for Broadway associate/resident directors and choreographers and have covered nearly 6,500 days of development work since we began that initiative a few years ago. And we have started to plan for our next cycle of negotiations, which begins with Broadway in 2019. The momentum is ours. Now is when we begin to really form our priorities and shape our strategy. As we get bolder, employers prepare for us as well. It takes research and consideration to determine how best to chart the course. Input from our membership, responsiveness to issues, clarity of leadership, and passion all around are essential for the Union to continue to move forward. Also this past year, the work of the Political Engagement Committee has given us a new muscle with which to engage in the larger community, and the work of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee has built our skills of self-reflection. This work has made us a more expansive Union, a more nimble Union, a stronger Union. Political concerns have become drivers for the SDC community. We are here to engage—not just in the conversation, but in policy and action. Now we have an extraordinarily important piece of work ahead for our Union and the industry. To say there has been a cultural shift this year, even these past few months, seems an understatement. In the wake of this major shift, the Membership ratified at our Annual Membership Meeting in November new language for our Rights and Responsibilities and our Work Rules specific to sexual harassment. Our Members have a right to work in an environment that is free from harassment and other unlawful or abusive behaviors, and our Members have a responsibility to behave in an ethical and legal manner. It was inspiring to see our Members come together during this significant and powerful moment to support each other and the Union. It is an important moment to be leaders in our field, working doggedly and carefully with both strength and compassion. I am as ever grateful for my Executive Board colleagues, who work tirelessly to support their fellow directors and choreographers and who continuously strive to raise SDC to a higher standard. Their incredible dedication and service continues long after their Board service and is an inspiration. For 2017, I was pleased to present my first President’s Award to Robert Moss, whose wise counsel and expertise guided many positive changes within the Union during his tenure. Every Board table needs a Bob Moss. As we take our first steps into 2018, we can rely on two certainties: change is imminent, and SDC remains committed to uniting, empowering, and protecting its Members. In Solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon, Executive Board President WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR I spend my days thinking about directors and choreographers. Lately, I’ve been gratified to find more and more rooms I am invited into where there is a renewed acknowledgment of the role of the director and a desire to build support for these central artists. Along with the work of our own SDC Foundation, Jim Nicola at New York Theatre Workshop has been gathering colleagues to try to understand what directors need; Philip Himberg at Sundance has committed to renewal for mid-career directors; Susan Booth of the Alliance Theatre is doing some important work with Liz Diamond exploring how we can better launch directors; Wendy Goldberg and the O’Neill have established the National Directors Fellowship; Anne Kauffman and Ken Rus Schmoll at Clubbed Thumb have created a directing fellowship focused on new work; and there are others. I have noticed growing recognition that what a director does within any given production process to transform the written word into the theatrical event often translates into transformative leadership beyond the rehearsal hall. I hear people wondering about what might be possible if we put some coordinated resources behind directors. If you haven’t read your January issue of American Theatre magazine, you must. Everyone at SDC sends our gratitude to TCG and American Theatre for committing the time, space, and expertise to shining a spotlight on directors. Just yesterday I was invited to participate in a convening of directors, public and private funders, and service organizations to spend time evaluating programs and the need for additional opportunities for emerging directors and choreographers on their all-too-dimly-lit career paths. Daniella Topol and Davis McCallum, with NYSCA, called the gathering together. It was a thoughtful, complex discussion. It felt like part of a bigger shift taking place. As I write, I’m on my way to Chicago for a Membership meeting hosted by Henry Wishcamper at the Goodman Theatre. I am eager to say hello, share some news from headquarters, and listen. Executive Board Member Lonny Price is joining me for what we anticipate will be a dynamic meeting with a strong turnout.

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SDC is at an exciting and critical juncture as our organizing efforts strengthen, artistic leadership transitions continue across the country, high definition captures and broadcasts of stage productions become commonplace, grosses on Broadway hit an alltime high, and your rights and responsibilities with respect to workplace conduct take center stage. In the coming months you will find members of the staff and Executive Board traveling to communities nationally, even as we continue to tend to the day-to-day in NYC. In this issue of SDC Journal, we get the privilege of speaking with Patricia Birch. Reading about Pat’s time with Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, and Agnes de Mille is a reminder of the significance of legacy. I also love the tangible representation of how the relationships we forge in our careers stay with us; in photos representing Pat’s brilliant work on Grease you will find the work of director Tom Moore, and if you look closely at one of the young T-Birds you’ll find Executive Board Member Walter Bobbie. Deeper in this issue, Ellen Sorrin of the Robbins Foundation and the Balanchine Trust offers some advice to choreographers about the need to find ways to capture their body of work for future generations to understand, replicate (with permission of course), or be inspired by. San Francisco-based Evren Odcikin, one of the National Directors Fellows, and NYbased choreographer Maija Garcia give us firsthand accounts in the columns “What I Learned” and “Why I Made that Choice.” When we asked Justin Emeka to share his “Pre-Show/Post-Show” reflections, he inquired about whether he might take a slightly different approach. The column was inspired by our desire to bring forward SDC Members working in an academic setting while continuing to practice their craft, and I think Justin’s approach helps us do just that. In “20 Questions,” Sam Gold discusses the rewards of working with actors with disabilities and encourages us to expand our casting pools. As Woolly Mammoth Theatre artistic director Howard Shalwitz prepares to depart the company for the next chapter in his artistic life, it seems that his time at Woolly has been a complete melding of his own artistic aspiration with his commitment both to the artistry of others and to the theatre in

the context of a community. You can clearly trace his growth as a director as he forged ways to create an environment for freelance directors to thrive and risk. Chris Coleman and Dámaso Rodríguez talk about their creative lives in Portland and how they integrate and balance their ambitions as artists with the institutions they are charged with leading and how they support other directors. Soon Chris sets off for a new adventure at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, opening up a leadership opportunity at Portland Center Stage. This is change. Change in the field. The field, as Howard describes it in his interview, is a “river that is always changing and always evolving.” The field is in the midst of maybe one of the most significant transformations we have experienced since the founding of the regional theatres. The growth and evolution in the not-for-profit field that has happened over these 60 years has, by and large, been incremental. The volume of artistic leadership transitions ahead provides opportunity for a sea change. In this moment, I hope we all take advantage of every room we enter and every table we are given a seat at to seek answers to the question, “What does the director need in the 21st century, and how do we find a way to provide it?” At SDC we believe that the larger ecosystem will benefit if we can answer and identify solutions in an inclusive and unified voice. Likely we will produce some sort of complex harmony—but I say let’s give it a try. The return on investment in directors with ambitious visions for their own art, commitment to their freelance comrades, and a dedication to the communities they serve has always been high. It’s exciting to consider what might be possible if some meaningful financial investment were to come to directors and choreographers in this moment of change. In solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

next to the window. The view was beautiful—part winter wonderland and part The Shining. I started sketching to stop my nervous hands and mind.

Sofia Ahmad + Kiran Patel in The Most Dangerous Highway in the World at Golden Thread Productions, 2016 PHOTO David Allen Studio

BY EVREN

ODCIKIN

CURATED BY SERET

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned... Why I Made That Choice Pre-Show / Post-Show 20 Questions

CONTRIBUTE If you wish to contribute to IN YOUR WORDS, would like to respond to any of the articles, opinions, or views expressed in SDC Journal, or have an idea for an article, please email Letters@SDCweb.org. Include your full name, city + state. We regret that we are unable to respond to every letter.

SCOTT

Creative downtime, which I call “staring into space” time, wasn’t always a priority for me. It took an intervention from Mother Nature for me to realize its importance. I was part of the first class of the National Directors Fellowship, a career development program led by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in partnership with SDC Foundation, National New Play Network, and the Kennedy Center. As the one West Coast participant, I was flown in a day earlier than everyone else for the fellowship’s Winter Symposium, a 10-day directing lab that took place on the O’Neill campus in January 2016. Immediately after I arrived, a Category 5 snowstorm hit the East Coast, and all flights, trains, and roads leading to the O’Neill were shut down. As the O’Neill staff scrambled to get everyone else in, I found myself alone with two days on my hands. My first instinct was to get on my laptop. I was in preproduction for the world premiere of Kevin Artigue’s The Most Dangerous Highway in the World at Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco. It was a challenging, nonlinear, dreamlike play set in Afghanistan. I had emails to return, a draft of the scenic design to ponder, and one last documentary to watch from the list that our cultural consultant had put together. The Afghan music playlist I had made was playing, including initial soundscapes from my sound designer that I needed to respond to. I went into full multitasking mode, but the storm had other plans. The Wi-Fi started coming in and out. Frustrated, I picked up my notebook and moved

For Highway, I know that the production would have been doomed if Mother Nature hadn’t interfered with my packed schedule. Now, I am intentional about making this time. For each production, I force myself to take a few days early in the process to let my mind wander with no timeline or end goal. This has been transformative. From the outside, it might look like staring into space, but creative downtime is key to finding my own voice within each project. EVREN ODCIKIN is a San Francisco-based director and producer. He is the Director of New Plays at Golden Thread Productions, where he leads all new play development activities and helps program and produce the mainstage season. He has directed productions and workshops at South Coast Rep, InterAct Theatre Company, Cleveland Public Theatre, The Lark, O’Neill Theater Center, TheatreSquared, Kennedy Center, Magic Theatre, Playwrights Foundation, Crowded Fire, and TheatreFirst with such writers as Mona Mansour, Yussef El Guindi, Christopher Chen, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lauren Gunderson, MJ Kaufman, Hannah Khalil, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, David Jacobi, Michael Lew, Rehana Mirza, Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko, Han Ong, Geetha Reddy, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Betty Shamieh, and Lauren Yee, among many others. Born and raised in Turkey, Evren is a graduate of Princeton University. Upcoming productions: Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss at Shotgun Players, and Mona Mansour’s We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War at Golden Thread. odcikin.com Kevin Berne

WHAT I LEARNED…

Directors are artists, after all. In our American theatre processes, deadlines and budgets are always top of mind. We make our work in crowds. Decisiveness and moving the process forward take priority. In such an environment, even research and thinking time can feel regimented and resultoriented. Dreaming without a specific goal is rare.

PHOTO

The O’Neill in the snowstorm PHOTO Evren Odcikin

I came back to almost three hours later. I hadn’t been asleep—I had just let my thoughts wander. Some were about the play, yes, but most weren’t. The playlist had long run out, and I realized I didn’t really feel like starting it again. I had spent a full day staring into space when my first “aha” moment hit about a stream-of-consciousness monologue at the center of the play. The snowball effect (pardon the pun) was overwhelming. Within only two days, themes of the play started to coalesce in a more concrete way than they had over the two years of its development. I could begin to articulate the emotional throughline of this challenging text—that less-tangible but essential tonal aspect of any production.

WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

Stories of Service directed by Maija Garcia PHOTO Gene Garvin

hen I started directing, I intended to create transformative experiences— for audiences. I formed Organic Magnetics in collaboration with artists and designers to make immersive theatre that took on social justice in historical context. We tested boundaries and pushed possibilities. We experimented with interactive sound and projection technology on a shoestring budget. We were bonded by work that felt dangerous and relevant—but not so commercially viable. As artists hustling to thrive in a freshly gentrified New York City, the work demanded more from us than we could afford. After years of research, rehearsal, and production, on top of grant writing and rejection, I was exhausted. We hadn’t changed any paradigms, but we did form lasting relationships. Our network remained strong, but Organic Magnetics was put on pause. I invested my passion for collaboration into new projects. While building the ensemble for a new musical, it hit me. It is us, the artists, who are transformed by the work! It seemed so obvious! Sure, I’d been inspired by a thousand shows, nestled safely in my seat. But my worldview shifted by being part of a process, in building a production. The experience is visceral, alchemical. The material moves through us. Our choices matter. Every action counts.

Veterans in rehearsal PHOTO Maija Garcia

PHOTO

Maija Garcia Kirk Donaldson

This epiphany forced a reframe of my purpose: to apply the art of creative practice in service of forming, and possibly transforming, a community. I accepted the challenge to direct an evening of storytelling with veterans whose service spans nearly a century from World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. This work felt absolutely necessary and yet incomprehensible. I’d been a peace activist all my life. How would I lead a military-minded operation? I started talking to vets and listening to their stories. There is a lot of pride, pain, and plenty of humor. Above all, there is solidarity. Not all veterans engage in combat, and those who do aren’t necessarily fighting for the flag. This is a thread throughout: they fight to protect each other. It dawned on me that this huge divide between veterans and civilians could be bridged by storytelling. And it wasn’t enough to ask veterans to tell their stories on stage. To reflect the diversity of veterans’ experiences while exposing intricate threads of connection, I needed to engage veterans in the creative process. So I recruited a few good men and women from local universities, many who reentered civilian society after returning from combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. When they speak of their time overseas, a quiet reverence permeates the room. Despite the oppressive heat of the desert, the lack of comfort, the pressure and danger…their stories evoke a nostalgia for bonds created in difficult circumstances. This, at least, artists could relate to. I pulled in dancers from the University of Michigan to work directly with veterans, and out of this unlikely union spawned the most magnificent storytelling experience. Veterans became playwrights, and the artists ethnographers. Together, the vets and dancers performed for an audience of 2,000, with a live sound score by Stephan Moore. The production, which premiered November 8 at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, was created by, for, and about veterans—in collaboration with performing artists—to raise funds to build the first Fisher House in Michigan, a guest house for families of veterans undergoing treatment at the VA Hospital. Encouraged by veterans’ slow and steady trust in the process, a group of strangers created the kind of cathartic experience that comes from being part of something greater than oneself—that powerful feeling of doing something dangerous and relevant. I carry forward a renewed sense of purpose in the creative process: to inspire creativity, authenticity, and transformation—from within.

WHY I MADE THAT CHOICE BY MAIJA

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GARCIA

MAIJA GARCIA is a Cuban-American director and choreographer whose signature work is featured in Spike Lee’s Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It and the film ChiRaq. Director of Salsa, Mambo, Cha Cha Cha in Havana, Cuba, and Heather Henson’s Crane; choreographic works include Cuba Libre with director Dámaso Rodríguez at Artists Repertory Theatre and Another Word for Beauty with Steve Cosson at the Goodman Theatre. Garcia worked alongside Bill T. Jones to choreograph the Tony Award-winning musical FELA! On Broadway, becoming creative director of FELA! World Tour and FELA! The Concert. She is now working on original choreography for West Side Story with director Joe Haj at The Guthrie Theater and Hatuey, a Cuban-Yiddish Opera, at Montclair Peak Performances. A graduate of California Institute of Integral Studies with a BA in Sustainable Development, Garcia founded Organic Magnetics, producing Ghosts of Manhattan: 1512-2012, an interactive history in Fort Tryon Park and I Am NY: Juan Rodriguez at El Museo del Barrio.

What I love about theatre is…its ability to transform audiences and artists alike by engaging our collective imagination. Theatre reveals our humanity and allows us to confront the complexities of our differences while recognizing our similarities. Through the power of the theatre, we remember the past, reflect on the present, and create a vision that leads us into the future. I became a director because…much of my childhood was shaped by my passion for theatre. I began acting at a young age, performing in the community as well as professionally. As I got older, I became more and more conscious of casting limitations imposed on Black and Brown actors. I began to feel betrayed by my own passion, until I began directing—my first time was at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center in Seattle. As a director, I found I could impact what stories got told on stage, help determine who gets to tell them, and help shape the aesthetics of how they get told. I wanted to build a career in directing that could support my family, so eventually, I found a way to pursue an MFA in directing from the University of Washington, where I was mentored by Jon Jory and Valerie Curtis-Newton, and became interested in looking at “classic” texts through the lens of Black culture. I started teaching in the academy because…of the extraordinary intellectual and creative freedom as well as the daily inspiration that comes from working with college students—some of the most resilient young people from all over the world. Arthur Miller said, “I have felt for a long time that universities were potentially capable of opening exhilarating perspectives in modern theatre…they contain an audience which is seeking rather than jaded, open to fresh experience rather than nostalgic for what it has comfortably known.” In the academy, I teach courses that encourage the next generation of audiences and artists to reimagine how we use theatre, as well as develop innovative productions that incorporate the talents of professional artists and gifted students.

PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW WITH

JUSTIN EMEKA OBERLIN COLLEGE

Some unique productions I’ve directed on campus include…Death of a Salesman, featuring Avery Brooks as Willy Loman; Macbeth, set in the South during Reconstruction after the Civil War; the regional premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s Follow Me to Nellie’s; Alice Childress’s Wedding Band with a set designed by Richard Morris, Jr.; and an original play about the relationship of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington called The Compromise, written by Gabriel Emeka. I am currently rehearsing Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, adapted by Lydia Diamond. Some unique classes I have taught are…“Heightened Movement, Heightened Text”; “Movement for the Actor” (based in capoeira); “Advanced Scene Study: Black and Latino Playwrights”; “Directing II: Staging from Non-Dramatic Sources”; and “Non-Traditional Approaches to Playing and Casting Shakespeare.” Before opening, I…always remind my cast of the sacred nature of our work together in the theatre and what an honor it is to have the opportunity to share our talents with our community through a playwright’s imagination. I remind them of the importance of honoring the staging created in rehearsal and to maintain that work even as they continue to find new possibilities within the staging. I urge them to take care of themselves and each other, both on stage and off, while investing everything they have, every night, in every show, no matter if there is one person in the audience or 1,000. And last, I encourage them not to discuss reviews of the performance backstage or in dressing rooms. Then I thank them; say, “Goodbye”; and let the production walk in the world on its own. I think it’s important for the American theatre to…take chances in reflecting the richness of the many cultural traditions that define America. To be effective, conversations on equity and diversity should be directly related to creating opportunities and resources for artists and producers of color. It is imperative that theatres get persistent in their commitments to hiring directors of color; recruiting board members of color; and producing work written by artists of color as well as redefining approaches to casting roles in the canon of classic texts that were written for white actors but now, as a result of many generations of struggle and protest, are being played by actors of color. I believe most people in the arts want to be more inclusive, but they also have to be willing to give up privileges they have come to expect in order to achieve it, which is always much easier said than done—for us all. JUSTIN EMEKA is a professional director and a tenured professor of theatre and Africana studies at Oberlin College. At the Classical Theatre of Harlem, he adapted and directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. At the Karamu House in Cleveland, he directed Dominique Morisseau’s award-winning Detroit ’67; at Intiman Theatre in Seattle, he directed Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly; at Yale Repertory Theatre, he served as the movement coordinator and played the role of Edgar in a unique African American production of King Lear. Recently, he published an essay titled “Seeing Shakespeare Through Brown Eyes.” WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

Atisha Paulson

WORKING WITH ARTISTS WITH DISABILITIES

IN 20 QUESTIONS SDC Journal sat down with Tony Award-winning director SAM GOLD to discuss his work with artists in the disability community.

the fullness of the portrait of Laura, I felt it was important to show an audience a complete portrait of that woman and a portrait that did not rely on pity. I became interested in that character’s agency in fighting for more, in taking a fuller look at who she is. That’s when I opened up the casting process, found an actor to collaborate with—Madison Ferris— and she and I worked together to bring [Laura] to life. How did you work with the casting director on this decision?

How was your gathering similar to or different from other diversity and inclusion conversations around casting?

Did you need to encourage the producers to consider nontraditional casting?

They are all really important conversations. I can’t speak for everybody, but for a lot of the directors that were at the meeting, this was a newer conversation than any of the other conversations about diversity and inclusion that they’ve been involved in. I think the disability community has been slower to get a voice heard in the theatre community than some of the other underrepresented communities.

On this project, it was part and parcel to the project, so I didn’t need to convince them. I think everybody was really excited about the idea.

PHOTO

It’s very simple. When directors hold auditions, they should audition actors with disabilities for all roles. It’s a simple adjustment in thinking. There’s a great community of actors with disabilities, and as directors, we don’t often get to know them, get involved in the community, or get to see what they have to offer. If directors started seeing them for any role where it’s not explicitly inappropriate for some reason, you would start to see directors inspired by this community.

The producer, Scott Rudin; the casting director, David Caparelliotis; and I saw a lot of actors for the part. It was clear to all three of us that we were only interested in looking for an actor who had a mobility disability. What that mobility disability would be was totally openended. In the play, the word “crippled” is used, and we wanted to take that word back in some way and let an actor who lives with a disability have the chance to own that part. So we were all on board with that. We saw a lot of actors. Madison came in and did a beautiful, beautiful audition, and she won the part because she is a brilliant actor.

Recently, you gathered a collective of your peers to explore casting practices in regard to actors with disabilities. Taking that experience and your casting choices on The Glass Menagerie, what needs to happen to change the narrative around working with actors with disabilities?

Why do you think that is? It’s a reflection of cultural norms. When we have conversations about diversity and inclusion in our culture, disabilities are at the bottom of the list. In The Glass Menagerie, the character Laura Wingfield is described as having a limp due to a childhood illness. How aware were you about the lack of disabled actors in high-profile productions prior to your revival? I was completely aware. I think the whole community became very aware when Ali Stroker was cast in Spring Awakening on Broadway, and there was a little factoid that went out that she was the first wheelchair-user on Broadway. I found that to be a very shocking fact. Did you then intend to cast an actress with a disability for the role of Laura from the very beginning, or did you reach that decision later on in the casting process? The idea of this production from the beginning was to explore that play in collaboration with an actor with a mobility disability. Was The Glass Menagerie the first time you worked with an actor with a disability? No. In fact, in Othello, the show I did directly before The Glass Menagerie, I cast a wonderful actor named Anthony Lopez, who happens to have a leg prosthetic. Why was exploring a mobility disability in your production important to you? Historically, disabled characters in art and literature are often used in very limited ways, and one of those limited tropes is a character who induces pity—that we are to pity this character. That limited emotional transaction feels offensive to me. When I reread The Glass Menagerie, and I saw

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Most theatres have outdated and inflexible infrastructure when it comes to accessibility. How did you work around the theatre’s construction? Broadway is not accessible, but the challenge is more for the audience; for example, there are Broadway theatres that don’t have an accessible bathroom for the audience. For me, for the production, and for Madison, it wasn’t so much of a challenge. It involved installing a couple of ramps and putting some care into some of Madison’s mobility issues. But it’s important for directors to know that it doesn’t take a lot to make a production accessible for an artist with a disability. These artists have been living their whole lives in a world that’s not set up conveniently for their disability, and they persevere, and they figure out how to maneuver their lives. And theatre people are creative people who solve problems. I had much more challenging problems putting The Glass Menagerie on Broadway than figuring out how to make it accessible for the actor I cast. It’s not that hard. People should just do it. Building on that, how did you work with designers to address accessibility? With the minutiae of the set design, there were issues relating to mobility; there was

a staircase, and we worked to make it to specifications that were workable for Madison, and she was involved in the decision making on the staircase. So there was some backand-forth between the set designer, me, and the actor. But again, I’ve done that in many circumstances for many actors who are not disabled. All actors need some kind of collaboration and accommodation, and I don’t think we should focus on what’s challenging about working with an artist who has a disability. It’s no more challenging than working with anybody else. Did you consult with any advocacy groups while working on this production?

As identity politics and identity rights movements push forward, we make progress, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. And you can name a couple of productions where artists with disabilities had opportunities, but the opportunities are limited. Until we make much larger changes, the audiences are denied access to a lot of artists with a lot of interesting perspectives. What other work are you doing to challenge casting practices at the moment? I’m talking with the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, and I’ve been talking with the Lark theatre laboratory (larktheatre.org) and the Apothetae theatre company (theapothetae. org) about some advocacy work they’re doing. I’m also continuing to talk to theatres about accessibility and talk to directors and casting directors about inclusion. And as an artist, I’m

Yes. I love the staff of Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts (inclusioninthearts.org). I worked closely with that organization as we worked on the production. They were extremely helpful both in casting and in providing Finn Wittrock + Madison Ferris in artistic advice and advice about The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, language and advocacy. What did you want audiences to take away from Laura’s portrayal?

directed by Sam Gold PHOTO Julieta Cervantes

Madison and I collaborated on her version of Laura, on who that woman was in the 1930s, what she means to us now, how to portray her in a way that rung true both to the time it was written in and to the world we live in now, postAmericans with Disabilities Act (ADA). And we tried to think of Laura as an independent-minded, intelligent person who had an overbearing mother and specific complicated relationships with her mother, her brother, and the world around her. We tried to make a detailed portrait of who that woman was and not make assumptions about what her limitations were. What is the most powerful lesson you took from this directing experience? I was shocked by the amount of cognitive dissonance I encountered from the audience and from the press, especially, in regard to seeing a disabled body on stage. There’s so much work still to be done to bring people with disabilities into a cultural spotlight so their stories can be better understood. Along with The Glass Menagerie, more highprofile productions are beginning to cast more actors with disabilities (Deaf West’s 2015 production of Spring Awakening, Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2017 production of Cost of Living, to name a few). What do you think this reveals about the industry?

most inclusive pool of talent possible. And what better place to start than to make the commitment to give actors with disabilities a chance to bring their talent to roles they have unique perspectives on and haven’t historically been given mainstream opportunities to engage with? What specific challenges do directors and choreographers face in regard to working with disabled actors? One of the main challenges is that there are still a lot of institutions that aren’t physically accessible, and our theatres need to make a commitment to accessibility. It’s closedcaptioning, it’s all sorts of things. In a nonprofit institution, its mission is to support artists, and artists are limited if they can’t work with artists with disabilities because of the physical limitations of a building or an institution. It’s the obligation of these institutions to make capital investments in accessibility to make it possible for the artists to achieve their vision. How do you encourage your fellow directors and choreographers to face these challenges? The thing I keep wanting to reiterate is how I didn’t find it very challenging. Theatre is really hard to make, and there are a lot of challenges to producing and directing. Working with actors with disabilities is a pleasure, not a challenge. And as soon as the director thinks, “I should open my vision up wider,” then a whole new set of people—artists—will present themselves to the director. It’s an exciting opportunity.

looking for projects where I can continue to be inspired by the collaborators I’ve met in the disability community. What resources do you recommend for directors and choreographers who want to open up their casting pools? Where should they start? Contact the casting director they are working with and ask to see actors with disabilities. If the casting director does not have the tools necessary, direct them toward the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts. Do you think a role for a disabled character should always be cast with a disabled actor? I never think it’s a good idea to tell other directors what to do. And to make blanket statements. But I think the theatre community will get stronger, more interesting, and more vital the more we create opportunity for the

SAM GOLD is the Tony Award-winning director of Fun Home. He most recently directed a critically acclaimed revival of Hamlet at The Public Theater as well as the Tony-nominated A Doll’s House Part 2 on Broadway. Other Broadway credits include The Glass Menagerie, The Real Thing, The Realistic Joneses, Picnic, and Seminar. He won the Obie Award for Outstanding Direction for both The Aliens and Circle Mirror Transformation in 2010, and also won Obies for Fun Home and John as well as a Lortel Award for The Big Meal. Other credits include Othello, The Flick, Uncle Vanya, and Look Back in Anger. Sam is a NYTW Usual Suspect, Roundabout Associate Artist, Drama League Directing Fellow, recipient of the Princess Grace Award, and a graduate of the Juilliard Directing Program.

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Legendary director and choreographer PATRICIA BIRCH has been called “a theatre giant” by no less than HAROLD PRINCE, with whom she has collaborated on multiple projects, including A Little Night Music, Candide, Pacific Overtures, Parade, and LoveMusik. Her “hit of hits” is Grease, and Birch set the young denizens of Rydell High—those in ducktails and those in poodle skirts—to rocking and reveling right out of their ’50s-vintage yearbook. Her hard-driving energy helped make Grease the longestrunning Broadway show of its time. She also choreographed those moves in the 1978 movie version, helping to make it one of the most popular films of all time, as well as directing and choreographing Grease 2. Birch started out in modern dance and has worked across all media, running the gamut from Cyndi Lauper videos to a William Bolcom opera to MerchantIvory films. In the past 60-plus years, she has received two Emmys, two Drama Desk Awards, five Tony nominations, and the Astaire Award for a lifetime of considerable achievement. On behalf of SDC Journal, Harry Haun talked to Birch about the lives that she has touched in her remarkable six-decade trek through the many worlds of dance.

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Patricia Birch in rehearsal with the Martha Graham Dance Company PHOTO Gene Cook c/o Patricia Birch

What was the first piece of theatre that you saw? Do you remember? I don’t remember. I saw a lot of children’s shows. I remember going to Carnegie Hall to the Young People’s Concerts. Leonard Bernstein conducted them. My family had a parterre [box]—it was very fancy—and I remember making paper airplanes and sending them down.

What was it like working with Merce? It was just studying in classes. Whatever he wanted me to do, I did. All I cared about was whether or not he said I was good. It was just me and Merce Cunningham thinking I could dance. I was around 11 or 12 years old. That’s when I really got bit.

I went to dancing school like any other little girl—ballet, tap, and lyrical. I must have been six or seven. My older sister did, too. I think my prime motivation in life at that time was competition with her. I was always going to be better than she was. I’m not sure if I was or wasn’t, but I do know that I conveniently got over the chicken pox and gave it to her before a very important dance recital.

Yes, I loved dancing, and I loved dancing around to music. But I can’t say I was one of those gifted children who could not stop dancing and listening to lovely music all the time.

Merce was a big influence. He was terrific. Watching him dance, I thought I’d die! Although I never joined his company, he took me to Martha. I stayed there and eventually joined the company. I became a pretty important soloist.

When did you get seriously interested in it? Was this at Perry-Mansfield [a dance, theatre, and equestrian camp in Steamboat Springs, CO]?

Guess who taught the dancing? Merce Cunningham! That was a gift. Of course, I had the biggest crush in the whole world on him. I remember that he was once making a sculpture out of toothpicks and I painted polka dots on the toothpicks for him. Nobody else can say they did that for Merce Cunningham. I would have jumped off a cliff for him.

Yes. I was in Martha Graham’s junior classes on Saturday mornings. Once in a while, I was elevated to the evening classes—and very often told I had to go back because I was behaving badly or something, which I don’t think I was. She didn’t like my big plaid ribbons. She hated them. Merce took me there and to the School of American Ballet, and he gave me private lessons. He had two maxims I still remember. “Your bureau drawers are a mirror of your soul.” Tell that to some 12-year-old girl, and she’ll have a heart attack immediately! The bureau drawers of teenage girls are not to be looked at, so I tried to fix that up pretty fast. The second maxim was: “You’re only a dancer when you’re dancing.” I thought that meant you couldn’t even stop on the way to school.

Even then.

Yes. I was riding horses at the Jersey shore when I grew up. I used to show horses. I even qualified for Madison Square Garden at one point. Riding was extremely important at Perry-Mansfield. They had a wonderful, very fancy teacher there from Westchester. Along with that, the main things at camp were dancing and acting.

Merce brought you back to New York and to Martha Graham, right?

Do you see some of Graham and Cunningham in your own work? Very, very, very much—in ways that you wouldn’t think are there. One was the storytelling. Martha had an actress’s and a director’s sense of it.

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James Borelli, Walter Bobbie, Timothy Meyers, Barry Bostwick + James Canning in Grease on Broadway, directed by Tom Moore + choregraphed by Patricia Birch PHOTO Martha Swope BOTTOM

At the Grease reunion, 1979 (left to right): producers Ken Waissman + Maxine Fox, writer Warren Casey, choreographer Patricia Birch, writer Jim Jacobs + director Tom Moore PHOTO c/o Tom Moore

After I had choreographed Grease, she asked me to come back and head up the company for a little while. They were doing Deaths and Entrances about the Brontë sisters. God help us, I had danced all of the three little girls in it. There was a scene of much confusion with the girls with vases, putting them down, picking them up, running around with them. My three girls were doing pretty well, but the movement didn’t seem “right”; nothing much was happening except vases. Martha was coming to rehearsal at some point, and I asked, “Can you come sooner than WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

later? I’m really in trouble here.” She came and watched it, then turned to them and said, “I have only one sentence for you: the grownups have all left the house.” It said everything. I never forgot that—that there were just a few words that could make such a difference.

Patricia Birch as Anybodys in West Side Story PHOTO c/o Patricia Birch

The other reason was that I had my kids very, very early. I was 21 or 22 when I had Jonathan, my number-one son. The company was going to tour the Far East—and me, with a twomonth-old kid! I knew I couldn’t go for long, but I thought, “I can go for six weeks. Our good nanny will take care of him.” Martha agreed to that—she wanted me in the major cities—but the company got furious because I was getting major cities and leaving before they did the boondocks. They all talked to her, so she took back the invitation. I didn’t go, but I did make a phone call to Agnes de Mille, who was doing all those revivals at City Center. I said, “I’m out of a job.” I knew she worshipped Martha Graham—worshipped her—so I auditioned for her and she took me for a couple of revivals.

I don’t believe in saying “play it sad,” or “play it happy.” You can’t play a quality or be sad or be happy. You can only have an action. Martha also said, “Every time you walk on the stage, you’re there for a reason: to accomplish something.” As a dancer, that’s odd. But there always was something—even in abstract pieces, to make a statement, physically or emotionally. What caused you to move into mainstream musicals? I liked performing the Graham story ballets— the ones she’d done before I was ever around and was bringing back, such as Appalachian Spring. I loved those American pieces. But I didn’t like the dance world. Every time there was a season, I felt that we were dancing for other dancers. Who’s here? It was a snobby world, and there weren’t enough people to make up an extensive audience.

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I was working with Agnes when the company came back and Martha went into rehearsal with one of her Greek dances. I thought they’d call me, but they didn’t, so I called her. She said, “It’s about time I heard from you,” and “Come meet me at the Neighborhood Playhouse.” So we met. She was angry because I hadn’t checked in with the company. She’d given away my favorite role—Joan the Maid [in Seraphic Dialogue]—because I hadn’t been there. So I quit. What did you do? Where did you go? I think a little bit more Agnes. West Side Story was coming back to town. I had auditioned for it already and been turned down because the role of Anybodys had gone [to Lee Becker Theodore], and Mr. [Jerome] Robbins didn’t think I was right for the other girls. When the national tour came back to Broadway in 1960, I got Anybodys—and that changed the course of everything. You took over for Lee? Lee had been on tour with a bad knee. They had replaced her and decided they didn’t like the person they replaced her with, so I got on tour before they came back. They set me up for a few months, and then I was in it.

How long did you play Anybodys? Eight months, I think. I was with it for the reopening in 1960. It was amazing. You can’t top that show. You just can’t. Why do you think it has lasted so long? It’s about something important and that both kids and adults care deeply about. The music is undeniably sensational. The choreography is brilliant. There you have it. Were you aware of how groundbreaking that choreography was at the time you were doing it? Not really. I saw everything from a performer’s point of view at that point in life. It was quasijazz. Robbins never had a jazz lesson in his life. It was kind of street balletic: it was street, but you had to have a ballet technique to do it. He just took the street and made it into what it became. It was certainly revolutionary. I think it was. Well, for Broadway, certainly. There was nothing like that. Isn’t You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown the show where you moved from performing to choreographing? Arthur Whitelaw, who produced it OffBroadway down at Theatre 80, offered me the role of Patty in that show. I said no, I wanted to play Lucy. There was no way I could sing it, but I thought I’d do well with it. I only got to do Lucy because I agreed I’d assist the director/ choreographer [Joseph Hardy]. One weekend, when I was performing Lucy with half a voice left, I heard the applause for a Bob Balaban number I had choreographed, and I realized then I liked choreographing as much as performing. You also came to the rescue of Whitelaw’s next show—Minnie’s Boys—when the director couldn’t control the star, Shelley Winters. The director left. I took over, took it into the Imperial, just to get it into the theatre. I knew I wouldn’t stay there, but I knew how to tech it and figure it out. They brought in a new director, and we parted ways amicably. It was fine. It got me The Me Nobody Knows. There was a little blurb in Variety saying that I was off Minnie’s Boys, and then the producers of The Me Nobody Knows called me to choreograph their show. When did Grease first enter your consciousness?

It happened when the producers [Kenneth Waissman and Maxine Fox] and the writers Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey came over and played the score for me. There was no worse snob of the theatre than my husband, Bill Becker, and he was there. Bill heard it and said, “You’ve got to do this.” I said, “I don’t even like it much.” The producers and writers talked to me for a while, and then Bill came out to say goodbye when they were leaving. After they left, he repeated it: “You’ve got to do this.” I’d been offered some other musical. I forget what it was. It was small. I thought it would be very advantageous for me to do. But Bill loved Grease. I never knew why. He stood up for it, and he convinced me.

Making sure that the number you’re doing helps the story remain alive or actually “go ahead.” I have ideas and themes, but I work off the actors. You get what they can do, not what they can’t do. I want to know what they’re comfortable doing. Then, you can make them reach outside their comfort zone, but you’re not forcing something on performers who have ideas and actions that come from their own bodies.

I create it on them—keeping in mind what step I want to use, or what movements I want to use, or what language I want to use. A Charleston on John Travolta looks different than a Charleston on Richard Gere. They’re different vibes, so you adjust it to their bodies. I’m sort of known for creating characters and that’s because I work off of the actors—not imposing what I want them to be for me.

I’ve never done shows with big choruses and tap dances in them. I’m not good at that. I can do a quick chorus job, but it has to be about something. It has to have a reason for being there. I’m not very good at “show-off dancing.” That’s not where I was brought up.

How did your work in television come about?

Grease was very important to all of us who did it because we felt that it encapsulated the high school experience. I don’t care where you went to school or when you went to high school: it still had the agonies of teenagers in high school. You could pick out anybody you knew in your high school class, and they would fit into one of those characters—not necessarily as a greaser, but in the relationships between people. There’s always a Sandy. There’s always a Danny.

How do you prepare for rehearsal?

It’s about the relationships of high school kids, no matter where they are. Our cast used to do these terrible improvs where you had to replay your own experience at the prom, whether you had a date or you didn’t. We all had our backstories, and they all went in there. None of us were greasers. To start with, the Grease cast was a bunch of people from regional theatre— well-trained actors who maybe danced a little bit. Timmy Meyers, who [originated the role of] Kenickie, couldn’t move a muscle. He found his walk when I said, “Why don’t you imitate Mick Jagger’s strut?” When you did the movie of Grease, did you base your choreography on what you did on stage? Yes, but it’s totally different. A camera shot is circular, and a proscenium certainly is not. The greasers in Chicago when they first mounted it were 20 times tougher even than when we did it in New York. By the time we did the movie, Grease was not about tough kids on the worst side of Chicago—it was almost suburban, and we had palm trees, which I hated! On the other hand, the movie did keep that whole feeling of high school kids’ relationships. And that is the secret—I swear to you—of Grease. I am proud of the dancing and singing. I am happy that it’s become iconic. But the secret is how the kids behave with each other. It hasn’t changed. What storytelling elements do you strive to get across in your choreography?

I come in with what I think I want to do, work on the actors and dancers, and take it from there with a good arranger. I don’t have set things I want. Just a theme and maybe a few combinations for the start of something—a certain kind of dance language either of the period or of the moment where they’re ready to kill each or love each other. I was well trained in acting as well as dancing. From Graham on up, it’s always influenced me. Do you begin by seeing bodies within an imagined space, or do you work off of what the director or set designer says the space will look like? Space, for me, happens by content. Martha Graham used to make us simply walk a diagonal across the studio and say your name as you came across. It was the hardest thing in the world to do! What she cared about was the pull from way over left, up left to down right. What I remember—and it influences me all the time—is that I may be going over to stage right downstage, but I’m also being pulled from where I came from. There is always the double pull. The space around you is not just where you are. It’s where you’re opening it up or leaving it. Martha would stop you in rehearsal if you didn’t have that sense of double pull and say, “It means nothing. You’re just running around.” I came in to rehearse Saint Joan with her one day, and the company accompanist said, “You’re in trouble.” I said, “Why?” He said, “You’ll find out.” She took out all the leaps and said they didn’t mean anything. “I don’t know why you’re jumping around.” They came back right before dress rehearsal with more depth. How important is it for you to know the bodies and skill sets of the cast you’re working with at the start, or do you create the choreography and then implement it on the dancers?

Joe Raposo, [musical supervisor and arranger] from Charlie Brown, composed a lot of music for The Electric Company. While I was doing Grease, he had me commuting uptown to 67th Street to do The Electric Company with Cosby and all of them. So I learned to work fast. I also learned to keep on point and not drift away from it. Otherwise, you just lose your audience. What was it like choreographing Saturday Night Live? Oh, I loved it. It was fast and furious because you never knew what you were going to do. You weren’t sure what you were going to have on until Wednesday night. There was a meeting on Monday where the writers would all say what they wanted to write. [The producer] Lorne Michaels would tell them by 11 o’clock that night. They would write like mad— sometimes musical ideas, mostly not. I used to beg for musical ideas. I did that show for seven or eight years. Give me a musical idea. Well, the one that became famous was “Dancing in the Dark,” a parody created for Steve Martin and Gilda Radner. Look it up on YouTube. It’s good. It was an idea from the writer Marilyn Miller. “King Tut” was another one. They wanted Steve to do his own version of King Tut, so we made it up on the spot. The choreography was always off of the actors. What happened was that by the time they decided that they were either going to do that one or this one, you maybe had three or four hours on Thursday or Friday, and the next thing you knew it was SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE! Tell me about working on Boardwalk Empire. Five years of that show. I loved it. Even though I knew about television, was very comfortable with cameras, and had done a dozen movies, I had to get used to working in a different way. My dances were in the background for a dramatic moment; the movement was for scene setting. You never just stopped for a number. WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

Patricia Birch on the set of Boardwalk Empire PHOTO c/o Patricia Birch

A lot of my work took place in clubs where there were meetings going on at tables or at a party where there was a reason why people were dancing around. There was always something else going on, so I worked very closely with the directors and cinematographers on how to make it all of a piece.

Brent Carver in Parade, directed by Harold Prince + choreographed by Patricia Birch PHOTO Joan Marcus

What surprises you most? I like to see special language on stage. I loved American Idiot. I loved the approach to it. I loved the whole look of it. I felt like we were watching something modern that young people would relate to. That show was choreographed by a man you’ve said you admire, Steven Hoggett. Sometimes, he’s credited for “choreography,” as with Rocky, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and sometimes, he’s credited for “movement,” such as with The Crucible, Once, and Peter and the Starcatcher.

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Whatever you call it, it’s what the best choreographers do. Otherwise, we’re doing those same airplane turns. I think he works sort of like I do. Whatever he does has to do with bodies, body language, storytelling, and shapes. I love shapes. I think shapes say a lot.

What projects are you juggling these days? Orphan Train is my passion. It’s a musical with a true 19th-century reference point: America’s first national experiment in foster care, in which 250,000 children were taken off the streets of New York and sent by train to adoptive families in the Midwest. We presented it for two days in Grand Central Station a few years ago. The sound was terrible, but everything else was great. Now we’re trying to do a “Heartland Tour” across the country to Union Station in Los Angeles to raise money for foster-home agencies. In June, I did a little show at Signature called Sweetie. It was about survival in the Jim Crow era, and it looks like it might move forward. Another one I’m developing right now with the writers is based on a 1928 silent movie called The Road to Ruin. It’s in the public domain now, so I may use bits and pieces of it in the show. It’s about guys who used to take movies around, show them in tents, and get the parents

Orphan Train, directed by Patricia Birch PHOTO Richard Finkelstein

Harold Prince + Patricia Birch PHOTO c/o Patricia Birch

in to see them. The movies they showed sort of lectured them on the horrible things their children are into, but they would do it in a slightly salacious manner. I’m doing this one as a multimedia musical. You’ve done six shows with Harold Prince. I’d call that pretty good chemistry. Hal is amazing, such a visionary. We don’t even have to talk. He tells me what the number is, and I go do it. Then he looks at it. Either he likes it or he has ideas to make it better.

I loved doing Parade. I came up with the idea of playing a game of blind man’s bluff as a defense argument in a courtroom scene, and it worked. Every once in a while, you get a wild idea like that, and you have to trust it. It told the story, and I found the image for it. Pacific Overtures was hard. I’ll never forget when Hal called me and said, “Will you do this?” I said, “What do I know about Kabuki?” I knew nothing. I did research, and I had a wonderful assistant—Haruki Fujimoto— who played Commodore Perry and did the “Lion Dance.” I’d get my kimono and my

Tabi shoes and my fans and meet Haruki twice a week for a month. I looked like a wet butterfly doing it, but I did learn it. Strangely enough, a lot of the motion of that kind of movement was in the Graham technique. Suddenly, I said, “Oh, my God! I see where she got it now.” That was very interesting because she was influenced by her teacher, [modern dance pioneer] Ruth St. Denis, and her work was important in introducing Eastern ideas into dance. I have to be grateful for the training and the people I’ve worked with. If I wasn’t any good or didn’t have a certain style, I’d be letting an awful lot of people—Merce and Martha and Agnes and Hal and Jerry Robbins—down. Sometimes, I wasn’t even aware that I was being trained. I was just doing what they wanted, but by doing what they wanted, I was learning. I am so thankful for my teachers. I truly believe that, for me, choreography is timed behavior. I learned that from being at the feet of genius.

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Teresa Castracane

At the end of this theatre season, Howard Shalwitz will step down from the artistic directorship of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, the Washington, DCbased company he co-founded nearly 40 years ago. During that time, Woolly has produced more than 200 plays (including 78 world and US premieres), commissioned 14 new works from award-winning writers, and earned 45 Helen Hayes Awardsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;earning its national reputation as a leader in the creation and production of new plays. Most artists would be happy to rest on their laurels after these accomplishments, but Shalwitz isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t retiring. As he muses about his next adventures, he spoke with Shana Cooper, a Director-inResidence at Woolly since 2014 who recently joined the faculty at Northwestern University.

Forward Motion AN INTERVIEW WITH

HOWARD SHALWITZ BY

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SHANA COOPER

the work onto the stage. In hindsight, I think we were responding against the influence of “Method” acting, though I’m not sure I identified it that way at the time. I’d been a philosophy major in college and had a master’s degree in teaching, but I hadn’t gone through any formal theatre training. We spent the first half-year of Woolly doing exercises and inventing our own training methodologies to find new language to activate the work and overcome the stuff that was in the air in the late ’70s. We were critiquing the work we were seeing in New York and then bringing that critique into our language at Woolly and trying to figure out how to get to something else.

Tim Getman, Howard Shalwitz + Kimberly Gilbert in The Arsonists, directed by Michael John Garcés PHOTO Scott Suchman

Howard Shalwitz + Shana Cooper at the opening night of Taylor Mac’s Hir

There was a famous quote from David Richards, who was the Washington Post critic back then and who saw all of our early work. He said, “Watching a Woolly actor is like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” We were going to go for it emotionally, also physically, and really activate the work. We would rather run the risk of going too far than of holding back. This past fall I was back on stage for the first time in eight years, in Max Frisch’s The Arsonists at Woolly. I realized how much I’m the embodiment of Woolly’s acting philosophy from those early days, for better or worse. I’m a very nervous actor, very fast, and I develop inside myself a strong sense of impulse—how some words lead to other words lead to other words. You hear something from your scene partner, and you pounce on your response. You aggressively grab hold of your key words—the ones that make the essential points—and let all the other words go. SHANA | Where would you say, speaking both then and now, you find your inspiration for your work as a director?

Howard Shalwitz at the Woolly Bacchanal

SHANA | It’s interesting that you’ve said that Woolly Mammoth began as an actor-driven company. In terms of its national reputation, it’s known for new plays and for being a writer-driven company. And then, in the past few years, directors and designers have taken a stronger lead. I’m curious to hear you talk about that evolution. HOWARD | It is an evolution. Over time at Woolly, different things have had emphasis. But I think you have to do all of them well. We began with a critique of the regional theatre: it was too design-y, too tech-y. In the

early days, a lot of the language between me and Roger Brady—who was the co-founder of the company—was sort of anti-tech. We were influenced by Peter Brook and The Empty Space, Grotowski and the “Poor Theatre” concept. Over time, I came to appreciate the importance of design, but not at first. In terms of acting, a lot of our early language was a critique of what we called the “mumble and wheeze school of acting.” We had this feeling that there was a whole generation of post-Brando, post-James Dean actors who were connecting with their own inner lives and emotions but missing the technique to project

HOWARD | There were many individuals who influenced me and helped to train me because I hadn’t gone through formal training before I started a company. It’s really people who became partners of mine—like you, most recently. An early influence was a director named Grover Gardner, who was a longtime member of our company and a brilliant actor and director. He loved Preston Sturges’ films, those screwball comedies, and was very character-driven and extremely articulate about what the character presents on the surface, and what they hide underneath and cover up. So that long dialogue between us had a big influence. SHANA | I feel like that was at the heart of the work you were doing in the first Woolly Company Lab we did a couple years ago: what is on the surface, what’s underneath. WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

That evolved into a course called Wrestling HOWARD | Yes, but I think my understanding the Text, which was about unpacking the has evolved. Over the last few years, I’ve language of the play on both the micro and been slightly obsessed with making sure macro level. But the idea that really stuck for there’s a clear separation between the actor’s me from that course was a particular approach actions and their emotions. That separation to objectives. I thought there was generally too is where I think the audience actually enters much emphasis on objectives that matched the work, in the tension between intense action on the surface and a river of hidden emotion Howard Shalwitz speaking at the TCG National Conference, 2012 underneath, often running PHOTO Michal Daniel for Theatre Communications Group in the opposite direction. SHANA | Who else influenced the evolution of your work? HOWARD | So many people, but especially members of our artistic staff and company who did many projects and pushed the work forward over a long period of time. Tom Prewitt, our Associate Artistic Director in the ’90s, really lifted our conceptual focus, as did scenic designer Louis Folden. Neither of them thought about plays in realistic terms, and this expanded my way of thinking. In the 2000s, Michael John Garcés brought an intensity and sense of danger to our work, while John Vreeke brought ambitious new ideas to how we use our space, especially in his work with designers Misha Kachman and Colin K. Bills. Inventive writers, such as Nicky Silver, Amy Freed, Sarah Ruhl, and Robert O’Hara, had a big impact. Dramaturg Miriam Weisfeld played a major role in pushing our focus toward big civic conversations. And the list goes on. SHANA | So Woolly has been a 40-year graduate course for you? HOWARD | Yes, that’s probably what has kept me going. In fact, my own teaching is almost an amalgam of all the different things I’ve learned. I’ve evolved a course called 10 Words for Actors and Directors, which is about trying to put what I’ve learned in some logical sequence—how to think about the theatrical event and all of the different layers that build it up. SHANA | Well, that’s the book you’ve been talking about writing! HOWARD | I hope. It’s actually an evolution from a couple of earlier courses. The first course I ever taught was called Thinking Backwards, and it was about how you don’t know what’s coming next on stage, so how do you really listen and react to what came before without presuming that you know the future? How do you spring from what just happened to what’s about to happen?

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conventional ways that audiences are used to being satisfied. And so, these scripts are asking all the artists to find new and different kinds of satisfaction for the audience through the work. The theatre I want to avoid is theatre that spoon-feeds the audience. “Spoon-feeding” is the Woolly word for “it’s too easy.” It connects every dot for the audience and doesn’t challenge them to make any leaps on their own. I’ve always felt there was a relationship between the leaps that you’re asking an audience to take and the potential to really impact them through the work. That’s really what risk means to me. We all have to risk. The audience has to risk, the actors have to risk, the director has to risk, and the writer—the material—has to risk.

where the play was taking you. So I tried to focus actors on objectives that are opposite from where the play is taking you, objectives that your character fails to achieve. Things are always being dragged out of your character’s control, the world is constantly changing, and you’re in a continual struggle to keep up. SHANA | It sounds like the director/actor relationship has been at the very core of your thinking. HOWARD | Yes, absolutely. But it has always surprised me how little the actor side of my brain can help me as a director, and how little the director side of my brain can help me as an actor. They are such different jobs, and they need each other so desperately to succeed. As an artistic director, I think you become hyperaware of how interdependent all the elements of theatre are, including playwriting and design, not to mention the larger sense of purpose and vision that brings everyone together. So many things have to go well for a production to really click. SHANA | I want to talk to you a little bit about risk. You’ve created this theatre that is known for its risk-taking and inclusiveness. I’m curious what it means to you as a director to take risks. HOWARD | When I hear the word “risk,” I first think in terms of scripts that are not necessarily trying to satisfy the audience according to the

Challenge is a word that goes right along with risk. If you go into a project or pick a play where you can visualize exactly what it’s going to be, I’m not actually interested in that play. Whereas if you’re picking something where there’s a genuine puzzle—“Could we pull this off?” “Do we have the skills for it?” “How might we grow as artists in order to figure this out?”—then I get really excited. This may sound strange, but when I see the potential for failure, then I actually see the potential for success as well. SHANA | I love that, in a way, risk is about creating an event where everyone is willing to live in a place of discomfort. HOWARD | It’s that discomfort and a leaning forward to ask, “What’s going on here? What is it?” SHANA | Right! Staying engaged in spite of discomfort. HOWARD | I feel that every discipline in the theatre plays a role in creating that zone of struggle or discomfort. The writer has to not answer every question and has to make room for the audience. Did you read Jordan Tannahill’s Theatre of the Unimpressed? SHANA | I haven’t. It’s on my list. HOWARD | His critique—from a millennial perspective—is that theatre often seems self-enclosed and it’s all bound up like a dead

hanies

truly understands new work

with totally fresh es the piece looks eyes at a play

develops strategies

brainstorms envisions

ickly poses questions

orchestrates ontrol creates a safe space Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns: A PostElectric Play at Woolly Mammoth, directed by Steve Cosson PHOTO Scott Suchman

es wears many hats ensures quality thing, very much the way Peter Brook talked about the deadly theatre of his day. And Jordan is asking the same question Peter Brook was asking: what makes theatre alive?

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That was the question we were asking in the founding Woolly manifesto in 1978. Every theatre has to ask how we are different from film and television, and what is the liveness of theatre. It’s a question that every generation has to re-ask for themselves. For Woolly, it led us to a kind of antirealism stance. That’s not quite fair because some people would say [Bruce Norris’s play] Clybourne Park is a perfectly realistic play and that Danai Gurira’s work is fairly realistic. We certainly have done some realistic work that’s stylistically more in the center. But even when we have, I think it is work that’s had plenty of puzzles and refuses to spoon-feed the audience. But probably the work we’re best known for is pushing away from that realistic center and asking the audience to take leaps in a more radical way. For example, a play like Mr. Burns, where the story leaps forward in time and there’s no immediate logical connection between the acts.

Or Stupid Fucking Bird, which we developed with Aaron Posner, a play that is trying to radically upend the structure of The Seagull and turn it into a very naked engagement with the audience. Early on, we did a lot of European absurdist work by writers like Mrozek, Boris Vian, Pinter, and Dürrenmatt, and I think those left a real imprint on my taste. And it’s interesting to come back to that kind of work with Max Frisch’s The Arsonists right now. It feels like going home. SHANA | It seems that all of these pieces, in some way, have at their core a sense of innovation in them. I was thinking about when we first met. You were prepping the speech you gave at the TCG conference in 2012 about innovation. Clearly, it’s at the heart of so much of the work you’ve created at Woolly, but I’m curious: why that topic? Why did you center there in choosing what to talk about for your speech at a national conference?

HOWARD | At that moment, I had just started to see work in Eastern Europe, and I was dazzled by the level of experimentation in so many of the productions. I was seeing some of the greatest directors in the world in a theatre

culture that thrives on reinvention and that is more director-focused. And that got me very, very excited. There was a lot of dialogue around my TCG speech, but there was also some pushback against the concept of innovation, such as, “Who can say what innovation is? You don’t really know everybody who’s come before. You know, there’s no way to really know if the work you’re doing is particularly novel.” I think innovation really has to be evaluated in relation to who you are and what your circle is and who the artists are. But I think it’s also about the unknown. If you’re not taking chances on work that you don’t already know how to do, then you’re not growing as an artist. You’re not asking your audience—your community—to grow. So whether the word is “innovation,” “exploration,” or “risk-taking,” they’re the same thing to me. What was useful about the word innovation is that it asked, “Well, what is the methodology? What are the circumstances that make it possible for groups of artists to come together and ask more innovative questions or challenge one another toward more unknown kinds of work?” WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

“

...I think it’s also about the unknown. If you’re not taking chances on work that you don’t already know how to do, then you’re not growing as an artist. You’re not asking your audience—your community—to grow. So whether the word is ‘innovation,’ ‘exploration,’ or ‘risk-taking,’ they’re the same thing to me.

”

Stupid Fucking Bird by Aaron Posner at Woolly Mammoth, directed by Howard Shalwitz PHOTO Stan Barouh

Cody Nickell in Claire Barron's Baby Screams Miracle at Woolly Mammoth, directed by Howard Shalwitz PHOTO Scott Suchman

To students going into the field of theatre— either high school students, but especially students in college or grad school—I always say, “There is no field of theatre for you to plug yourself into. The field is this river that is always changing and always evolving. Your job as an artist, no matter what part of the field you’re in, is to ask yourself how you’re going to contribute to the forward motion of that river and to the evolution of it. Not how you’re going to plug into some existing thing.” The field is not the body of work. It’s the forward motion of the work and the continuous exploration of new ways of doing things and new ways of connecting with audiences. SHANA | I love that. HOWARD | Roger and I used to say all the time that, “If you don’t offend somebody with every show, you’re probably not doing anything very significant.” But a more benign way of saying it is, “If you don’t surprise your audiences with every show, you’re probably not doing...” Surprise is an essential ingredient that makes audiences want to lean forward and engage. It’s not just novelty for novelty’s sake. When you start a theatre in a community where a lot of people are coming to see every show, you want that relationship to feel as though it’s never static.

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SHANA | The challenge to the artists to create a new theatrical vocabulary. HOWARD | That’s what I think of when I imagine the best of European work: that there’s a longer timetable that allows the whole team to participate in many different parts of the process. As compared to the assembly line approach, where you separate out all the parts and where the likelihood of innovation is lower because you don’t make time for the dialogue. The innovation comes from the conversation. SHANA | This is a great transition to talk a little bit more about the company lab that we created at Woolly. It was one more step on this journey of getting off the assembly line and creating more nontraditional avenues for artists to get in a room together and explore and investigate the questions about the work. Could you give a brief description of what the company lab is and how it relates to the roots of Woolly as well as the current state of the work? HOWARD | My first real success as a director very much grew out of a lab process. (My first big failure did as well, but let’s skip that for now!) The success was in 1981 at Woolly with a play called The Kramer—an early Mark Medoff play. It was about a malevolent character who infiltrates the life of a Washington temp agency. We read the play and gave ourselves the time to play with different ideas. At some point, I had the idea to try casting the title role with three actors simultaneously and have them all on stage together. They were very different actors, but we did a lot of experiments with simultaneous gestures, like they all scratched their noses at the same time. It was pretty funny, but the real experiment was to draw out of the behavioral and subtextual life of the play by having three actors in the role instead of one, and it became the animating idea behind the production. It’s interesting that as Woolly went along and we started to get into whole seasons and the more conventional way of basically keeping a theatre going, we found it harder and harder to have the time for that kind of exploratory activity. We continued to some extent with the company we formed in 1986. For several years, we all got together, read scripts, and picked plays together. Even that was a useful process and created an esprit de corps and a sense of “we’re all in this together.” But getting back to that lab work really took until your TCG residency over the last few years. Our basic idea about the Company Lab

was that it can be anything. All that matters is that you have some really talented people who bring an agenda into the process, which is to explore and learn something new and to share it with other artists. It can be a free-form lab that is about pure learning and sharing, and where ideas and sparks might fly that lead to ideas for projects. Or it can be a more targeted lab around the specific challenges of a given project. To me, the sine qua non is that you have designers and actors together in the room, because that’s the connection that I think doesn’t happen in the assembly line process at all. And it seems to spark everybody’s imaginations. SHANA | Absolutely. That’s become clear to me after these last couple of labs: there is a way that actors, designers, and directors experience a liberation of the imagination in a lab process that doesn’t happen when you have the deadline of a production—when you know that, in three weeks, we’ll be moving into the theatre. There’s a more focused, rigorous creative process that could happen in a room when you have that deadline, which is wonderful, but they’re two different kinds of thinking and imagining, and they’re both so vital. HOWARD | It’s not even the amount of time in the lab; it’s that it is separated by at least a number of weeks from the official rehearsal process and that everyone has the feeling that if we wasted our time, we’d still have our rehearsal process. It’s almost a feeling that there’s nothing at stake, that it’s pure exploration.

we’re going to build this around? And what are the things that would actually be useful or exciting for us to experiment with?” We’ve had to educate artists—even company members—that they could bring ideas to us as a company and that those ideas would be interesting to the rest of us. Artists aren’t used to being empowered in that way. The devising field works that way, but the more conventional resident theatre field doesn’t. I feel that part of our job is to open people’s minds. It’s about breaking everybody out of the DNA, the crust that’s been formed over them because of the structure of how we work in the normal assembly line process where those norms of who talks to who are important. But they can be limiting in a lab process. SHANA | Liberating everyone from their traditional roles in the artistic process. HOWARD | I think Woolly’s Connectivity initiative has functioned that way as well. As part of the theatre’s community engagement and outreach planning, we often ask playwrights, “Who’s the audience you imagine you wrote this play for? What’s the conversation you’d like to have with that audience?” And playwrights often respond, “What?” It’s as if no one has ever asked them those questions before. They seem like such obvious questions, but there are so many ways, as a field, in which we don’t engage with the fundamental purpose of the play. Who is it for, what would be the kind of ideal outcome, what would you want people to be talking about when they left the theatre?

We’ve also learned that the labs are not huge investments. They’ve been, at the most, a week. Some, like our lab for Baby Screams Miracle by Clare Barron, have only been a couple of days.

SHANA | Just thinking about the future a little bit: you’ve talked some about your conversations with emerging artists, young artists. If you could grant wishes or wave a magic wand and make anything happen, what would you want for today’s emerging artists?

In relation to the scope of Woolly’s whole budget, they’re not huge investments, but they’re game-changers. The harder thing is scheduling. You know what we went through. We had to twist ourselves in knots to find time on the calendar where we could get at least a majority of the artists together. And then we had to be willing to substitute some artists— especially actors, sometimes designers—for the sake of keeping the work moving forward.

HOWARD | I am still a real believer in companies. I have done some good things with the Woolly company and some wrongheaded things. I don’t know that it’s ever been exactly what I wanted it to be. It’s always been a compromise between the ideal vision I might have and the realities of the freelance structure we live in.

SHANA | But I think that’s right: that a critical mass of collaborators in the room still results in such a deep benefit that it’s okay to compromise in that area to make it happen. HOWARD | The other thing we’ve discovered is that labs, especially the more free-form labs, are pretty time-intensive to plan. There’s the process of asking, “Who are the key artists

But when I look back, growth always comes around long-term relationships. So what I wish for people is those kinds of partnerships or artistic communities that have some staying power over a period of time. Where people really learn and grow from one another. When I say “companies,” I mean groups of artists that represent multiple theatre disciplines together: writers, directors, WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

Taylor Mac’s Hir at Woolly Mammoth, directed by Shana Cooper PHOTO Scott Suchman

actors, designers. We’ve always been a somewhat playwright-centric theatre culture in the United States and, obviously, I’m incredibly proud to be part of the new play field. But I think that theatre is this stew that comes from all of those disciplines together and the excitement of long-term relationships where people challenge one another and grow together over time. So that’s the best that I could wish for anybody: to find a home like that. SHANA | That makes me want to cry, Howard. That’s beautiful. It makes me tearful because it is very, very hard to find. HOWARD | At Woolly, there are many people who have grown with our company— certainly actors, certainly directors, designers, the writers we’ve done multiple projects with—who have a feeling that Woolly has a particular sensibility that they can lean into. When they’re at Woolly, they can take certain kinds of risks on all those levels that they couldn’t necessarily take at every other theatre. It’s hard to feel that in the United States. We’re so big. We’re in so many isolated pockets. But I think each theatre can create that kind of home on its own terms for at least some artists.

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SHANA | It’s one of the inspiring things about Woolly as a company. It really is a company of multiple generations. There is a uniting factor of artists searching for a home where they can risk. But then, we do evolve over time. One of the things I love is the conversation happening between generations with the bridge of a collective desire to search for the unknown. HOWARD | I think having a company also reinforces the idea that theatre is about a real dialogue. You need a group of collaborators to have an internal dialogue with, and then you need to expand that dialogue out to the larger community. You first have to challenge yourselves as artists, and that allows you to challenge others. Theatre doesn’t necessarily have a specific social change agenda, but I think it has an agenda to shake people up so that then they think about things in new and different ways. SHANA | I wonder what the next adventure will be. HOWARD | I’ve been puzzling over that a little bit. For me, I just knew that it was the right time to not be running the theatre anymore. I felt like the contributions that I could make to the field were different from just continuing to run the company and that someone else could do that successfully.

The list of stuff that I want to do is long. I want to keep directing and acting, and definitely do more teaching and writing. There are some important issues in the field that I want to think more about and talk about. I hope I can do some advocacy work on behalf of the field. There are a lot of things about the way we support theatre in our country—or don’t support it—that are disturbing to me. SHANA | Do you imagine that that advocacy work might play out in DC in a political way? HOWARD | I don’t know. I feel that I need to talk to people who know more about it than I do and ask myself where could I plug in—where could I be helpful and push the conversation forward. I’m asking myself what my responsibility is now, at this point in my career. Is there something that people in my position actually have to do to help the field move forward? I don’t quite know the answer, but I’ll figure out my own version of that.

Chris Coleman + Dámaso Rodríguez ALL PHOTOS Kate Szrom

Laura Penn

MAKING THEATRE SHAPING COMMUNITIES A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS COLEMAN + DÁMASO RODRÍGUEZ On September 26, 2017, SDC sponsored a conversation in Portland, Oregon, between Chris Coleman, Artistic Director of Portland Center Stage, and Dámaso Rodríguez, Artistic Director of Artists Repertory Theatre. The conversation was moderated by SDC Executive Director Laura Penn. (Subsequent to the symposium, it was announced that Coleman would be leaving Portland to become Artistic Director of the Denver Center Theatre Company, starting in May 2018.) This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation. WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL 25

LAURA | Dámaso and Chris are both stage directors of national acclaim, who both founded theatres: Chris founded Actor’s Express in Atlanta, Dámaso the Furious Theatre in Los Angeles. The breadth of their work is truly extraordinary. Between the two of them, they have directed plays by every classic playwright you can image: Shakespeare, Shaw, Odets, Hellman, Wilder, Williams. And they’ve also directed plays by many of the leading playwrights of our time. Both practice their craft while serving as artistic directors, artistic leaders here—Chris arriving in 2000 and Dámaso in 2012. We’re here to talk about that interplay, how they braid their own personal artistry with their community leadership, what is the interplay between theatres here in Portland, and what opportunities and challenges does artistic leadership bring them as individual directors.

I’m going to get some training and start assistant directing. I stopped calling myself an actor at that point and started to direct. LAURA | I imagine that you have affection for most, if not all, of the productions you’ve worked on. But if you had to pick a couple that were favorites, what would they be? CHRIS | For me, it’s always the one that has challenged me or stretched me most recently. That would be Astoria because I adapted it and directed it, and it was huge scale, and it’s over two parts. It was something I hadn’t done, and it was both scary and super stimulating and rewarding. DÁMASO | I feel the same way. I did a production here in Portland of the musical Cuba Libre, which is bilingual. It was a brandnew play, something we’d been developing

To begin, when did you each know you were a director?

for four years and was really large scale. It was off-site, not even at Artists Rep, and it almost killed me while being one of the experiences I’m most grateful for. My family’s from Cuba. I’ve sort of—my whole career—been waiting to get into that and tell a story that personal.

DÁMASO | I wanted to be an actor, and I stuck with that into my twenties. But in college, I was involved in an improv comedy group. At the end of my freshman year, this graduating senior endowed me with the responsibility of taking control of the group moving forward. Part of that was leading the rehearsals and stepping up as a director while also being a performer.

There are these key moments. The first time I ever directed in a large venue, which was the Pasadena Playhouse, a big traditional proscenium house, after years of just working with my friends in tiny little spaces. So jarring and challenging and scary, but then, ultimately, you realize you’re a transformed artist when it’s over.

Later, in LA, I decided that maybe it’s the process of making the work that is so seductive, fuels me, and makes me want to be an artist, and not necessarily the adrenaline rush of performance that I think real actors have and crave. I thought about it, and I said

LAURA | If you were able to go back to something that you’d worked on and take another run at it, something you’ve directed before, what would it be, and how would you approach it differently?

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DÁMASO | I’d go back to those plays I was directing at the very beginning of my career. Sometimes I think back on a show that is still very vivid for me, but I realize I hadn’t even directed five plays at the time I was taking on this thing. I directed Scenes from the Big Picture, by Owen McCafferty. I was excited about the scale of it, and it had a cast of 21. I was totally not equipped to direct that show. I would have done such a better job now. LAURA | What was your impulse to lead outside the room, the founding of your theatres? Chris Coleman + Dámaso Rodríguez

CHRIS | Summer of 1985. I got my first opportunity to teach and direct a fulllength play. It was at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. I was a year and a half out of undergrad, and I had never taught before. I thought it might be interesting but was totally surprised and delighted by how engaging it was. I was directing this group of 15-, 16-, and 17-yearolds in a production of The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht, which is what you should do with 16- and 17-year-olds. I just thought I could do this for the rest of my life.

CHRIS | Maybe The Seagull, which I think I did my second year here. I think Chekhov is so hard for us, as Americans, to kind of taste. But I feel like we had some sense of it in the rehearsal hall, and then a lot of it evaporated once we hit the stage for a variety of reasons. So that’s definitely one I would take a crack at again.

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CHRIS | It probably first came to me right when I left for college, when my mom gave me this book called Reference Point, by Arthur Hopkins. He was a famous director in the ’20s and ’30s. It was about the dream of the regional theatre movement, a series of lectures he gave before 1948, when the American theatre was Broadway.

It was a dream of having a group of artists in a community, and artisans, who would do the great plays. And the costume designer would live in the community and have a relationship with the milkman and so on. It was very romantic, but it inspired me, and it stayed with me. I had this notion of gathering a group of friends and having a small space like this and doing cool, wacky plays. When I got the courage to try to do that, which was right after graduate school, the impulse was twofold. I wanted a place where I could practice my craft for a decade. I wanted a place where I could do a lot of the plays I wanted to do and try to get better at this thing. And I wanted to try to have a conversation with the community. I wanted to do a body of work that would engage a community in the dialogue.

DÁMASO | I did a production of Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets, in high school when I was 16. It was the second play I ever did, and so I got introduced to theatre pretty early with the idea of socially relevant work and this idea of the Group Theatre and ensemble, and these young people, who started this theatre company in the 1930s and then ultimately revolutionized American culture because they all affected the theatre world but also the film world and approaches to acting that are still with us. So just that idea of being in a company and making something almost like a rock band—it reminded me of that. That just felt like what being a theatre artist would entail for me. So I always knew I’d be involved in a company. That’s what I aspired to. I hooked up with friends I went to college with who ended up in Chicago and then some other folks, and we ended up with a core group of six people that decided to found Furious Theatre. We produced a few times a one-off without being really organized, but then, in LA, we produced a show as Furious Theatre that was a total disaster. We couldn’t get anyone to come see it; we became disillusioned by doing theatre in LA. We all decided to pursue commercial work and film and all that.

you did, what did you enjoy about your work at your companies, outside of the rehearsal hall, outside of that honing of the craft? CHRIS | I learned to enjoy raising money. My mom was an actor, and when I told her I wanted to start a theatre company, she said, “Well, you probably could do that. The schmoozing part is something you’ll have to learn.” I could never sell myself as an actor—that was very embarrassing to me—but trying to get people engaged in supporting the company, I could totally do that. I understood how to do that. The thing you have to do, if you’re running a company, is figure out how you gather a group of people around an idea. You do it badly, then you try something else,

Dámaso Rodríguez + Laura Penn

About a year and a half later, a couple of the founders came and said, “Let’s do this thing.” And so we decided to organize, to incorporate as a nonprofit, and we were looking for our niche. How could we be significant, especially in the Wild West landscape of Los Angeles, where they’ve got 1,000 plays opening every year and all kinds of one-off productions? We thought, “We’re going to do premieres, new work and stuff that’s really visceral,” like the Group Theatre, where the experience of seeing a play was first emotional and then, later, intellectual. I was the only person that raised my hand and said, “I’m a director.” LAURA | It seems like you guys also have hit on this 10,000-hour idea as well, that the mastery comes from 10,000 hours of practice, and that it gave you that opportunity. Assuming

and then maybe, if you’re lucky, you have board members or community leaders that teach you or model for you. The most important thing in leadership of theatres—of anything, really—is how do you articulate what the future looks like, what our values are, what we care about? What’s different about this organization than the Red Cross or the symphony or something else in the community? And what does our future look like? What are we living toward? Your ability to envision that and share that with others and get other people excited about it or help craft it—that is a really, really important thing. I vividly remember, maybe seven to eight years into Actor’s Express, we had a managing director who had his MBA—of which I was very suspicious—and he said, “We need to do a strategic plan process.” I dragged my

feet. I felt that sounded so corporate and so terrible, and he kind of forced me into the room. We had to envision what we would look like in five or 10 years, and we did this whole plan. And, lo and behold, within two years, we had realized 90 percent of it, and I was like, “Holy shit! This stuff works, you know?” The power in that—the power in gathering a group and brainstorming about what the future might look like and then really breaking that down into achievable pieces—is something I had about making plays, but I did not have it about how to build an organization. That is definitely something I still find really engaging. DÁMASO | What I enjoyed or what I’ll always remember—and I know this can’t be recreated—is the camaraderie of those times, the working together, ultimately with your best friends, and doing everything, doing whatever it took to make the play happen. The crazy all-nighters and stopping rehearsal and then building the sets and writing press releases together and figuring all of that out. There are good times and bad times around all of that, but the kind of electricity and possibility of just starting something from scratch with your peers is really—I highly recommend it. What I carry more than anything is the problem solving. We used to call it “What’s the scheme?” in the best sense. How are we going to do this? We don’t have any money. As reported in the Los Angeles Times when we had a feature story on us, we lacked “prepossessing academic credentials,” all of us, and all the connections that come with that. So we went on a retreat and said, “We’ve got to have money, but we don’t know anybody and don’t have any money, so what are we going to do?” And we said, “Okay, well, we’re each going to put in $2,500 a year, the six of us for three years so that we can get started.” But a few of us were working in the internet world for day jobs, and they had double matching programs, so we were able to turn $15,000 into $45,000 to start. We started calling departments of culture for the various cities and neighborhoods in Greater LA and said, “We’re looking for a space WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

we could use for a little bit.” And guess what? The city of Pasadena—somebody pointed us in the right direction to this building. It was an old plastics factory that was temporarily being operated by the Armory Center for the Arts, which is a visual arts multimillion-dollar organization that was renovating their downtown Pasadena space, and they had thousands and thousands of square feet. The executive director met with us, I’m not sure why. He doesn’t either. We told him what we were trying to do. We wanted to produce three plays. Right before this talk today, Chris and I were updating each other on what’s going on with our theatres, and it’s what many of our conversations are about—what are we up against, what challenge are we trying to overcome? I learned that you have to find through your leadership and your own tenacity and your own desire to protect a personal interest or your group’s project. You have to come up with a scheme, and we had a whole bunch of them through the years. LAURA | Your arrivals in Portland seem to me like they were very different. Chris, you were scaling up into a theatre in search of an identity, having a few years outside of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival relationship. What did the intersection of your personal artistic vision and ambition and the organization’s priorities look like? You were introducing yourself to the community as an artist and a leader, and did you ever feel tension between those two things? CHRIS | I think that intersection probably looked like a car crash in many ways. It was very funny because I was coming from a tiny organization that had been the edgiest theatre in Atlanta to a larger organization that was still trying to figure out what it was going to be. It was really seven years from becoming an independent organization. When they hired me, in the second interview, they said, “Well, is there anything that you would say to us?” I said, “Don’t hire me unless you’re ready to support the kind of work I’m really passionate about,” because I had a sense that, at the time, the two hot arts organizations in the city that had a lot of buzz were PICA (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art) and Oregon Ballet Theatre. There was this sense that they had their finger on the pulse of what Portland was going to become, and my sense was that if you’re going to succeed, you had to lean forward more in terms of the programming. So I said, “Don’t hire me unless you’re ready to support that.” And they were ready. The search committee was, the board was, and the staff was.

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But nobody had asked the audience, and the audience was not ready. I remember two calls during my first show. One woman said, “Well, if this is what he’s going to do, they should just send him back to Atlanta.” And another woman said, “I depend on you to be the boring stodgy theatre.” It was definitely a process for me to figure out how to dance with the community and how quickly I could lean forward and make sure that there’s somebody still behind me or who wants to dance with me. So it took a while. I don’t think we completed that process until we moved into the Armory, when the new building, psychologically, let the community let go of the [company's] birth from OSF and say, “Oh, that’s who they are.” LAURA | Dámaso, you also served as Associate Artistic Director at the Pasadena Playhouse, which is a flagship LORT theatre, while you were scheming. How did that experience at Pasadena with Furious inform your approach to entering Artists Rep, where you had a different challenge, coming into a theatre that had a very distinct identity through a founder? DÁMASO | After we did five plays in that warehouse at Furious, it was scheduled for demolition, and we were looking for another free home. Through luck and timing, we got invited to the Pasadena Playhouse for a meeting. And the Executive Director, Lyla White, and the Artistic Director, Sheldon Epps—this was about an $8 million budget organization at the time—said, “We have this second stage that we don’t really use because we can’t afford to use it. We’d like for you guys to activate that space. We’ll give you the keys to it and four years of time there, at least, and an office, and do your counterprogramming to what we’re doing on the main stage.” I was then directing constantly, and we were producing constantly, on the campus of a big LORT theatre, where the artistic director was seeing everything I did. That led to a rapport with Sheldon, and eventually he invited me to another surprising meeting, where he said, “I’ve got this big grant to create an associate artistic director, and it’s you. And you get to direct one show on the main stage”—just six months earlier, he had told me [this] would be very unlikely because there aren’t very many slots and all that—“and then keep running your company and get involved in the New Play Development Program here.” Sheldon gave me the opportunity to demystify how a big arts institution operates. I had never been in those kinds of board meetings and fundraising asks and interacting with a large staff. The great gift was they weren’t using that title for me to run a program that had a whole bunch of administrative tasks associated with it. It was really a chance to learn.

Artists Rep sits right there in the middle, the same kind of origin story as Furious Theatre. It’s the longest-running professional theatre in Portland. It’s been around somehow five years longer than Portland Center Stage, because PCS was born out of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Allen Nause, the Artistic Director before me, was there for 25 years. The previous five years of Artists Rep it was almost an artists’ collective, six founders, very similar to the Furious story. So I felt like I understood the origin story, which was really helpful. It sat, even at a $2.4 million budget when I started, somewhere in between a flagship big regional theatre and the scrappy local startup company. I felt like I was arriving into a job where I could be myself, and I think that’s very important. I went further maybe in that first year than the audience was ready for me to do, but mainly out of some insecurity. And I mean that in a good way. I was totally an outsider. I’d never been to Portland until I was a finalist for the job. But in that first year, I realized I was being evaluated in real time. So each show was everything I was as an artist and every intention I had for the theatre. LAURA | There’s a little over a decade between your arrival, Chris, and your arrival, Dámaso. Portland has changed dramatically in that decade. But there’s always been kind of “Portland likes Portland,” right? Do you think your experiences arriving as outsiders and artists with very distinctive artistic visions were different from each other’s? CHRIS | I think part of it is about the city and part of it is about the culture of the organization. And I think that’s true in most cases. I don’t know if you ever read Carey Perloff’s book about her entry into the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. You’d think that San Francisco is the most liberal place in America, but ACT’s culture was not. It’s really about the culture built inside—but, that said, I remember vividly a conversation I had with Dámaso’s predecessor, Allen Nause. Maybe I’d been here a year and a half, and I was still mystified about how you connect in this community, both socially and artistically. Allen was very thoughtful about it. He said, “You know, I think it’s pioneer mentality. I think people hang back, first to see if you’re going to stick around, and second, they’re like, ‘Hey, I figured it out on my own. Let’s see how you do.’” And so once he told me that, I stopped taking it personally. It was just like, “Okay, it’s just going to take some time.” Then you figure it out.

Chris Coleman, Dámaso Rodríguez + Laura Penn

“

Having a history and having a real visceral understanding of the director’s work by seeing their work is essential. You’ve got to create that and you can’t rush it.

”

DÁMASO RODRÍGUEZ

LAURA | I’m interested in what you look for in directors that you invite to come work at your theatres. Where in your planning process does the director come into the conversation? CHRIS | To me, most often, it comes when I know what the play is. The project is first, the director is second. Our list right now is, like, 50 plays that we’ll have to whittle down to figure out the ones we want to budget for next season. But there are a couple that I think, “Okay, that’s a very special piece and there are only a couple of people in my head that I would like to do that.” So there’s a director kind of floating around with that. Actually, as the list narrows, I’m starting to think about that. I’m always very selfish, and I always start with the things that I want to do. Of course, if I want to do everything, I know it’s probably a good season, and then I have to decide which ones I’m going to sacrifice and share with somebody else. And then I have my Associate Artistic Director [Rose Riordan], so I’m also looking to see if there are projects that would make sense for her, might excite her.

DÁMASO | I’m often thinking about the director: who’s aesthetic might this match up with, and who do I want to entrust with this project? Who do I hope will take care of this for me? So much of it is that. I do start usually with what I’m attached to and what I want to do, but sometimes it’s really: would I want to take responsibility for it? Right now, if it’s sort of a big, messy, difficult play or very expensive for some reason, I like that challenge, but I’m also like, “Okay, I need to carry this ball. If it fails, then it’s on me. I need to be in the room every day to help this thing or at least take responsibility for it.” From there, I think my budget really makes it a different equation. It’s a challenging budget for the amount that we’re trying to produce. And aside from our identity being that we hire a lot of local talent in general, it’s also kind of how we budget it. So, I, as an out-oftowner, have not been able to say, “Oh, I know so-and-so’s work from years back.” I can’t match directors up with projects that way on a budgetary level and because we’re prioritizing

other things. But it’s getting easier being here longer because now I’m making relationships. I feel like having a history and having a real visceral understanding of the director’s work by seeing their work is essential. You’ve got to create that and you can’t rush it. I just got hired to direct at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I tell people it’s been a 10-year job interview. I’ve been bumping into Bill Rauch and becoming friends [with him] and then, next thing you know, it feels like we’ve been working together for a long time. I realized, yeah, that’s how it goes. You’ve got to create a real spark of enthusiasm about that person and that project. LAURA | Zelda Fichandler used to talk about her relationship with Alan Schneider, who she felt was one of the most brilliant directors she had ever seen work. Zelda was the Artistic Director of Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and she used to talk about what she learned from watching him work as a director herself, while she was simultaneously shepherding and guiding the work as a producer. WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

I’m curious if you have that experience with directors that come in and work with you. Do you find yourself as the producer, as the director, either learning from or wanting to help guide directors? CHRIS | When I was in Atlanta, I would act in a show every other year. I feel like I learned more in that capacity, actually being in the room and watching somebody else at the helm, and I’ve totally stolen things from the processes of other directors I worked with, as an actor, that I really liked. Is there tension? I mean, many of the directors that I hire are people whose work I’ve seen multiple times. I probably have a relationship with them most of the time. And so having a conversation about what’s in the room or what’s on stage is pretty comfortable. I don’t go in with a yellow pad because I don’t want somebody to come at me with a yellow pad during previews. If it’s a director who’s working here for the first time, I try to take them to dinner before we go into rehearsal, just so that our first conversations about the work are coming out of some sense of dialogue and trust. DÁMASO | The very successful process with a guest director is one in which I’m not really solving any problems or getting too prescriptive or invasive. There’s a lot of conversation on the front end about the play before we agree that this is a good idea to work on this together. Casting is the most intimate process, actually— just sitting together during the casting sessions for hours. Once we get into rehearsal, I want to just drop in at a couple of rehearsal hall runs, where I will give very broad, firstaudience kind of “I want to be your partner, your supporter” feedback or, “What are you trying?” Often, it’s like, “Well, what are you trying to achieve with that moment?” I’ve been in a position as a guest director where someone has given me these really detailed, prescriptive notes, and that is not helpful. As a guest director, I want really broad, general notes that I can then decide for myself all the maybe 100 little adjustments that need to be made to achieve that. I got this really great direction from Sheldon Epps as a host of a guest director. He saw a dress rehearsal, and I actually felt pretty good about it, and then he told me, “I think you need to work on this moment,” and I was like, “Oh, yeah,” you know, this important thing. He said something like, “Act one is hot, but it needs to be cool.” That sent me off thinking about that and going, “What does

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that even mean?” And then, “Oh, yeah. I know what that means.” And then, “Oh, well, in order to do that, I realize it could be I need to change the costume on that, you know, or whatever. It could be I need to work on that opening moment so that it sets it off in a different direction.” LAURA | I think theatres are well cared for by having practicing artists at the center of them, because this is the core work of the institution, and it’s your unique artistic vision as individual artists that becomes manifest through the work. But it’s your capacity to produce that work as well, not as just a producer. How has your work leading the institutions you’re leading now impacted your work as an individual artist? CHRIS | It’s super interesting to me because I have talked to freelance directors around the country that I think are really gifted, who are nervous about the notion of leading an organization because they’re afraid it will be the death of their art. I actually feel the opposite. No one in their right mind would ever have hired me to direct an adaptation of Peter Stark’s Astoria over two seasons. You get to make some choices that no one’s going to ever hire you to do and stretch as an artist. When I left Actor’s Express, I was trying to help them recruit my replacement, and we were getting all these résumés of young or midcareer directors who thought they wanted to run a theatre company. What I realized was there are people who do all new plays or who do all Shakespeare or who do all musicals. I was kind of shocked. So the opportunity to develop the muscles to do a lot of different things is unique, I think, in this seat and something I feel extremely grateful for. DÁMASO | It’s back to that idea of controlling your destiny. There’s real power in the fact that if you can find a way to raise the money and get people behind your vision, you can make whatever idea you have happen. That’s very empowering. I used to think that if I liked something, if a project was feeding me, that’s why we were going to do it. I don’t think like that anymore. I have to go deeper. I have to ask why is it worth all of this community of people getting behind it, the whole staff, raising the money, executing whatever the plan is of the vision, and audience members getting babysitters or rearranging their lives to come into the theatre? That’s changed me. It’s made me be more demanding as to what’s the impulse? What are you trying to do? How are you trying to affect your audience?

LAURA | What inspires you about Portland? CHRIS | Smart audiences. I think it’s a community that’s deeply engaged. Whether it is about resisting the current presidential administration or it’s about the opening of a new dam or the fires in Columbia Gorge, it’s a community that really, honestly cares about its values and how we develop. We’ll go to the streets, or we’ll raise money or let the voices be heard to engage. I think that’s fantastic. DÁMASO | I lived in LA for 14 years, and I was struck by how everyone wants to be an actor or a writer, or they’ve got a band or they want to open up a restaurant and a club, an internet company or whatever it is. When I came to Portland, I realized there’s a different kind of ambition. It’s about the kind of life they want to lead and the kind of world they want to make for themselves, and I found that inspiring from the beginning. There’s this desire to define how you live your life. I don’t know if that’s the pioneer thing, but it was interesting. One of the things that drew me to Portland was the idea of being part of this scene, and part of a theatre scene that was growing, and what was going to be a really relevant theatre in the city in the national conversation about theatre, maybe a place where playwrights are aspiring to get their Portland premiere in the same way they’re setting a goal for themselves to get that Chicago production in the Bay Area and DC. I think Portland is next in that line of major regional theatre cities. I really feel like Chris and I are in this together. I don’t want Artists Rep to be Portland Center Stage or a smaller version of that. I’m trying to carve out our place. So we talk. We ought to talk more, maybe. There’s this great scene around these two companies where, if you’re living in Portland right now and you want to know what the national conversation about theatre is, what contemporary playwriting is in this moment, you’re getting it pretty quickly. CHRIS | I love that you guys are a feature in the community because I agree with Dámaso. When I got to Portland, Seattle and the Seattle theatre scene was where it was at, and there was a lot of work, and there were a lot of jobs, and that’s shifted. It feels like we have the opportunity to become not just a place where there’s cool stuff going on but a place where more people can make a living at it. And that’s my hope: that more of the theatres can grow enough to support more artists and artisans who want to live here.

New York City Ballet rehearsal of Swan Lake with George Balanchine + Suzanne Farrell, choreography by George Balanchine, 1967 PHOTO Martha Swope

Sustaining the Steps of Balanchine & Robbins AN INTERVIEW WITH ELLEN SORRIN WITH

LINDA MURRAY

eorge Balanchine and Jerome Robbins: two titans who shaped the dance world of the 20th century. Both their steps and legacies are protected and interpreted by a group of trusted artists and thoughtful trustees who oversee the trusts that bear their names. Ellen Sorrin, a former stage manager and producer, works as Director of the George Balanchine Trust and is a trustee of the Jerome Robbins Foundation and the Robbins Rights Trust. Sorrin is also the Managing Director of the New York Choreographic Institute at New York City Ballet, the organization once led by both Balanchine and Robbins, followed by Peter Martins.

ELLEN SORRIN | I took the job producing “Dancing for Life,” which is how I met Jerry Robbins. Thirteen dance companies performed on the stage of the New York State Theater on October 5, 1987. It was a trial by fire because, at that time, AIDS was an illness associated with fear and prejudice and there was no support at the beginning. None.

In 1986, Sorrin was working as the general manager for an Off-Broadway play when a friend told her about an event that the dance community was putting together in response to the AIDS crisis. Signing on as the producer, Sorrin was thrown in with the forces that would change her life: Jerome Robbins, Peter Martins, Barbara Horgan, and New York City Ballet. Ms. Sorrin spoke recently with Linda Murray—Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library—about the legacies of Robbins and Balanchine, as well as the Institute’s ongoing work supporting contemporary choreographers.

I took a job company managing a Broadway show because there was no money to pay me. It was really, really difficult until Zack Manna, who worked for AT&T and was very connected to the dance community, said, “I can’t give you any money, but I can pay for an ad in the New York Times.” And that ad sold the event out completely.

As this issue went to press in early January, Peter Martins retired from his position at New York City Ballet in the wake of allegations of misconduct against him.

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Jerome Robbins rehearsing Watermill with Edward Villella at New York City Ballet, choreography by Jerome Robbins, 1971 PHOTO Martha Swope

It was one of those nights that no one who was there will ever forget. Peter Martins, who was the Artistic Director of New York City Ballet with Jerry, came up to me when we were rehearsing and said, “I need you to come and work here because I’m doing an American music festival in the spring.” The next day, I came into the State Theater to pick up my computer. Peter saw me and—I’ll never forget this—sat backwards in a chair and said, “All right. I want you to come and do this.” I said, “Okay,” and that was it. That was October of 1987.

ELLEN | Gilbert was a lighting designer and production manager who was my professor at University of Wisconsin. When I came to New York in 1979, Gilbert was living here. He soon after developed AIDS and died in 1983. We set up an internship in his name at New York City Opera, where he then worked.

In 2000, Peter Martins started the New York Choreographic Institute, which is an affiliate of New York City Ballet. I was the director of education at NYCB at the time. He asked me to set it up, get it up and running. I did and then said, “Okay, well, here it is.” And he said, “Not so fast.”

He was such a mentor. The reason we have continued with the Gilbert Hemsley Lighting Programs for so long is because what he did for us we now are doing for young lighting designers. We see our role as a bridge between the academic and the professional world.

Barbara Horgan—George Balanchine’s personal assistant, executor of his will, and heir—had spoken to me in 1998 about taking over the Balanchine Trust when she retired. I became the director of the trust in 2004, keeping the Choreographic Institute. My office is involved with both initiatives. The Balanchine Trust is committed to his legacy, and the Choreographic Institute is about opportunities for emerging classical choreographers who are starting to make their way. Many of the nowestablished choreographers have participated in the Institute, which is now 17 years old.

It happened in May of 1988, then I left for a couple of months. Peter called me and said, “I want you to come back and work on special projects.” So, between the Dance in America and Live from Lincoln Center programs, the Nutcracker film, and the jazz project Peter did with Wynton [Marsalis], a number of things fell into my area. I was doing special projects here in 1990 when Jerry retired from the company, and I produced his festival.

Over the years, we have expanded our program to include an annual portfolio review. Thirty-two young lighting designers come from universities all over the country and spend a weekend with us. We also have a master class program, a mentorship program, and we still have our original internship, which now is divided among New York City Ballet, the Lincoln Center Festival, Alvin Ailey, and San Francisco Opera.

LINDA MURRAY | I know Gilbert Hemsley was very special to you. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with him?

We have a small board, some of whom knew Gilbert, and we have recently invited two younger designers to join the board because Mark Stanley and I both feel that we’re getting to that point where we want to have people who can run with it in a different way than we have.

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Everyone from Justin Peck to Benjamin Millepied to Christopher Wheeldon to Alexei Ratmansky to Liam Scarlett have come through it. It’s been very rewarding to see them come in and experiment with ideas and spend two weeks in New York. LINDA | I know you put them together with lighting designers.

ELLEN | Well, we do both costumes and lighting. The head of the design department at NYU—an old friend of mine—and I had a conversation about their partnering with the Institute. It’s all conceptual, but it gives the choreographers and designers opportunities to learn one another’s language and to spend every day in the studio together while the choreography is being created. The designers come in and they’re part of the whole process. At the end, they do a presentation. We do one light lab at the beginning of the two-week Institute session, when M.L. Geiger, who runs the lighting design department at NYU, and Mark Stanley or another established lighting designer come in and run a six-hour workshop with the choreographers. We look at what lighting design can do and the richness it brings to dance. Before the second week of the Institute, we go into a small black box theatre. We have swatches of materials that the costume designers think would be suitable for the piece, which are lit by the lighting designers. We bring in the dancers from each piece and light some of the choreography, just to see what it would look like. We build half a costume for each choreographer. We share them at the showings we have, just to show what the designer had in mind. That’s very valuable. We do that in the fall session. In the spring session, we work with composers from the Juilliard School, graduates of their doctoral program. The choreographers have the opportunity to develop a new score with a composer that they use for their choreography. It’s a great opportunity, and it’s so meaningful. The Institute has a remarkable social media program created by the manager of the Institute. She posts newsletters about where choreographers’ works are being performed, video, Facebook, Instagram—basically all the things that I can’t do. When I see who has looked at the social media site, it’s everyone

who’s participated, every artistic director, classical director, and often modern directors around the world. People are interested, and they know that they can read about the work that the choreographers have done here and they can find them on their websites to see more work they’ve done—and hopefully hire them!

LINDA | You mentioned that Barbara Horgan had selected you to take over when she retired. She is a formidable force in the dance world. That’s a huge role to take on. Why do you think she selected you? What was it that she saw in you that she thought you would do well because she was so protective of Balanchine?

LINDA | Do any of the relationships that are fostered during that time between the designers and the choreographers persist beyond their time at the Choreographic Institute, or do any of the conceptual ideas make it to a full production?

ELLEN | You probably would have to ask her that question because I don’t know what was going on in her head, but we did share an office for five years when I was doing special projects at NYCB. I listened to everything she said. I watched everything she did.

ELLEN | It depends. What they create at the Institute is usually a 10-minute piece. Sometimes—not too often, but in a few

Balanchine changed my life. When I first came to the company during the American Music Festival, I used to stand backstage every night and watch the company perform George Balanchine + Jerome Robbins Balanchine. giving directions onstage for a New York City Ballet production of Firebird, choreography by George Balanchine, 1969 PHOTO Martha Swope

instances—an artistic director will commission the choreographer to finish the piece. The composers and choreographers have more often continued to work together when the opportunity arises. LINDA | It reminds me a little bit of Jerome Robbins’ American Theatre Lab and that idea of creating a space for experimentation. Was that ever considered in putting it together? Did that serve as a template? ELLEN | Not directly. We are all aware of what Jerry did during that time. But this was an impetus that came from Peter Martins, who felt that, “You have the school, you have the company, and wouldn’t it be great to have a laboratory where people could come and work?”

LINDA | But he passed away before you got here, right?

ELLEN | Yes. I came in 1987, and he passed away in 1983. But I got to know his work so well and I was so influenced by his choreography and also by the music he chose. I mean, every aspect of it, the composers, the designers— the Karinska costume designs, the Rouben Ter-Artunian scenic and costume designs, and others Balanchine worked with. It was remarkable. When I first came to the company, I was much more focused on Balanchine’s work than on Jerry’s. I appreciated Jerry’s work and grew to appreciate it more over time, but Balanchine changed how I looked at art. I never tire of seeing the ballets he created. LINDA | What is it about Balanchine’s technique and principles that you think are so enduring? What are the things that you’re looking to protect when requests are coming your way? ELLEN | I think the first thing is that as many dancers dance and as many audience members see his work as possible. I consider each and every one of his ballets a piece of modern art. I see it like a Persian carpet. Every time I look at a beautiful Persian carpet, I see something WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

that wasn’t there before, and that’s what happens when I watch Balanchine ballets. I see things that are entirely new to me. The emotion of his ballets is often in the architecture, because so many of them are, as he called them, abstract ballets. But when you watch a ballet like Concerto Barocco, Serenade, or Symphony in C, you’re so overcome by the patterns and how the music and the choreography are…inevitable together. It’s like that when I listen to Mozart. What comes next is inevitable. It has to be that. It couldn’t be anything else. I feel that Balanchine’s ability to illustrate the music with his choreography was a great gift to all of us.

beginning to have people who are staging his ballets who worked with people who worked with Balanchine. In another period of time, we will have people who stage his work who never worked with anyone who worked with him. The kind of respect there is for his choreography makes it almost imperative upon artistic directors who license it to make sure that the intent of his choreography is always realized. That’s done through the people who I think are most responsible for his legacy— the répétiteurs who stage the work. They are a unique group of people who I have more regard for than almost anyone else because of the commitment they bring to what they do and the passion they feel about it. They’re always talking to each other, asking questions,

it with a new physical production. It was something he himself did throughout his life. Why put the brakes on? Let it breathe a little bit. The trustees must approve any new productions, so they’ll always set the standard that will exist because it comes from the trust. So it’s not just “Do whatever you want.” LINDA | What are your primary responsibilities as head of the trust? ELLEN | People get in touch with the Balanchine Trust for all kinds of reasons. The most important thing is the licensing of the ballets. So artistic directors and directors of schools are in touch with us. Ballets for galas are requested. Dancers are very entrepreneurial, and they’re doing

Choreographer Price Suddarth, costume designer Andy Jean + lighting designer Jennifer Reiser give a design presentation during the Fall 2016 session of the New York Choreographic Institute PHOTO Kyle Froman

LINDA | So how do you mitigate interpretations of Balanchine? Younger choreographers are taking him on and, ultimately, there will be some sort of shift in how the ballet ends up being presented. How do you sit with Balanchine’s work moving forward into subsequent generations, where we’ll get further and further away from the original interpreters of the role? How do you think he’s going to transition over the next 100 years? ELLEN | I see Balanchine like Shakespeare. I think of the choreography as a text. And we know what has been done to Shakespeare over the years, but the text remains sacred. Balanchine’s choreography is a living, breathing thing. The people who are staging Balanchine’s works now are, for the most part, the people who worked directly with him. Now we are

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“Do you remember this? What was this?” The stories that I’m told by people who worked for Balanchine and who now stage his ballets is that he always made accommodations for the different gifts that dancers had. So it might look like the choreography was somehow changed, but it’s still his intent. The ballets are still his ballets. You only have so much in the way of control. The trust has videos that the artistic trustees—former dancers—have approved. It might be sections from different videos where they feel that it’s closest to what Balanchine’s intent was, but we’re going to just have to trust the people who stage it. There are artistic directors who are reimagining Balanchine, meaning they’re taking the choreography as text, but they’re surrounding

ballets all over the world. All of that comes to our office. We have to make sure that the conditions are as they should be for the presentation of a Balanchine work. There are many things that go into approving a ballet. The répétiteur who stages the ballet, the physical production, the license, the venue, touring, media. LINDA | Is there a request you ever got that has particularly tickled you? To do something outlandish or just exciting with a Balanchine piece? ELLEN | A company in Europe was doing Concerto Barocco and were not using the orchestra on that program. The trust did not approve the performance without an orchestra. The artistic director came up with the idea

of using a chamber group with instruments that were in existence at the time that Bach wrote the score. That worked out very well. Someone else was doing a production of Coppélia and said, “I don’t like the ‘Discord and War’ section. Do you think we could cut that out?” I said, “Absolutely. In 2053, when the ballet goes into the public domain, you can cut it out, but until then…” LINDA | Balanchine had passed before you even began here at the ballet, but you knew Jerry really well, and that’s the other legacy you’re entrusted with. What was your relationship with Jerry like?

I asked one of the volunteers on the event to have everyone sign a poster to Jerry because I knew that he would find it nice to have everyone’s signature. Unbeknownst to me, she did one for me, too. What Jerry wrote was—and this is on the night of the event, just before the event—“If it was good, it was due to you.” If, if. LINDA | That’s him in a nutshell. ELLEN | Right. When Peter offered me the opportunity to come to NYCB for the American Music Festival, I talked to Jerry

During “Dancing for Life,” he was very difficult. It was hard for me, but I had dealt with difficult people before. I knew that it wasn’t necessarily about me, that it was also about whatever drove him in that way. I was able to always be somewhat dispassionate, even though, of course, it always hurts when someone says something that feels personal.

He wanted Eddie Villella to dance Watermill. He had done it in the original production in 1972. Eddie was thrilled. He was just turning 50. Jerry invited the dancers from the Paris Opera to come and do In the Night at the closing performance.

During “Dancing for Life,” Jerry was very nervous because there were 13 dance companies: Merce [Cunningham] and Alvin [Ailey] and Bob Joffrey and Paul Taylor and Twyla [Tharp] and Martha Graham…these were his people. They were the people he knew and grew up with, and he was very nervous.

The festival was very challenging for him because he was very focused on how much rehearsal and how much orchestra rehearsal was needed. He asked Jennifer Tipton to come in and refresh all the lighting, which was great.

Even though they each chose the piece they wanted their company to dance, everybody wanted a certain place in the program, everyone wanted to open the second act, nobody wanted to open the first act. It was a very difficult thing for him to maneuver.

There were two posters for “Dancing for Life.” One was a quality version that Rauschenberg had signed, which a number of people bought and we gave to all the artistic directors. The other was unsigned and sold for $25. A lot of people bought that.

ELLEN | It was very bittersweet. I was sorry to see him go. I don’t think he ever wanted that [artistic director] role, because I don’t think that was where he was most comfortable. I think he was most comfortable creating and in the studio. I don’t think administrating was what he wanted to do, but I think at that time the board, after Balanchine died, felt that having Peter and Jerry together would be a good solution. Jerry did that from 1983 to 1990, and then I think he decided that was sufficient for him. It was a great process because Jerry was looking at work that had not been performed for a long time. He also looked at outtakes that he had from his more recent ballets, like Ives, Songs. And he went back into the studio with someone who had been there with him at the time to try to see if he could recreate it.

ELLEN | Jerry and I had an unspoken understanding of each other. I didn’t know why, but there was always this connection.

He was convinced that this event was not going to be very successful, and until the night it was performed, none of us knew either. I finally said to him, “I know you don’t know me very well, and I know you’re not sure if I can pull this off, and you won’t know until the night of the event. That’s the nature of these events. But I’m doing everything I can to make sure that it’s a success for you and for everyone who’s participating.” I could not say more than that, except, “Let’s leave the negative here and try to…”

LINDA | What was that like? What was it like taking care of his farewell, his retirement?

Dancing for Life program book, with cover and poster design donated by Robert Rauschenberg. The gala event, held October 5, 1987, at the New York State Theater, featured the entire New York City dance community united against AIDS.

ABOVE The

about it. He said, “Well, I think the company would be lucky to have you.” So I came. Space here is almost impossible, and Jerry said, “You’ll work in my office, and you’ll work from there until there’s a space for you.” We had a lot to do with each other. I saw him socially at times. I wasn’t as close to him as other people were, but we had a very special relationship. He knew from “Dancing for Life” that I was always going to take care of him. That’s why, when he planned his festival when he retired, I was the person to do that.

Two days before we started rehearsing the festival, when we had a dark week in the theatre to ourselves, Jerry flipped over on his bicycle in Central Park. It was over a Memorial Day weekend, and he got a concussion. He was pretty fragile during that whole time. He had someone with him who made sure that he had something to eat and drink between rehearsals. I think it added to his anxiety because he wasn’t in full force. But it worked out well. It sold beautifully and was a terrific tribute to him. The audiences just loved it, and he lived eight years after and created other ballets—West Side Story Suite, Brandenburg, and a revival of Les Noces, which he had originally made for ABT. I saw him from time to time. We might go to the movies, have dinner. I wanted to film his West Side Story Suite rehearsals because I thought they would be really valuable: I knew he probably would never do West Side Story on Broadway again. He eventually agreed, but we had to have a signed agreement. Floria Lasky—his wonderful lawyer—had to write the agreement and make sure it was airtight. Those tapes are absolutely invaluable to the people who stage that ballet. WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

We have lots of tape of him working with the dancers. His rehearsals in a studio alone for A Suite of Dances, Peter and Suzanne [Farrell] in Afternoon of a Faun. He did have things taped. He didn’t like the medium itself when he was being professionally filmed, but he did record everything, and that’s been a great gift. LINDA | I think that’s one of the bigger challenges with Balanchine. I look at the way Robbins and Balanchine approached their work in such vastly different methodologies. As one of the people involved with the legacy for both, what is it like to take care of both of those? What do you wish the other had done, or do you feel that the way both went about it was the only way that those two could have gone about it? ELLEN | I think it was the only way at that particular time anybody could have gone about it. I think, had Jerry lived longer and talked about this with someone like Twyla, who has taken what she considers to be the definitive tape of a work and put it with a tape of the music and the costume and lighting design…so when you’re licensing a Twyla work, it comes with what you need, plus a ballet master to stage it. Balanchine, of course, never thought about it. I don’t think it was on anybody’s radar at that point. From what I’m told by Barbara and others, he didn’t think his ballets would last. He left them to people who were important to him. He thought maybe they would have a little income. Jerry didn’t leave the rights to his ballets to people. He put them in trust to his foundation and he left the income to various people, which, in most cases, reverts to the foundation once those people have passed away. The Balanchine Trust had to be set up after his death. It was established so that there would be a central place from which to administer his work. What Paul Epstein did as the conceiver of the idea of the trust and what Barbara did in implementing it was absolute genius. The heirs were people she had relationships with for a very long time because they were dancers and administrators at the company. Many of the former dancers became stagers of his ballets. I think Barbara has and continues to do a remarkable job, which has enabled me to continue that work at the trust. LINDA | Your work with the Robbins Foundation has allowed you to segue back to theatre because Jerry had a finger in the theatre world as much as he had in the dance world. Do you want to talk about Project Springboard a little bit?

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ELLEN | Several years ago, the Robbins Foundation started a two-year exploration into whether there would be value in putting a group of creative artists—including a choreographer and composer—in a studio for a workshop to develop a narrative musical theatre piece, with dance as a central component. For a number of reasons, economics being a good part of it, choreographers are often not in the room from the beginning. They’re told, “We need a dance number here, we need one there.” Integral to the story, one hopes, but not always. That’s why many choreographers become director/choreographers: they want to be involved in it from the very beginning. Warren Carlyle has done that. Jerry certainly did that. I think that was our thought. We gathered a think tank of people: from the Musical Theatre Lab at NYU, from the O’Neill, Warren Carlyle, Rachel Chavkin, Ted Sperling, Michael Friedman, Diane Borger…people who ran programs… to see what kind of needs there were. Last year, we launched Project Springboard as a three-week workshop. Creative teams applied. In the initial year, we had 22 applications. We narrowed it down to eight who wrote full proposals, and then two were chosen. It’s a way for people to have a collaborative process that has, in some ways, been lost over the last 10, 15, even 20 years. We’ll see how it goes, but this is really a tribute to how Jerry worked and how he wanted to work, and we’re hoping that this will regenerate some of that. We learned a lot from doing it. LINDA | I think of you as a mentor, and I see you give wonderful advice to others. It’s interesting that, with the Choreographic Institute, you’re pulling a lot on your time with Gilbert Hemsley. And then with Springboard, Jerry is sort of serving as the influence. It’s like you’ve taken what they gave you and you’re passing it on to a new generation. ELLEN | Well, I’m an educator at heart. I think that way. I think about process. I think about how someone gets from here to there. My own arc has been one of learning, finding mentors, and finding my way. I know how hard it is to do that. And so I’m always very willing to meet with people, willing to help them whatever way I can, if I have a relevant connection with them. I’m still developing. Even though the roles now have changed a bit and I’m more in a mentoring capacity, I’m still mentored. I still look for that from the people who have been influential for me.

LINDA | You have told me that your family was more political than cultural, but I feel that now, most of our culture is political. Are you now starting to revisit the way your family spoke about things? ELLEN | What I am noticing is that theatre artists are using politics to express themselves. Look at Lynn Nottage, SuzanLori Parks, David Hare, Tony Kushner… certainly Sam Shepard…and other playwrights who have taken important issues and given them a theatrical outlet. Theatre used to be looked on as something you went to for a night of enjoyment. But when I revisited South Pacific, for example, [I saw that] it’s a very political piece. West Side Story, a very political piece; Fiddler on the Roof, a very political piece. It’s always been there. The people who create these things are aware of not just the music, the dance, and the story, but they’re aware of all the forces of society at work. I think sometimes things are a little more obvious now and I don’t always like that. Sometimes I like it to be more subtle, but we’re not living in a very subtle time. LINDA | A last question. What pieces of advice would you like to give choreographers working now about how to protect or preserve their work and legacy? ELLEN | I have four pieces of advice. First, retain a good copyright attorney— someone who understands the field. Even if you have to pay a lot of money, it’s worth it. Second, make sure all of your work is copyrighted during your lifetime. The copyright will last your lifetime plus 70 years. Registering gives you an extra layer of protection. The forms are online at the US Copyright Office website. Third, write your last will and testament! You need a will for your work. Where do you want your income to go to? Is it going to heirs? If so, what happens when the heirs pass away? Be specific. For example, Balanchine left his ballets to his dancers and the people who were devoted to him. Jerome Robbins assigned the income to various friends and family, including his foundation. And finally, figure out what your strategy is for your work to be disseminated after you pass away. Set up a structure for the decisions and put it in the hands of the people you trust. It’s about making sure you protect your work so it can continue to be performed.

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION FIG. 1 Karen Azenberg, Caitlin Graham, Genevieve LeRoy-Walton, ATHE keynote speaker Tony Walton, Kris Danford + Alicia Tafoya, ATHE VP for Conference 2017, at the ATHE/SDC Annual Cocktail Hour In Las Vegas.

Editorial Forum: SDC Support for Directors and Choreographers in Higher Education At the annual conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in Las Vegas in August 2017, the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (SDCJ-PRS) celebrated its second full year in print, toasted new authors and members of the peer-review and advisory boards, and extended hearty thanks and welcome to outgoing and incoming editors (Figs. 1 & 2). The current editors are all academics and Associate Members of SDC who present regularly together at ATHE annual conferences. We decided to undertake a forum on the ongoing informal relationship between SDC and ATHE, and more broadly, on the ways SDC supports its Members working in higher education. All members of the editorial team were involved in a publication task force formed by members of the Directing Focus Group of ATHE, who enthusiastically accepted Laura Penn’s offer in 2013 to create a peer-reviewed publication exclusively devoted to theatre direction and choreography. Each year the four of us gather with past and current members of the SDCJ Peer Review Board at ATHE and reflect on our directing work in academia and professionally, connecting our work to scholarship, and generating a (rare) directorial dialogue amongst ourselves. Our academic institutions span several regions of the US and schools of different types. The following forum reflects our work together in Las Vegas around the theme of “Spectacle” and looks forward to our work next year, both as editors of the PRS and as members of the planning committee for ATHE’s next conference, August 1-5, 2018, in Boston, MA, centering on the theme “Theatres of Revolution: Performance, Pedagogy, and Protest.”

We each address the following three questions in the short essays that follow: 1. How do you see SDC and the Peer-Reviewed Section of the Journal supporting directors and choreographers in higher education such as yourself? What excites you about your work as an editor of the Journal? 2. What did you contribute to the ATHE 2017 Conference in Las Vegas? What are some highlights that might be of interest to other SDC Members? 3. What are some things that excite you about the upcoming ATHE 2018 Conference in Boston and how do you see ATHE/ SDC working together in that context, and in the future, to support directors and choreographers working in higher education? Likewise, how can Members working in academic settings support the professional fields of directing and choreography more broadly? FIG. 2 LEFT Karen Azenberg, Brian Kite + Anne Healy at the ATHE/SDC Annual Cocktail Hour, 2017

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ANN M. SHANAHAN, CO-EDITOR, SDCJ-PRS

The Gender Politics of Spectacle in Staging Sarah Ruhl’s Adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO and ATHE 2018: Theatres of Revolution David Callaghan, Kathleen M. McGeever, Emily A. Rollie and I presented together on a panel at ATHE 2017, named “[s]pectacle as an Alternative to Bells and Whistles: Four Directors Reflect on Visual Communication and a Return to the Imagination in Staging.” My paper, entitled “‘I am about to understand...’: The Gender Politics of Spectacle in Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Directions,” reflects on a recent production of Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando that I directed (with substantial assistance from Jeremy Ohringer, M.F.A. Directing, Boston University ’19) for the 24th Annual Conference of the International Virginia Woolf Society, Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Loyola University Chicago, and Room(s) Theatre. I argue that the creativity and collaboration required to achieve the visual pictures of Ruhl’s verse and stage directions (based heavily on Virginia Woolf’s text) reinforce the play’s dramaturgy in relation to gender and identity, empowering creativity and fostering community in both ensemble and audience through shared processes of art-making. I place our staging processes in context of larger considerations about gender and space, which I’ve developed in scholarly writing on staging plays about women and houses. Through ongoing theorizing about directing plays with these subjects, I’ve developed ideas about gender, space, and style in staging; these ideas help me to understand Orlando in unique terms, and relate the fluidity of gender expressions in the novel and play to design and staging choices in production. Diana Swanson, associate professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Northern Illinois University, provided the following synoptic notes for Virginia Woolf’s novel in our program: “Orlando, the hero/heroine of the novel, begins life as a male in the Elizabethan era and by the end of the novel is a 36-year-old woman in 1928. Sometimes his/her lovers

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are women, sometimes men. Throughout his/her centuries of life, shaped by historical and gender changes, s/he writes poetry.…” Orlando, both the novel and play, can be understood as an integration of gendered identities through art-making. The poet, Orlando, struggles throughout the novel and play to depict in poetry “the natural”— specifically an old oak tree that grows on the grounds of his (then her) estate. And he tried to describe— For all young poets are forever describing— Nature. (142) Considered by some a companion to Woolf’s nonfiction piece A Room of One’s Own, treatment of space in Orlando relates to this architectural symbol. While a house does not figure prominently in Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Woolf’s novel, nonetheless because of the nature of the play and its source material, the relationship of domestic and public spaces in the play can be meaningfully illuminated by theorizing about gender and space. As with time, identity, and gender in the novel and play, treatment of space is fluid and nonconventional. We followed Ruhl’s suggestion for flexible casting of the required roles through a collective chorus made up of folks identifying as and playing varied and fluidly expressed genders, races, and sexualities—with simple costume pieces to change characters. The chorus collectively created places and objects, as well as characters, importantly including the oak tree that Orlando tries to write. In notes, Ruhl introduces the performance style required for Orlando with a reference to Vietnamese Ceo Theatre: “In the Russian tradition of Stanislavski, the actor says, ‘I will tell you a story about me.’ In the German tradition of Brecht, the actor says, ‘I will tell you a story about them.’ In the Vietnamese tradition, the actor says, ‘You and I will tell each other a story about all of us’” (Jenkins qtd in Ruhl 137). At the end of the play, Orlando is finally able to complete her poem, when, safely at home and away from the chaos of the modern world, she defies sexual limitations and dares to write while married. The success of the creative act also requires that she acknowledge the need for other people, a collective—both a multiplicity of selves within her, and other people to receive the creative act as audience. This arc of creativity suggest that, while we may start by needing a room of our own, ultimately real creativity (writing “the natural”) means breaking it down—moving into liminal space at the threshold (limen) between interior (inner) and exterior (outer) space. I have traced a trend with female-identifying characters in plays about houses: dramatists connect their final acts in houses to society, the public surrounding the private spaces.

As the lines break down between public and private, male and female, Life and Theatre— ALL is HOUSE. In Orlando, Sarah Ruhl follows Woolf’s path to this limen. The only way to write (and stage) the natural is to occupy this liminal space, materially and collectively. Understanding the spaces of the story in these terms allowed me to appreciate Orlando’s final success in writing the oak tree and suggested a way to stage this event in space. In the final scene, the fragmented 20th-century world drives Orlando running home to the safety of her own room, but she finds she can no longer easily locate herself there. For she had a great variety of selves to call upon: The boy who sat under the oak tree young man who fell in love with Sasha the boy who handed the queen of all of rosewater the poet, the fine lady, the woman who called Mar or Shelmardine or Bonthrup. (230-231) The chorus, aspects of herself and her collective audience, disperse to leave Orlando alone in her room at the return home. According to the gendered dynamics of space outlined above, the place for the chorus to retreat was (naturally) across the threshold of the proscenium, into the auditorium, within and behind the audience. The audience was not aware of their presence, until they began to whisper softly in response to Orlando’s calls. This whisper was a collective inspiration of the chorus, which we fostered in many ways, including use of Viewpoints in staging as alternative to Stanislavski’s realistic methods. Visited by the then dead Queen Elizabeth, Orlando finally defies gender restrictions for married women, and begins to write. The actor playing Orlando, Annie Murphy, followed a brilliant impulse to write all over the physical world of the set—along chairs, rugs, manikins, and trunks—until finally, the poem is done!— and it “wants to be read…people had become necessary” (232). At this point, the chorus slowly joined Orlando on stage, surrounding her to reprise their collective creation of the oak tree, but this time also including her in the formation. The member of the chorus playing Shel, her husband and male counterpart, entered last, also from the audience, when the script indicates “he came as he always did, in moments of dead calm…” (232). As he joined the collective group of entangled, breathing bodies, fusing actor and audience space (Fig. 3), Orlando uttered the last words of the play, “I am about to understand...”(232). The idea for staging the end, which received an audible gasp from audiences, came from a dream I had about talking with a friend and mentor, while walking upstairs in a house

Final moment of Orlando PHOTO Julia Eberhardt c/o Loyola University Chicago and Room(s) Theatre

FIG. 3

Theatres of Revolution: Performance, Pedagogy, and Protest The 2018 ATHE Conference focuses on revolution, resistance, and protest, and the multiple ways these ideas—and the actions that spring from them—impact theatre in higher education. Drawing on the city of Boston for its historical significance in the American Revolution, and as a site of both academic excellence and artistic innovation, we aim to explore revolutions at the multiple intersections of politics, theatre education, and professional practice. We will consider various meanings of revolution, in scholarship and performance as well as in our work as educators with students in the classroom, rehearsal hall, and in the larger context of college campuses. The conference theme invites examination of ways in which electoral representation resonates with theory and practice in theatre-making: How does representation in politics relate to equitable and fair casting and employment practices? How do changing practices require revolutions in production methods and pedagogies? How might theatre scholarship serve a meaningful public function, engaging with performances—both artistic and civic—that surround us? How might we create art that activates audiences to make lasting social change?

on our university campus where I have staged plays. It was based on my ongoing theorizing about gender and theatrical space, understanding the border of the house as a physical manifestation of a gender binary, and what I’ve learned from repeated application of these theories in the material terms of production. Culturally speaking, as strictly binaried terms expand to more fluid conceptions and expressions of genders and sexualities, and as the demarcation of public and private spaces shifts, conceptions of domestic spaces on stage likewise change. This staging of the end of Orlando provides a physical embodiment of the breakdown of public and private, imaginary and material—a union of multiple and variously gendered selves….With Orlando, in the theatre, we are, perhaps, about to understand… I am excited to serve as Vice President for Conference 2018 and am proud that the editors in this forum join me and other leading scholars from a variety of disciplines across ATHE focus groups on the conference planning committee. The full call for papers, written by the 2018 Conference Committee, follows.

Boston’s history allows us to consider performance and revolution in uniquely complicated ways. Events of the American Revolution are memorialized throughout the city in museums and public monuments, many involving performed reenactments. The site of the Boston Tea Party, a protest by white men who masqueraded as Native Americans to resist “taxation without representation” by the British, is marked by a museum only a short distance from the conference hotel. However, other revolutions remain unmarked, such as the systematic and violent dispossession of the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Massachusett and other nations of the Dawnland by European colonists. In contemporary US politics, the Tea Party has itself become a kind of costume for protest. Groups claiming its ethos arguably play with tropes of revolution alongside those of racial superiority, misogyny, and nativism. Consideration of how contemporary and historical enactments of the foundational stories of the United States of America perform race and gender, as well as erasure of the land’s history before colonization, raises complex questions concerning representation and revolution in this context. These questions resonate in turn with debates prompted by popular theatrical productions like Hamilton, which not only evidences revolutions in storytelling and casting practices, but famously inspired a Twitter war between artists and politicians about the role of theatre as “safe space” or platform for protest. We see questions about safe space and protest rising on college campuses: demonstrations and counter-demonstrations by right and left, changing policies regarding academic freedom, the development of professor watch lists, conceal and carry laws, designation of sanctuary campuses, and the ongoing impact to students who are especially vulnerable under new policies, including undocumented and transgender students. These concerns intersect with urgent questions over funding for the arts and for higher education, the cost of education, and perpetuation of economic and institutional inequities on racial, ethnic, and gender lines. J oin us in Boston in 2018 to explore the potency and precarity of theatre in higher education to protest oppressions and advance revolutionary change. We hope directors and choreographers in SDC, especially those who work in higher education, will consider joining theatre educators in Boston in 2018, as well as leaders in other professional organizations such as TCG and USITT for workshops, plenary events, special sessions, and performances centered around this important and exciting theme. WORKS CITED

Jenkins, Ron. “In Vietnam, Telling Stories About ‘All of Us,’” New York Times, August 11, 2002.

Ruhl, Sarah. Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf’s Orlando, TCG, 2013. Shanahan, Ann, Ed. ATHE 2018 Conference [http://www.athe.org/page/18_home]. Swanson, Diana. Program Notes for Orlando, produced by the 24th International Virginia Woolf Society Conference, Department of Fine and Performing Arts, Loyola University Chicago, and Room(s) Theatre, Newhart Family Theatre, Chicago, 2014.

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DAVID CALLAGHAN, CO-EDITOR, SDCJ-PRS

Still Signaling Through Flames: The Actor’s Body as Spectacle in SPRING AWAKENING and ATHE 2018 I think the SDC Journal offers highly relevant resources and discussion forums in our field. I was on the task force that created the PeerReviewed Section and then on the board. I view my role as a co-editor as an opportunity to gain new insights into the exciting work happening in our profession, and to serve the SDC Membership in even more expansive ways. In Las Vegas, I co-coordinated a panel showcasing Vegas-based directors. I also saw five performances, including The Beatles LOVE, BAZ, and Absinthe. My biggest takeaway was the consistent enthusiasm and sense of “event” among these audiences (at mostly sold out houses). As a director and producer of a university theatre season, I keep reflecting on how to attract theatregoers as we compete with numerous other entertainment options. Given the continued closings of theatres and university theatre departments, this challenge seems especially resonant. One of my favorite films is My Dinner with André, where the legendary avantgarde director André Gregory shares his participation in Jerzy Grotowski’s Paratheatrical happenings in Poland with dinner companion Wallace Shawn. Their freewheeling conversations speak to many issues of politics and theatre of the times and their implications for the future. I have enjoyed an ongoing “dinner” conversation of sorts with my colleagues in this forum during the last three conferences, where we have engaged issues of memory, space, gender, and spectacle via formal panels. In each session, we engaged these frames through the lenses of productions we have directed. My paper in Vegas reflected the panel’s exploration of spectacle with a small “s,” exploring how the embodied performances in my spring 2016 production of the musical Spring Awakening captured the potential spectacle in the dense symbolism of Steven Sater’s lyrics and stage directions.

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Our first leap into this Artaudian-like dreamscape involved embracing Sater’s notion that in the privacy of their own bedroom, every teenager acts like an imagined rock star. As I unraveled these complicated communication codes with my choreographer and designers, the short book scenes contained the literal world of a provincial German town, c. 1890, that at times brutally ordered the life of these teenagers. However, the deeper, authentic journey of the characters resided in their explosive inner lives, which emerged through each successive song in Act I. The show opens with Wendla yearning to know about the process of motherhood in “Mama Who Bore Me,” with her “revealed in song light… she gently explores her newly maturing body, [and] pulls on a near-transparent schoolgirl dress” (15). Wendla’s private exploration is shattered by pounding percussion as her school friends join her in a primal, communal anthem, allowing their bodies to express the questions repressed in their public lives. Our scenic design further reflected these tensions, with totems of their secret and institutional worlds such as magical lights, incense burners, and bound schoolbooks hanging in the air around them. One of the musical’s important conventions involves the presence of unnamed teens in contemporary

girls gather around Melchior and Moritz in radiant light, singing and moving as a chorus” (35). Adolescent bravado segues into youthful vulnerability as they contemplate the mysteries of sex, and gradually the full teen community transcends the literal boundaries of their separate rooms to physically celebrate their repeated sung phrase, “touch me.” Our staging also united Melchior and Wendla in this dreamscape site to embody Wendla’s stated attraction for him in a prior scene, anticipating their subsequent relationship. The audience was seated on stage in a 3/4 configuration that allowed for 75 spectators, further heightening the surreal nature of the number. Characters swirled around them, with others seated only inches from onlookers. “Touch Me” then transitions into three scenes that escalate Wendla and Melchior’s complex attraction. The first is an encounter in the woods where again they express their inner feelings in “The Word of Your Body.” Our set included a large antique piano, which I used to create a series of recurring visual images for the numbers that conveyed longings for physical and spiritual connection. The first happened with Georg’s solo during “Touch Me,” followed by Wendla and Melchior’s move to the top of the piano in “The Word of Your Body” where they cross beyond secret

Ensemble, “The Guilty Ones,” Act II Michael Wade c/o The University of Montevallo Theatre Department, Spring Awakening, April 2016

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dress, joining the scripted period characters in various numbers. In our production, I heightened their impact by incorporating these additional characters into the onstage choreography for “Mama” and continued this motif throughout the production. A major turning point of these emerging Freudian desires occurs in the ethereal “Touch Me.” Stage directions indicate “subtle chords…a world of longing. The boys and

desire to physically explore their longing for each other. Victor Turner defines the liminal as a place “neither here nor there,” but rather “betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom, convention and ceremony” (95). The liminal journey allows for the possibility of creating new personal identities and social constructs, which aptly reflects the inner landscapes and desires of the teen characters as expressed in these songs.

After Wendla and Melchior consummate their relationship in the “hayloft” scene, the entire community gathers to contemplate the aftermath as they sing “The Guilty Ones” at the top of Act II. To extend the visual spectacle of this motif, I placed Wendla and Melchior on the floor as the parish priest condemns their impure actions, while the teen ensemble was grouped on or around the piano (Fig. 4). This staging pattern was not realistic, but created an ongoing state of liminal ritual where the teenagers engaged the “real story” contained within their “hearts and minds” (VIII). Furthermore, it allowed the audience to share a sense of what Turner called “ritual camaraderie” or “communitas” with the characters, in which a “group catches fire in the spirit” and can experience a “liberation from the constraints of ordinary life” (274). This spiritual or emotional connection occurred in many other numbers, including Melchior’s “Left Behind” at Moritz’s funeral as his friends silently drop flowers at his grave. In Act II, the principal characters are brutally crushed as Moritz commits suicide, Wendla dies from an abortion, and Melchior is sent to a reformatory. Their dream for a liberated future, however, is expressed in the ethereal “Whispering,” where Wendla and Melchior embrace the “mysteries” between them in counterpoint with a dialogue scene between Melchior’s parents. Wendla proclaims, “And I let him love me. So, let that be my story…” (83), with the freedom of the musical space allowing her to “give voice…to the enormous story unfolding between them” (VIII—VIX). Alone on stage at its conclusion in a surreal blue light, Wendla’s “heart…huge and dark” can finally “whisper some silver reply” to her lover that the teens hoped for in “The Guilty Ones” (65). Subsequently, as Melchior is about to kill himself, the departed Wendla and Moritz return to convince him to carry on without them. The stage directions indicate that “Melchior draws the ghosts of Wendla and Moritz to him, holds them” (91). Unlike the original production, I staged Wendla to guide the razor from his throat and for Melchior to look directly at them. In our intimate theatre, this shift heightened the emotional power of the stage directions and imagery of the scene, climaxing in intensity as the ghosts physically “recede” through the audience singing “not gone” in counterpoint to Melchior’s lyrics, “they walk with my heart—I’ll never let them go” (92). As the number ends, Melchior crosses the threshold beyond the liminal space into a new life, although not the one he once dreamed. The linear story ends here, but the finale, “The Song of Purple Summer,” bookends the metaphysical yearning of “Mama Who Bore Me” with adults and teens alike united in the

space where they joyfully celebrate, “All shall know the wonder of purple summer…” (94). As the lights fade, the audience is offered one final ritualistic possibility of collective communitas, capturing what Julian Beck once referred to as “a theatre that would be an intense experience halfway between dreams and rituals, through which the viewer could achieve intimate comprehension of himself…” (11). Given our current cultural climate, the 2018 conference theme is enormously timely. As teacher-artists, we are charged with developing dialogue among our students and audiences around sometimes challenging questions. Although currently under attack in more extreme conservative circles, the academy serves as a central resource in many communities. With that comes a responsibility to offer positive leadership and a willingness to engage difficult issues. Ideally, the conference will create new strategies for future work on our campuses as agents of change. The great political theatre artists Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov of the Living Theatre once wrote of the need to maintain their mission in the face of ongoing adversity: “we have always wanted to work, not necessarily where we are most popular, but rather where we are most needed” (Malina and Reznikov). I continue to find this message inspiring in my roles as teacher, director, and member of multiple communities. SDC offers a strong support network for ATHE and directors and choreographers as we do our work in highly visible landscapes that frequently include diminished resources, controversy, and even censorship. It is arguably more important than ever for Members in academic settings to produce seasons that speak to the events shaping the world we are preparing students to enter after leaving university life. Involvement in SDC as an Associate Member can help bridge important connections between university-based directors and those working outside the academy. WORKS CITED

Beck, Julian. Quoted in Uptown Dispatch, October 1985. “Living Theatre Collection,” Papers 1945-Present, Series XIII, Boxes 4347, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, Lincoln Center Library, New York City. Malina, Judith and Hanon Reznikov. “Dear Friends” Letter, 1994. Personal Collection of the Author. Sater, Steven. Spring Awakening A New Musical. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969. -----. Drama, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974.

KATHLEEN M. MCGEEVER, BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Magic in Plain Sight: Staging Jeffrey Hatcher’s Adaptation of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE and Protest as Performance A professor and a director, I joined SDC as an Associate Member because of the interplay of practice and pedagogy, which is at the heart of directing in the academy. We are artists who teach, and effective teaching requires reflective practice. Not only does SDC provide outstanding resources for directors in and out of the academy, the PeerReviewed Section of SDC Journal highlights the marriage of practice and pedagogy. I have been involved with the SDCJ-PRS since the beginning, first as the Associate Book Review Editor and a member of the review board, and most recently as Book Review Editor. As directors and choreographers, many texts apply to our practice. I look forward to my new role as editor because I will have opportunities to explore these diverse resources in a rewarding way. The best reviews allow the voices of both the book’s author and the reviewer to co-exist, providing PRS readers a sort of dialogue between multiple directors and/or choreographers at once. The Directing Focus Group of ATHE is also a forum in which to explore pedagogy and practice. Directors Rollie, Shanahan, Callaghan, and I have engaged in an ongoing dialogue concerning our individual directing processes. The dialogue led to three panels that probed topics of place (Montreal, 2015), history (Chicago, 2016), and spectacle with a small “s” (Las Vegas, 2017). Las Vegas was the ideal setting in which to explore how we create spectacle. My paper, Magic in Plain Sight: Four Jekylls and a Hyde considered my techniques for staging the visual pictures of Jeffrey Hatcher’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by embracing simplicity and exposing technique. Our hope was that the audience saw clearly where we were going, willingly went where led, and were nonetheless surprised when they got there, experiencing the thrill of theatre “magic”—both in acting and design—executed in plain sight. WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

The genre of Dark Romanticism was my inspiration; depicting ghosts, witches, devils, and enigmatic, gloomy landscapes, the artists reflect humanity’s inevitable fate. The paintings seized my imagination, ushering me into the uncomfortable world of Jekyll and Hyde. This is the shadowy landscape of Dickens and other Victorian novelists, but Stevenson created an even more sinister setting. In fact, just two years after the novella was published, Jack the Ripper stalked London, and some suspected Stevenson’s book served as a blueprint for the real terror. I was inspired by Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, which depicts an ape-like incubus resting on the chest of a languid woman while a beast waits in the wings. Critics assert that The Nightmare portrays the simultaneity of a body asleep and a nightmare awake within the mind. The painting, a dream-like, haunting, erotic scene, evoked the world of the play for me and greatly influenced my staging. Scenically, the design was uncomplicated, consisting of a series of platforms, ladders, and a spiral staircase. The platforms were planked like a deck to provide optimal lighting opportunities, capturing the light and shadow creeping through the gaps in the wood. The soaring height of the unit created a sense of space and distance. Furniture and properties were limited; projections were used to present both symbolic and realistic images. The costume design linked the four actors playing Hyde to the actor playing Jekyll. We designed the Hydes in shades of gray using identical morning coats and top hats. Dr. Jekyll was clothed in a similar silhouette, but in blue and gray. The production design captured the mood of another dark romantic piece, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Seashore by Moonlight. The landscape illustrates simple forms and diffuse light with a limited range of color, just like our design. Critics say the painting symbolizes humanity’s toil and struggle in the earthly world, leading to imminent death. Freidrich’s painting, much like Fuseli’s, inspired the psychological landscape of the characters as well as the physical world of the play. The four Hydes in Hatcher’s adaptation highlight Jekyll’s psychological complexity and struggle with multiple sides of his nature. Jekyll’s transformation is initially voluntary, then becomes involuntary, until finally Jekyll makes the choice purposefully to allow Hyde to dominate. I asked the actors to imagine a voyeur standing on a dangerous precipice ready to fall, teetering before making the right choice. I pointed them to the end of the first act, where a maid, who witnessed the terrible murder of Carew, exclaims: “I am sorry. The better me would have

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called out sooner…but the bad in me… wanted to watch” (39). Hatcher’s adaptation explores the “slippery notion of identity”— supposing there is gray in the spectrum between good and evil, and that humanity has potential to slip in either direction, or even more disturbing, to succumb to darkness. The Hydes are deliberately doubled with prominent characters in the story, providing a multi-faceted look at human psyche, as well as an intriguing opportunity for actors to create physical representations of various Hydes. To foster these physical transformations, I used Laban Movement Analysis (LBA). Rudolph Laban (1879–1958) created a theoretical and practical system for observing, performing, and interpreting movement. LBA frees actors to play with a range of physical possibilities; psychological and physical processes lead to a character’s outward expression of an inner world. Through this method we crafted physical expressions for various aspects of Hyde, which accumulated

to threaten the perceived goodness of Jekyll, until our audience questioned what side of this man was evil and what side good. My staging concealed nothing from the audience. For example, in the first act Hyde 1 violently assails a child and quickly disappears behind a red door. He immediately reappears as another character, Utterson, with only a change in physicality to identify him. The actor made a quick circle through the door and around the other side, back to the front. In the second act, the four Hydes overpower Jekyll, transforming from their other character in full sight. Surrounding Jekyll, the Hydes torment him, and then physically fade into the shadows unexpectedly, becoming their other characters again. Finally, near the climactic scene all Hydes return despite Jekyll’s feeble attempts to banish them. At the site of Hyde’s cruelest attack, the death of Carew, Jekyll falls to his knees, and Hyde 2 (the most sadistic Hyde, doubled with the victim Carew) slithers out of the shadows, twirling Jekyll’s broken

FIG. 5

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Act II, Scene 4 Ben Alexander c/o Northern Arizona University, April 2014

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cane (Fig. 5). The scene, staged in a fetid green light, captured Hyde operating Jekyll as a puppeteer, voicing these words in full control: “Springtime and the buds have come back to bloom. Just because they lie dormant in the ground, we think they’re dead. They’re not. They’re just sleeping. Come on darling boy, on your feet, we’re going for a ramble.” (48). The transformation is now complete, and we arrive at the end of the play. Elizabeth, weeping over Jekyll’s lifeless body, gasps: “He did it to himself” and Hyde 3, bathed in tranquil light high above the long forgotten horror says: “I had the strangest dream. I dreamt I was a man named Henry Jekyll. Everyone loved me and thought I was the finest person they’d known. And I was so unhappy. So lonely. Thank God, I woke in time to know I wasn’t him” (58). As the lights fall, Jekyll’s lifeless body and Hyde 3 are isolated in pools of light surrounded by fog, finally revealing Jekyll’s truth. I am energized by the place and history of Boston for ATHE 2018. As a member of the 2018 Conference Planning Committee, I am excited by the potential for expanded dialogue with ATHE membership. In these troubling times, it seems our culture and humanity are under siege, and I am reminded that rebellion can be fertile ground, providing opportunities for innovation. Boston, one of the cradles of the American Revolution, is an exciting setting to explore artists’ and educators’ responses to the times. Just now, as I write, I hear that the terror of white supremacists and Nazis in Boston was met with forty thousand counterprotestors from several communities lifting their voices in a dangerous arena without violence. In January 2016, I had the opportunity to join millions in Washington, DC, for the Women’s March. My colleague and I braved a heavy snowstorm to travel from Flagstaff, AZ; I was compelled to do something. I am deeply proud that I joined millions, sharing the historic protest. Acts of protest are performance, and we, the people, tell our stories in revolt. I am profoundly encouraged by the ATHE discourse planned for Boston, anticipating revolutions in pedagogy and practice, and most importantly, with our art. Since we will be in Boston, a city with many Irish immigrants, I end with the Irish proverb that speaks volumes—“Under the shelter of each other, people survive.” WORKS CITED

Hatcher, Jeffrey. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dramatists Play Service, 2009. Kramer, Felix, ed. Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, Hatje Cantz, 2013. The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst, Musée d’Orsay, March 5–June 23, 2013, Paris.

in other, more traditional publications, so it is refreshing and inspiring to read essays that bring together scholarship and practice alongside the words of directors working in professional theatres across the country.

EMILY A. ROLLIE, ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Directing the Spectacular: Utilizing the Spectacle of Imagination in A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD and SDC/ ATHE’s Roles in Training Directors Before coming to academia, I worked as a freelance director, and those years provided some of my most valuable lessons in collaboration, leadership, communication, and the craft of directing. My Membership with SDC and my contribution to the SDC Journal PeerReviewed Section not only help me maintain both sides of my professional persona but also allow me to give back to the field that has shaped and inspired me. There is wonderfully rich conversation at the intersection of practice and theory. Studying directing can deeply inform one’s artistic practice, and doing artistic work offers a great opportunity to grapple with theoretical, social, historical, and dramaturgical issues. I see the SDCJ-PRS as a place for directors to engage in both. Working as the book review editor is particularly exciting for me, as I am a bit of a book nerd; however, like many of us, I don’t always have the time to dive into as many new books as I would like. So when presented with the opportunity to become the associate book review editor of the PRS, I leapt at the chance to help bring titles of interest to readers’ attention as fodder for inspiration and new approaches. I strongly identify as an artist-scholar, and I strive to actively maintain and balance both of those careers. My connection to SDC, including the SDCJ-PRS, is one of my most valuable professional networks. Through it I stay connected to professional work—something that I view as essential for my own artistic and scholarly life as well as to model for my students, many of whom are aspiring directors. It also provides a respected venue for publishing work by and for those of us who look specifically at directing methods and theories. Work that spans the historical divide between practice and theory does not always have a “home”

I also serve as the Focus Group Representative for the Directing Program at ATHE, so I spent the majority of the 2017 conference participating in directing-related panels and events. In addition to vibrant roundtable discussions on texts used in undergraduate directing classrooms and best practices in director/designer collaboration, I was incredibly fortunate to join several of my colleagues on a panel exploring ways that we as directors might approach productions without relying on the “bells and whistles” of Spectacle with a capital “S.” Indeed, the term “spectacle” itself is somewhat problematic. As Baz Kershaw notes in a December 2003 Theatre Journal article, the term is and has been ambiguous, connoting different things to different audiences but typically referring to large-scale (and often big-budget) effects. Natalie Osborne, in a September 2015 HowlRound article, posits that “in contemporary theatre, spectacle and special effects are treated as synonyms.” I think she raises a valid point, and I believe it is time to tease out the differences in these terms. While many audiences seem to expect Spectacle, as a director with a background in found space and low-budget theatre, I feel compelled to raise the question: can we “give ‘em the old razzle dazzle,” but without excessive special effects? Particularly in a moment when educational institutions as well as professional companies face budget cuts and dwindling audiences, perhaps it is useful to explore spectacle with a small “s,” or what I call the “spectacle of the imagination.” I believe that exercising elements of surprise, humor, and creativity, more “subtle spectacles,” can create a magic, an air of “anything is possible” that arguably subverts and counteracts the big-budget Spectacle and draws the audience into a production in a new, perhaps more powerful way. Using a production of the musical A Year with Frog and Toad (book and lyrics by Willie Reale, music by Robert Reale) that I directed in spring 2015, in my paper, I teased out the ways that my design team and I purposefully utilized the “spectacle of imagination,” and I argued that the approach enhanced the overall audience as well as actor experience. Directorially I was drawn to the imaginative nature of the original world of Frog and Toad as created by children’s author and illustrator Arnold Lobel. Lobel developed these characters during his childhood to create friends for WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

in this tumultuous socio-political moment, the need for art and theatre as a vehicle for response, resistance, and revolution is high. The 2018 ATHE theme really probes this, asking us to consider the ways theatre has engaged and is engaging in the politics and possibilities of revolution, both personal and public. As someone who both directs and studies the work of directors, I am eager to see what work comes from the immediate socio-political moment as well as explore how current directors’ work mirrors or expands upon the work of directors in the past. The 2018 ATHE theme is rich with possibilities— both in artistic and scholarly work—and I am eager to see how my colleagues and fellow artists are using art and directing approaches to teach and perform resistance and revolution.

A Year with Frog and Toad PHOTO Doug Rankin c/o Monmouth College, April 2015 FIG. 6

himself and find his place in the world. Lobel was highly imaginative, and his characters are too, so I wanted our audience members— young and old—to experience that. But rather than rely on “big S” Spectacle, I wanted to encourage audience members to use their imaginations to fill in the gaps—much like we do when reading a book. I wanted the audience to be able to imagine the magic and then see it in everyday life. Thus, my director’s concept moved toward “small-s” spectacle. I wanted the story to come to life before their eyes, but I wanted the small humans in the audience to be able to leave the theatre and recreate those imaginative moments of magic in their own homes, with the power of their own imaginations. We needed to make the ordinary become extraordinary, with everyday objects taking on new uses and meanings. With the “spectacle of imagination” in mind, I collaborated closely with my designers to introduce moments and objects that repurposed and reimagined the every day. We found ways to use everyday objects such as inexpensive inner tubes worn like a backpack

for Turtle’s shell or rehearsal blocks with a large piece of white fabric for “snow,” that could be moved to increase the “speed” of the sled and “pitch” of the hill to stage Frog and Toad’s winter sledding adventure (Fig. 6). I would argue that this imaginative approach actually opened more doors for spectacle than complicated special effects would have. It required my actors to be inventive in rehearsal and when creating character, which engaged our audiences more actively. In a cultural moment in which imagination is often set aside for technology, it is essential that we invite audiences to use their imaginations and invest in the spectacle. As directors, we have the great privilege and opportunity to make productions that spur creative thought and activate the power of imagination. And that is a spectacular thing. One of the great opportunities we have as artists—particularly artists working in the live, embodied medium of theatre—is to reflect, reimagine, and respond to social issues with our collaborators and audiences. Particularly

Over the past several years, the ATHE/SDC collaboration has gained more ground, and that excites and invigorates me. I think the collaboration adds vibrancy and relevancy to our academic and professional conversations. While ATHE only occurs in August each year, the regional SDC meetings and other events that happen year-round offer a great resource and point of connection for all of us interested and working in directing. The ATHE/ SDC collaboration extends the conversations begun at ATHE and allows ideas to take shape in various regions and throughout the year. Also, as someone who is helping support young directors, I think the SDC/ATHE relationship opens great possibilities for these emerging artists—as well as their faculty sponsors. The collaboration points to the fluidity between the worlds of scholarship and practice, academia and the profession, and I hope the continued collaboration can expand those conversations further. WORKS CITED

Kershaw, Baz. “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism.” Theatre Journal, 55, 4, December 2003, 591-611. Osborne, Natalie. “Spectacular: The Art of Theatre Spectacle.” HowlRound, September 15, 2015. Reale, Robert and Willie Reale. A Year with Frog and Toad TYA. Music Theatre International, 2003.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the Peer-Reviewed Section of SDC Journal serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. SDC Journal seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/craft. For more information, visit: http://sdcweb.org/sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

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David Cromer

Susan Stroman + Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

Sheldon Epps

Susan Stroman + Bartlett Sher

PHOTOS

Walter McBride

On Monday, October 30, 2017, theatremakers from New York City and around the nation gathered to celebrate the first annual SDC Foundation Awards at Green Room 42 in Manhattan. The newly conceived event, billed as a Celebration of Excellence in Directing and Choreography, brought together the presentation of three of SDCF’s existing awards in one celebratory evening: the Breakout Award (now in its second year), the Joe A. Callaway Award (now in its 28th year), and the Zelda Fichandler Award (now in its ninth year). It was truly a showcase of excellence at every phase of Members’ careers. Lee Sunday Evans + Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

David Yazbek

Rachel Rockwell

Warner Shook

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Co-hosted with grace and humor by Susan Stroman (five-time Tony Award winner, 1991 Callaway Award winner, and 2001 “Mr. Abbott” Award winner) and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar (Drama Desk Award winner and 2016 Breakout Award winner), the audience was in good hands. The ceremony kicked off with the presentation of the Breakout Award to Lee Sunday Evans. The Breakout is given by the SDCF Executive Board to an SDC Member for a selection of work over a number of seasons that signals a shift in a career and the beginning of critical recognition—a “rising star” moment in the Off-Broadway arena. Iskandar, who was last year’s winner, had the privilege of presenting the award to his friend and collaborator Evans, or more accurately, to a video of her. Unable to attend the event due to the tech schedule for her latest production, Lee joined the festivities near the end of the evening. Next up were the Callaway Awards, peergiven awards that recognize excellence in the arts of stage direction and choreography in a given New York City Off-Broadway season. Committee Chair Pamela Berlin set the scene for the past season and took a moment to recognize three long-serving committee members who were rolling off this year: Barry McNabb, Sue Lawless, and Bill Martin. The crowd was then treated to a wonderful musical tribute from composerlyricist David Yazbek, who performed “Haled’s Song About Love” from The Band’s Visit, in honor of his friend and collaborator David Cromer, who won this year’s Callaway Award for best direction for that show’s Off-Broadway incarnation at Atlantic Theater Company. Michael Halberstam gave an inspired and good-humored introduction of his old Chicago pal and then presented the award. Cromer, in his acceptance, shared how much the honor meant coming from his peers. Emily Walton, accompanied by Alan Schmuckler, gave a haunting rendition of “The Ballad of Jane Doe” from the musical Ride the Cyclone, in tribute to their directorchoreographer Rachel Rockwell, winner of this year’s Callaway Award for best choreography for her production of that show at MCC Theater. Marcia Milgrom Dodge presented the award to her and during the introduction shared with the crowd some quotes from Rockwell’s close collaborators praising her tenacity, grit, and ability to inspire those around her. In her acceptance remarks, Rockwell gave us a glimpse of exactly that, making us all want to be in a rehearsal room with her. Last, but not least, was the Fichandler Award, which recognizes directors and choreographers who are in the center of their creative lives,

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demonstrate great accomplishment to date and promise for the future, and who have made prominent achievements in the field with singular creativity and artistry and deep investment in a particular community or region. The award is given annually within rotating regions of the US, and this year focused on the Eastern region. Warner Shook presided over this portion of the evening and recounted with wit and wisdom the legacy that Zelda Fichandler had left behind, backed up by Zelda herself in a short video, taken from her last public address.

perhaps the most difficult piece of it all.” Storytelling, legacy, and mentorship were clearly the themes of the night. To cap off the evening, Davis McCallum gave a heartfelt introduction to his friend and colleague Vivienne Benesch before presenting her with the 2017 Fichandler Award. What follows are her impassioned and inspirational remarks.

2017 SDCF AWARDS 2017 FICHANDLER AWARD Vivienne Benesch, Winner Curt Columbus, Finalist Wendy Goldberg, Finalist 2017 FICHANDLER COMMITTEE Warner Shook, Chair Linda Hartzell Lisa Peterson

SDC Executive Director Laura Penn had the honor of presenting the Fichandler finalists, Curt Columbus and Wendy C. Goldberg. Penn compared each to Zelda, noting that Columbus is “radically and impressively connected to his community, allowing his audiences to cross the aesthetic divide in really imaginative ways,” and that Goldberg possessed the same “keen eye and enthusiasm and dedication to the talent of others” as Zelda. Unable to attend in person, Columbus sent a statement that read, in part, “They asked me who I would like to thank, and there are too many mentors to thank along my way, so I’ll thank two people who changed the course of my life. Dennis Zacek, who was the artistic director at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago who gave me the invaluable lesson—once you get your foot in the door, what the fuck are you gonna do with your foot? And who made me look up and outside of myself for the first time. And Martha Lavey, the most expansive thinker about theatre I’ve ever met, who made me want to look at the edges of what’s possible and beyond. Without them, I never would have had a life in the theatre.” Speaking of her honor, Goldberg said, in part, “I started my career at Arena Stage as an intern. And I always joke and say that everything I needed to learn about the regional theatre, I learned that year as an intern. I learned that running an arts organization is very difficult. Working with complicated political boards and fascinating and complex artists is thrilling and daunting. I watched directors soar and crash on the Fichandler Stage, and learned how being an artist inside one of these organizations is equally interesting and fascinating. Building bridges to the community you served was easier said than done, and trying to implement change while honoring your history was

2017 BREAKOUT AWARD Lee Sunday Evans, Winner 2017 BREAKOUT COMMITTEE Richard Hamburger Anne Kaufmann Adam Levi 2017 CALLAWAY AWARDS David Cromer for The Band’s Visit, Atlantic Theater Company—Winner (direction) Rachel Rockwell for Ride the Cyclone, MCC Theater—Winner (choreography) Jesse Berger for The Government Inspector, Red Bull Theater—Finalist (direction) Rebecca Taichman, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, Lincoln Center Theater— Finalist (direction) Daniel Sullivan, If I Forget, Roundabout Theatre Company—Finalist (direction) Gerry McIntyre, Spamilton, The Triad Stage 72—Finalist (choreography) 2016–17 CALLAWAY COMMITTEE Pamela Berlin, Chair Barry McNabb, Co-Vice Chair Richard Hamburger, Co-Vice Chair Jonathan Stuart Cerullo Leah Gardiner Maija Garcia Devanand Janki Sue Lawless Bill Martin DJ Salisbury Amy Saltz

this evening and want to do her proud as her first student to receive this award.

The Zelda Fichandler Award Acceptance Remarks SOME THOUGHTS ON OUR UNIVERSE BY VIVIENNE

BENESCH

hank you, Davis, for that lovely introduction. Davis is someone who I’ve had an artistic crush on since we first met to discuss his directing a production of Arcadia up at Chautauqua in 2009. The glint in his eye is matched by the compassion of his artistic brushstrokes, and he’s become someone I look to for advice and inspiration as a director, artistic leader, and friend. I couldn’t be more honored to be here accepting the Zelda Fichandler Award. Thank you to SDC Foundation, especially to Laura Penn, David Roberts, and to Warner Shook, Lisa Peterson, and Linda Hartzell. To be recognized in the company of all the exceptional directors being honored tonight, and in particular Wendy Goldberg and Curt Columbus, both community trailblazers and empathetic innovators in the field, is humbling indeed. But in a page from Zelda’s handbook, I wore my less-than-humble pants for this event. Some of you here know this—I’ve worn these pants on the opening day of every season at Chautauqua and now at PlayMakers for the last 14 years—both in Zelda’s honor and in hopes of channeling even a smattering of her eloquence when I’ve been called on to speak. I feel her presence so strongly

n the first day of each school year at NYU’s Graduate Acting program, where I had the remarkable privilege of training under Zelda’s leadership, she would sit in some fabulous outfit (usually with loud leather pants) and hold forth. She would share with a room full of eager aspiring actors and a passionate faculty a sort of State of the Union soliloquy. It was always the most inspiring, challenging, and curious meditation on the role of the artist in our Universe. Zelda, more than anyone I know, lived and taught the value of context—from the immediate to the global. She believed there was an endless amount of investigation to be done, and that that investigation as actors must begin with ourselves—but that as theatre artists, it must continue limitlessly through our curiosity not only about each other but also for the historical, social, political, economic, and psychological context of every human interaction we strive to bring to light. This process of looking inward and outward in order to make sense of our universe (and of our all-too-vulnerable humanity within it)—this was our life’s work. One of our first assignments in Zelda’s class at the beginning of NYU in 1990 was called the Universe Project. We were tasked with sharing our Universe—whatever that might mean to us at that moment in our lives— in whatever form we wished for between 20 to 30 minutes. Some people read from journals and shared photographs, others performed poetry and played music, some broke eggs over their naked chests. My project involved me facing a mirror in the classroom, and talking through it to my classmates as I told a few “seminal” stories about my dog, Flic, and my parents’ divorce. But the meat of it was sharing how, for much of my life, this had been my relationship to the world: constantly watching myself as if through a mirror as I interacted with people, places, and things. Now, I wanted to have the courage to turn around so that I could be more present in my life—and in my art. In many ways, every stage of my career can be traced back to that declaration—each step an attempt to be more present, to be as much a listener as a doer, to really absorb who and what’s around me so that I can collaborate and tell stories that make a difference and take risks that feel essential (and by the way, that’s something I find so palpable in the work of David Cromer and Lee Sunday Evans). I have come to understand my life’s mission as aspiring to live up to Zelda’s challenge: to dig ever deeper and more authentically into an understanding of our Universe.

So, tonight, I wanted to take stock of a few significant elements in my Universe over the intervening 27 years that have made standing here even possible. Zelda is one of a trio of life-changing mentors in my life, two of whom have recently passed away. In fact, the loss of both Zelda and Jim Houghton (director of the Juilliard Drama Division over the nine years that I was a director and faculty member there) within a month of each other last year felt like a cosmic sign that it was time for me to STEP UP and break some new glass ceilings in the wake of their indelible imprint. Zelda and Jim were both community builders—they not only had an incredible passion and clarity of mission but they were also authentically interested in seeing and listening to the individuals that made up their Universe. The third in my trinity of mentors, Rebecca Guy, started as my high school acting teacher and is singularly responsible for guiding me to nearly every major artistic home in my career; most significantly, to Juilliard and to Chautauqua, my longest artistic home to date. I spent my first summer at Chautauqua as a student of Becky’s when I was 20 and stepped down from a 12-year tenure as Artistic Director 28 years later. Chautauqua nurtured me in every way imaginable. It gave me the opportunity to be an actress, director, producer, and educator, and—significantly—to be able to model that combination of roles as a possibility to the many young men—and particularly the young women—who came through Chautauqua as my students. It gave me the huge gift of an inter-generational continuum, learning to value the presence of the eight-, 18-, 38-, 58-, and 88-year-olds in my Universe. (Truth be told, at Chautauqua, there are a number of 98-year-olds who still attend the theatre!). Chautauqua afforded me life-changing and molding collaborators in the many exceptional artists and humans working at the top of their game, most significantly Ethan McSweeny, Andrew Borba, and Chautauqua President Tom Becker, all of whom inspired, challenged, and supported me as we built something really special together. But for all the many successes we experienced, there were also painful but essential growing pains. At the start of my tenure there, I would never have called myself a political person and I certainly didn’t think of myself as a political artist. In fact, I was often even afraid of entering into political conversations for fear of being wrong—or seen as ignorant. But I came to realize in my time at this historically white, gated community of lifelong learning, that whether I’m right or wrong, it’s an artistic leader’s responsibility to be IN those conversations and providing pathways for empathy through our work as well as the engagement built around our WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

work. I have learned (and continue to learn) that those conversations can be complex and uncomfortable. But I’ve also learned you get used to making mistakes, and in the face of whatever may come at you, you have to keep opening up yourself—and the organization you serve—continually. That’s the only way for positive change to begin.

Vivienne Benesch + Davis McCallum

So, in all, Chautauqua—its artists, its community, and its leaders—gave me a home to develop the practice of turning around and being present in my Universe. And in so doing, it has charged me with creating that space for others. Nothing in my career has become more important than passing the gift of creative and empowering mentorship on to new generations of emerging artists by making safe spaces for them and for audiences to collide with each other. And may I just say how excited I am to be working at a moment where providing that for women of the theatre in particular—directors, writers, actors, designers, technicians, and administrators—is not only necessary but galvanizing because there is an ever-increasing number of visionary women, and especially visionary women of color, in the pipeline of the American Theatre who we get to champion. But the distance between this aspirational goal and its enactment (on my own part just as much as anyone else’s) is one of the uncomfortable challenges that I still need to “turn around and face.” All this is some of the context in which I arrived at PlayMakers nearly two years ago, a new home where I now get to work with the most dedicated staff and make great theatre with an exceptional resident company (one of the last ones left in the country, a fact that makes me think of Zelda constantly as she championed the value of company through her final days). I also get to converge with the intellectual and cultural resources of a top research university [the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill], whose chancellor has boldly put the arts front and center, and with all this—and through all this—train a dynamic and exciting ensemble of the next generation of theatremakers. I’m also standing on the shoulders of Joseph Haj, my friend and predecessor (and the previous recipient of this award in the Eastern Region!). Joe spent nine fertile years growing PlayMakers’ national reputation and pushing the boundaries of excellence and engagement in a way that has allowed me to start shifting the dial with a company and community ready and demanding of the new. Lucky me. But I will say that my Universe in North Carolina, and our collective American Universe, is an ever more complex place these days, and an ever more daunting one in which to turn around and be present.

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Only a few weeks after I arrived in Chapel Hill to start my tenure with PlayMakers, the North Carolina Legislature passed House Bill 2 (known as the notorious bathroom bill). The Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando followed a few months after that. The Black Lives Matter movement was growing in the wake of tragedy after tragedy and continues to do so. And, of course, it was the year of that election, which has since redefined artistic responsibility. Quite a moment for a liberal New Yorker to land in the South! As I planned for what would be my first programmed season, I knew we had to be involved in all these conversations; to give our artists and audiences, our desired new audiences, and, above all, our students a forum for debate, for escape, for empathy, entertainment, the possibility of beauty, and most of all, a platform for the act of transformation. Transformation was the theme of my inaugural season, but I have quickly come to realize that it has only just begun. I am humbled with the charge of leading a great institution like PlayMakers in a time that is witnessing huge transformation in the American theatre—no longer holding up a mirror to just a narrow view of nature—but to the expansive reality of what the human race actually looks like and experiences today. Transformation will continue to require that brave investigation of our history and an understanding of the myriad issues currently at play on an organizational, local, regional, national, and global level. The information culled from that deep dive can then affect how we think about and act on issues of programming, engagement, education, audience development, donor development, artistic excellence, innovation, and, significantly, how we thread the pursuit of authentic access, equity, diversity, and inclusion into the fabric of all these.

Transformation will mean taking risks to plan for a future that may not (and, in many cases, should not) look like our past, but must respect it as the context that got us here and gives us the information to move forward. If I do my work well, it should never end. And perhaps at this important mid-career checkpoint, that is the great joy to discover about my Universe. “To be an artist is to become a citizen of the world,” I was so beautifully taught by Zelda. I am ready, and with this meaningful recognition that I cannot thank you enough for, I am armed to keep dreaming and advocating, supporting and creating safe and challenging spaces for artists and audiences to better understand their Universe. And I can’t think of a community with whom I’m more proud to be in the trenches. As a director, producer, educator, and an Obie-winning actor (Lee Blessing’s Going to St. Ives), VIVIENNE BENESCH has had the great fortune to collaborate with exceptional theatre artists of many generations on all sides of the table. She is in her second season as the Producing Artistic Director of PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C., where she has directed acclaimed productions of Molly Smith Metzler’s The May Queen, Deborah Salem Smith’s Love Alone, John Logan’s RED, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, and Libby Appel’s adaptation of Three Sisters. This spring, she will direct the world premiere of Mike Wiley and Laurelyn Dossett’s Leaving Eden, PlayMakers’ first full commission. From 2005 to 2016, she was the Artistic Director of the renowned Chautauqua Theater Company and Conservatory, presiding over the company’s transformation into one of the best summer theatres and most competitive summer training programs in the country. At Chautauqua, she directed over 20 productions, including the world premiere of Metzler’s The May Queen and workshop productions of Zayd Dohrn’s The Profane and Sick, Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles, Michael Golamco’s Build, Kate Fodor’s Rx, and Anna Ziegler’s An Incident. In 2014, she proudly conceived and directed The Romeo and Juliet Project, featuring over 100 performers from the Chautauqua dance, opera, theatre, and music programs alongside the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra. Vivienne has also directed at Trinity Rep, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, and extensively for the Juilliard School Drama Division. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU’s Graduate Acting Program, where she had the great fortune to study under Zelda Fichandler and Ron Van Lieu. She has served as a faculty member at NYU, Juilliard, Trinity-Brown, and UNC Chapel Hill’s Professional Actor Training Program. For several years, Vivienne served as chair of the theatre panel for the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (now YoungArts).

Josh Prince

RESOURCE Q&A

One new initiative SDC Foundation is developing is the creation of a knowledge center and resource hub, envisioned as the go-to source for all things related to the crafts of direction and choreography. We will look to include artists, programs, and organizations that complement the Foundation’s direct programming and supplement the opportunities available to our constituents. In this spirit, the Resource Q&A will be a semiregular feature in the Foundation Section of the Journal, where we get to learn more about a fellow organization, its leadership, and whom it serves. We hope you will find it interesting and ultimately of use to your craft and career. This quarter, as the Journal focuses on choreography, I posed the same five questions to two artists and organizational founders, as they look to impact the field and serve unmet needs. Take a read and be inspired—I know I was. David Roberts Foundation Director

BROADWAY DANCE LAB SDC Member Josh Prince is an alum of Dance Break and was the choreographer of Shrek, The Musical and Beautiful—The Carole King Musical on Broadway, among many other credits. He is the Artistic Director and Founder of Broadway Dance Lab (BDL), a “choreography incubator that gives all theater dancemakers the resources they need to bring their visions to life.” Why is choreography important to you personally? Choreographers are writers, and all writers write because they feel a need to express themselves. I love choreographing because I love communicating emotions, stories, ideas, etc. to audiences. My views of the world come out in my work. How can they not? Even if I am choreographing to preconceived situations in a revival of a musical, it is my unique perspective on the characters or

the situation that informs how the actors or dancers end up moving. For me, dance is an expression of pure life force as well as the human connection. We are all nonverbal communicators when we start out in life. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and choreography is the art of assembling thousands of pictures. Ergo, it has the power to communicate so much on a uniquely visceral level. When you founded Broadway Dance Lab, what was the problem you were seeking to solve? Commercial choreographers are called upon at a moment’s notice by the producers who employ them to be well-oiled, creative, fully defined artists. But how can we be any of these things without being given the tools with which to practice? That would be like telling an opera singer not to open her mouth to sing until she’s given a job. I’m certain no one reading this would agree that is a good idea. I realized about five years ago that my peers and I were at the mercy of two elements: we either had to “wait for the phone to ring” to be given the chance to create on spec for shows that may or may not contain any dance elements, or we had to spend WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

disability benefits for dancers. It’s a great gig for professional dancers. Where else do you get to work with so many different types of choreographers in one short period and get paid for it? How has leading a rehearsal room been similar to leading an organization? How has it been different? Let me first say that I never in my wildest dreams thought I would create and run a nonprofit arts service organization for choreographers. I now understand what people mean when they say they had a “calling.” But I would say that leadership positions of any kind carry with them the need for certain common skills: communication, clarity of vision, strong boundaries, and an ability to be okay with not being liked when tough decisions need to be made. But the biggest difference (and it’s a very big one!) is that as the Founder/ Artistic Director of BDL, I spend a great deal of my time fundraising. When I’m in the rehearsal room actually creating dance for a show, I am generally only focused on one specific element of the art form. When I’m in the office as an administrator, I am often wearing many, many more hats. Managing staff, budgets, grant applications... the list often seems to go on forever. What do you think are some of the most inspiring things happening in choreography today?

thousands of dollars of our own money on studio rentals and ask our out-of-work friends to donate their services so we could explore new ideas. Both of these were deterring even the most experienced dancemakers in the industry from pushing the artistic envelope. This, in my opinion, was having an adverse effect on the industry at large and the products we put out as a theatre community. How do BDL’s programs specifically serve choreographers and dancers? BDL is the only incubator whose primary mission is to support choreographers by giving them the tools they need to practice their craft, test ideas, and collaborate more effectively with other artists in the field. BDL offers dancers, space, and time to choreographers free of charge, giving authors of dance artistic freedom and a safe place

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to fail where nothing is dictated and no idea is off-limits. The cost-prohibitive nature of securing large space and professional dancers in New York City leaves most of our promising dancemakers without any means for trial and error. This, in turn, keeps new dance-driven stories from being birthed and ultimately brought to fruition. BDL addresses this problem by giving dancemakers of all backgrounds a sophisticated platform for experimentation and movement generation. BDL also provides consistent seasonal employment for professional dancers, paying a competitive salary reflective of their years of training, experience, and the considerable physical demands placed upon them. Our dancers are also covered by workers’ comp so both dancers and choreographers can approach their work with confidence about dancers’ protection. In addition to this, the company also pays into unemployment and

There is so much varied dancemaking in today’s climate. There are so many different types of dance to go see. There really is something for everyone out there. Dance is big again, and it’s everywhere. Ballet is once again making a splash on the Broadway stages, and I’m so thrilled to see that talented women of color like Camille A. Brown are finally being given their due. Broadway needs these varied voices. Musical theatre dance is a distinctly American art form precisely because it is an amalgamation of styles derived from a multitude of varied influences. People often say to me (regarding BDL), “Aren’t you worried you are training your competition?” I find this question rather sad. After all, I don’t become a better artist because everyone else disappears off the radar. I become a better artist by being inspired by the creativity and excellence of my peers. To find out more about Broadway Dance Lab, visit: Web: www.broadwaydancelab.org Facebook: www.facebook.com/bwaydancelab Twitter + Instagram: @bwaydancelab

When you founded Dance ICONS, what was the problem you were seeking to solve? We did a survey that indicated that most dance professions have their associations in the US and internationally. Dance performers, teachers, and scholars have networks, publications, and conferences as an organized way of connecting and communicating. Unfortunately, we learned that the choreographers did not have any concrete platform to unite them professionally [across genres]. That was the reason for us to gradually build a platform that serves as a meeting point for choreographers of all nationalities and ages, working in different dance genres and disciplines of the movement and dance arts.

DANCE ICONS Vladimir Angelov comes from a long professional career of choreographing contemporary ballet. He has worked internationally and staged original works for companies including Atlanta Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and Washington Ballet in the US, and Tokyo City Ballet of Japan, National Ballet of Mexico, and Mariinsky Ballet of Saint Petersburg, Russia, among many others. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the International Consortium for Advancement in Choreography, a.k.a. Dance ICONS, Inc. Based in Washington, DC, it is “an international organization and global network for choreographers of all levels of experience, nationalities, and genres, offering a cloud-based platform for knowledge exchange, information distribution, inspiration, and debate.” Why is choreography important to you personally? Choreography has been my native language for the past 25 years of my professional career. Dance is an art form that is very unique because it does not need translation in different languages and cultures. It is a nonverbal and universal way of expression beyond borders, and at the same time, it is powerful enough to make political, social, and philosophical statements. Every choreographer in the world is an artist searching, reaching, and creating beyond words. Being able to communicate globally with all kinds of people always has been very appealing to me.

How do Dance ICONS’ programs specifically serve choreographers and dancers? We’re still in the process of developing our programs. We have our monthly newsletters that include information about upcoming premieres, what is trending, and a listing of international opportunities for young choreographers. In addition, we organize live Choreography Talks with prominent dancemakers who are visiting Washington, DC. Finally, we are in the midst of developing and perfecting a new methodology for educating young and emerging choreographers in how to advance their skills and create better dancers. Last year, we established a Choreography Institute in Washington, DC, which has started to implement this new methodology. Our next goal is to cultivate awareness and to further build advocacy for choreographers. As we move forward to establish an International Conference for Choreographers, we’re looking at major international platforms and international partner organizations to make this idea a reality. Of course, it will take time, patience, and lots of work. And we are prepared for it—Rome was not built in one day, nor by one person. How has leading a rehearsal room been similar to leading an organization? How has it been different?

organization. Luckily, there are also similarities. While choreography is to create movement for dancers, directorship of a service organization requires the same coordinating skills, such as organizing educational events, planning and arranging meetings, and, most importantly, creating and developing a vision by leading others to become better themselves. At the end, it’s all choreography! What do you think are some of the most inspiring things happening in choreography today? Contemporary choreography today develops into three major directions: the first direction is contemporary dance theatre, which has opened doors to multiple dance genres and movement cultures by colliding them together. The second direction is the openness of choreographers to integrate different disciplines in their work. There are three layers to this. The first is multidisciplinary, where multiple artists of different disciplines work together under a common concept, which leads to the second layer, interdisciplinary, which combines multiple disciplines into one single work. The third layer is transdisciplinary, when a single artist incorporates multiple disciplines to create a new hybrid art form of artistic expression. Finally, we have the interaction of choreography with current technological advancements, such as digital art, virtual reality, interactive media, threedimensional projections, computer animation, digital mapping, motion capture, and sensory response. It is always very exciting to watch how the art form develops and the new directions of the future. Dance ICONS is thrilled to be on the leading edge of identifying and observing these new developments. To find out more about Dance ICONS, visit: Web: www.danceicons.org Facebook: www.facebook.com/www.danceicons.org

Leading a rehearsal room has to do with artistic expression and self-reflection, and as a choreographer, I serve a vision. However, by leading an organization, I do not serve myself, but I serve others. Different skills are required to be a choreographer of an original dance work and to be a director of a service

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Peter Hall + Michael Bryant PHOTO John Haynes c/o National Theatre

REMEMBERING SIR PETER HALL BY

BARTLETT SHER

I found myself walking across Waterloo Bridge on my way to a rehearsal at the National Theatre in London when I saw on its famous advertising sign the simple words: “Sir Peter Hall, 1930–2017.” I stopped, slightly breathless; it was a simple and clear thing. Peter had died, and we lost one of our great leaders and one of the most generous theatre artists of the last 100 years. Founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, builder of the great National Theatre itself, tireless champion of the arts and artists, wizard and magician of language and the deeper music of Shakespeare and Mozart and text of any kind, and raconteur of gigantic proportions, he blazed through a life in the theatre. I only slipped into his orbit for several months as an associate on his productions of Measure for Measure and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles in 1998. I learned more in those short months than in any time in my life—not just an extraordinary tutelage in language, but more importantly a lesson in how to deeply think about theatre, how to be courageous, how to be generous, and how to defend the work and all of the artists who struggle to make it. I entered the journey hopeful; I left transformed. And I was one of many. After he died, the outpouring of stories and expression of his work in people’s lives became as transforming as he was. He singlehandedly reinvented, reconnected, re-explained the idea of company and company work, and what it meant not only to the individuals who made it but to his own country and its political leaders, as he fought tirelessly to build artistic homes and an idea

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of what this work should be. All of us in the theatre, whether in England or the US, grow up to discover the ideas that Peter Hall almost singlehandedly invented about what a life in the theatre could be and where we could make it, and how it could be extraordinary. My fondest memory of Peter is when his then 17-year old daughter came into rehearsal to watch him work. His love for her and his deep joy in his family, including his wonderful wife, Nicki, his daughter, Emma, and his brilliant son, Ed, were the most exquisite side of him. “My daughter, Rebecca, is going to be a star,” he said. I am not sure, even though it turned out to be true, that he meant it in terms of success. He meant it in almost a poetic, Spenserian way; she just shone that brightly to him. I have to be honest in saying I barely made it across Waterloo Bridge that day. Mostly because I knew, like many people, that I was going to work in such a special place because of Peter. The day was long but full of joy as I celebrated his incandescent spirit in the work and the place he made with so much heart. In Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” there is a line describing the “maple’s inward sound.” That was Peter: the deepest inward sound. From “Sir Peter Hall, World Builder” by Bartlett Sher and Jeffrey Horowitz. Originally appeared in American Theatre online, 18 September 2017. Used with permission from Theatre Communications Group. As this issue went to press, SDC learned of the passing of John Barton, Peter Hall’s partner in founding the Royal Shakespeare Company.

SIR PETER HALL, one of the great names in British theatre, died on September 11, 2017, at the age of 86. His extraordinary career spanned more than half a century. In his mid-twenties, he staged the English-language premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In 1960, at age 29, he founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, which he led until 1968. He was Director of the National Theatre from 1973 to 1988. He then formed the Peter Hall Company (1988–2011), and in 2003, he became the Founding Director of the Rose Theatre Kingston. Hall’s prolific work as a theatre director included the world premieres of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming (1965), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978); Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979); John Barton’s nine-hour epic Tantalus (2000); and the London and Broadway premieres of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce (1977). Other landmark productions included Hamlet (1965, with David Warner); The Wars of the Roses (1963); The Oresteia (1981); Animal Farm (1984); Antony and Cleopatra (1987, with Judi Dench and Anthony Hopkins); The Merchant of Venice (1989, with Dustin Hoffman); As You Like It (2003, with his daughter, Rebecca Hall); and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010, with Judi Dench). His last production at the National Theatre was Twelfth Night in 2011. Hall was also an internationally renowned opera director. He staged the world premiere of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden (1970) and was Artistic Director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera (1984–1990), where he directed more than 20 productions. He worked at many of the world’s leading houses, including the Royal Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and Bayreuth.

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

At the annual SDC-ATHE cocktail reception, held on August 4 at the ATHE Conference 2017 in Las Vegas, SDC directors and choreographers joined Co-editor Ann M. Shanahan, Book Review Editor Kathleen M. McGeever, and the board of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS), along with SDC Past President Karen Azenberg and Executive Director Laura Penn, to explore the ways that SDC supports directors and choreographers in higher education and celebrate the two-year anniversary of the PRS. Attendees toasted outgoing PRS Editors Anne Fliotsos and Travis Malone and welcomed new Co-editor David Callaghan and Book Review Associate Emily A. Rollie. TOP

David Callaghan (left), Kathleen M. McGeever (right) + attendees MIDDLE

Ann M. Shanahan (standing), Karen Azenberg + attendees Directors Lab Chicago held its 13th season August 20–25 at Victory Gardens Theater and other locations around Chicago. Exploring the theme “Director-Audience: Engaging and Challenging a Distracted World,” participants examined their roles in guiding audiences to engage with the work, each other, and the world. Sessions included exploring practices like sitespecific, immersive, interactive, and educational theatre, as well as theatre of the oppressed, ritual/ ceremony theatre, prison theatre, and agitprop. SDC Director of Member Services Barbara Wolkoff and Contract Affairs Representative Adam Levi led a session on SDC Membership. BOTTOM LEFT

Chay Yew + Adam Levi BOTTOM RIGHT

William Bullion + Barbara Wolkoff WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

Also in Chicago, Barbara Wolkoff and Adam Levi joined Fight Steering Committee Member Chuck Coyl, Executive Board Member Chay Yew, and SDC Members and non-members for a Chicago Fight Choreographers Meeting on August 23 at Victory Gardens Theater. Topics discussed included the new LORT coverage, SDC coverage in other jurisdictions, and the benefits of SDC Membership. TOP LEFT

Chuck Coyl Twin Cities Members gathered at the Guthrie Theater on August 29 for a Minneapolis/St. Paul Members Meeting with Casey Stangl and Barbara Wolkoff for a chance to connect and socialize with fellow SDC Members. TOP RIGHT

Casey Stangl + James Rocco MIDDLE

Jeremy B. Cohen + Kate Powers On September 14, New England-area directors, choreographers, and managers convened at Emerson College in Boston to celebrate the signing of the first Agreement between the New England Area Theatres (NEAT) and SDC. Members of the negotiating committees toasted the dedicated work of the NEAT and SDC committees in reaching this Agreement, which will support the working relationships among New England artists. BOTTOM

Producers and SDC Members toasting: Spiro Veloudos, Daniel Gidron, Lee Mikeska Gardner, Paul Melone, Melia Bensussen, Lisa Rafferty, Randy Anderson, Russell Garrett, Larry Sousa + Michaela Shields

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The SDC table at this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Broadway Cares/ Equity Fights Aids (BCEFA) Flea Market & Grand Auction, held in the Broadway theatre district on September 25, raised $10,436, placing SDC in the top 12 of the 57 tables at the Flea Market! The event shattered all records, raising over $1 million. In addition to supporting organizations that provide services to our Members and theatrical family across the country, the funds also enabled BCEFA to award $575,000 in emergency relief grants to organizations in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas recovering from the recent devastating hurricanes. Thank you to all our Members who helped make the Flea Market so successful! TOP

Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction MIDDLE

Nick Corley, Markus Potter + Markusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son Tennessee LA-area Members gathered on September 9 for breakfast and an LA Members Meeting centered around the topic of writer/director collaboration agreements. Matt August, Sheldon Epps, and Paul Lazarus were joined by new SDC Director of Contract Affairs Randy Anderson to lead the discussion and review the SDC Collaboration Agreement guidelines. BOTTOM

(Clockwise, from left): Matt August, Paul Lazarus, Arthur Seidelman, Kitty McNamee, James Still, Elina de Santos, Judy Rose, Sarah Gurfield, John Henry Davis, David Lee + Michael Arabian

WINTER 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

The inaugural Chita Rivera Awards (formerly the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards), directed by Randy Skinner and hosted by Bebe Neuwirth, were held September 11 at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre and followed by a celebration at Sardi’s. Theatre choreography awards went to Andy Blankenbuehler for Outstanding Choreography in a Broadway Show (Bandstand) and Joshua Bergasse for Outstanding Choreography in an OffBroadway Show (Sweet Charity). In addition, Tommy Tune was presented with the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, and Diane Paulus received the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Musical Theater as Director. TOP RIGHT

Pam MacKinnon, Kelly Devine + Diane Paulus MIDDLE LEFT

Sergio Trujillo + Laura Penn The Seattle theatre community celebrated free expression in the theatre on September 25 at Banned Together, an evening of songs and scenes from shows that have been censored or challenged on America’s stage, with a libretto by John Weidman and direction by Allison Narver. Sponsored by The Dramatists Legal Defense Fund in cooperation with SDC and Actors’ Equity, the cabaret was presented in 16 cities around the US as part of Banned Books week. On September 27, Portland area Members joined Laura Penn and Artists Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Dámaso Rodríguez for a Portland SDC Night Out at Artists Rep. A performance of An Octoroon, co-directed by Lava Alapai + Dámaso Rodríguez, followed the happy hour. BOTTOM

Gemma Whelan, Dámaso Rodríguez, Adriana Baer, Jonathan Cole, Jane Unger + Laura Penn

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Allison Narver

SDC Executive Director Laura Penn, IATSE International President Matthew Loeb, and other union officials attended a Meet & Greet with NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio hosted by the IATSE Local One PAC on October 11. The 9th Annual Gregory Awards were presented by Theatre Puget Sound on October 23 to honor the achievements of theatre practitioners in Washington State. Ameenah Kaplan won Outstanding Choreography and was nominated for Outstanding Director for her work on The Royale at ACT Theatre. Also nominated for Outstanding Director were Members Valerie Curtis-Newton for Wedding Band at Intiman Theatre and Sheila Daniels for Lydia at Strawberry Theatre Workshop. TOP RIGHT

Valerie Curtis-Newton, Kim Powell + cast members of Wedding Band PHOTO John Ulman A pilot Berkshire Leadership Summit was held October 28–29 at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, hosted by WAM Theatre Company, for women aspiring to, or already in, leadership positions in the nonprofit theatre in both the artistic and management tracks. Sessions focused on four areas identified as main barriers to the next step in women’s leadership: fundraising, producing, relationship building, and awareness building. BOTTOM

Liz Diamond, Hana Sharif + Martha Richards leading a plenary session titled “Successive Leadership: Leading on While Passing the Baton” PHOTO David Dashiell

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ABOVE

Berkshire Leadership Summit Participants PHOTO David Dashiell At Sardiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on November 7, the Broadway League and the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds held the annual Broadway Salutes, honoring the artists, designers, staff, and crew who have contributed to the success of Broadway for 25, 35, and 50-plus years. David Hyde Pierce hosted. RIGHT

Laura Penn, David Hyde Pierce + Ira Mont PHOTO Walter McBride BOTTOM

Broadway Salutes PHOTO Walter McBride

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“ I realized I had a lot of nerve. I had stride. I had guts. If you really want to be a choreographer, get down to business. Give it all you’ve got.

” SDC FOUNDER ONNA WHITE 1922–2005 Choreographer ONNA WHITE earned eight Tony Award nominations for her work on the original productions of classic Broadway musicals such as The Music Man and Mame. Her choreographic trademark was large-scale, intricate dance sequences, and she was known for her meticulous planning and attention to the specific needs of character, plot, and situation. White began her Broadway career as a dancer in the original 1947 production of Finian’s Rainbow, choreographed by Michael Kidd, and in 1950 became Kidd’s assistant on the original production of Guys and Dolls. She choreographed her first Broadway show, Carmen Jones, in 1956. White went on to choreograph nearly 20 Broadway musicals, including The Music Man, Irma La Douce, Mame, 1776, Gigi, and Working. Her success with The Music Man on Broadway in 1958 began her career in Hollywood choreographing some of the most beloved and enduring films of musicals, such as The Music Man, Bye Bye Birdie, Oliver!, 1776, and Mame. Although choreography is not a regular category for the Academy Awards, White’s work in Oliver! was considered so exceptional that the Academy gave her an Honorary Oscar at the 1969 ceremony in recognition of her “outstanding choreography achievement.”

PHOTO

Henry Groskinsky/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

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