New lines, new insights!

So today, my partner in crime and name-linked-hetero- artist-life-partner Kara Lee is at the theatre having her “germ day”, which sounds like a weird rite of passage from a previous time, but is in fact a dedicated day for her to WRITE MORE OF THIS PLAY and this play only, in the theatre, away from other distractions/realities/obligations, totally surrounded by the vibe/energy/literal locale of where the play currently comes to life Thurs-Sun (and others) at 8pm.  I’m following her progress vicariously as pictures of her working get posted on FB. Then we email. Then we call.

So she added back a line to the play that we had cut for time….it’s when Grace(slick) is talking to a teddy bear who is wearing a tie dye tee shirt. He talks back to her by quoting Grateful Dead lyrics. She calls him Jerry. So it seems like it should be pretty clear that the teddy bear is Jerry Garcia, but somehow people aren’t responding to it…maybe b/c they don’t associate Garcia with Jefferson Airplane, so they don’t catch on? Not sure.  So we want the audience to know exactly who he is. I’d post Kara’s exact rewrite here, but I don’t want to do it without her permission and I daren’t interrupt her writing with another phone call. So I will tell you that what she does is, she has Grace ask Jerry for more insight, and he responds by telling her that he is just a teddy bear that she calls Jerry Garcia and he’s doing the best he can.

Which I think is awesome.

Another thing I think is awesome is that this idea of a girl/woman having an inanimate toy/doll in whom she confides is one I’ve seen in Kara Lee’s work before. In her play HOLLY DOWN IN HEAVEN, Holly has a “psychiatrist”. It’s a Carol Channing doll she asks for advice, and she always receives it. Late in the play, the Carol Channing doll ALSO reminds Holly that she is not in fact a real shrink; she’s just a doll that Holly talks to. Any real answers must come from Holly herself. I find the fact of this recurring idea….that of a girl going to her beloved toy for help and then being told by the toy that the real help has to come from within YOU, b/c I’m just a toy….so INTERESTING. And it’s one of the cool things about getting to collaborate with the same artist across several projects…I learn more about Kara Lees worldview and how she expresses it theatrically (which has many similarities to my own) and realize why I am so attracted to working on her scripts. And it’s, well, damn cool.

Kara-Lynn Vaeni

A Ladder Dance…and maybe more

Well Hello GermReaders!

I’m your friendly Movement Choreographer…. I’ve worked with both Goldor$Mythyka and Evening All Afternoon – two refreshing and very different plays.

I’ve been working with the Goldor $ Mythyka Germ Team since February… we’ve had multiple changes in casts, and each workshop has been exciting in it’s own way… But here we are ready to open the GERM!

But first…. I’m giving you a sneak peak at how the funny fog moments (our FDNY run in that was discussed last week) made for some pretty HOT pictures of the famed “Ladder Dance”.

Enjoy!

Melissa

(Melissa Riker, Choreographer & Artistic Director of Kinesis Project. My Blog)

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We got videos! (And some articles, too.)

Learn lots more ’bout what’s going on — our collaborating artists can tell you themselves!  Videos on The New Georges Channel by Rehana Lew Mirza.  They’re all pretty fun!

GERM cast member Charise Castro Smith, meanwhile, wrote a fab preview of the project for The Brooklyn Rail!  A little problem on the spelling of our company’s name… but hey, the article’s so awesome, you can skip that.

And because of THE GERM PROJECT, artistic director Susan Bernfield was asked by TCG to answer the question “What if…theatres swam against the small cast currents, and sought out epic plays to produce?”  on their blog.  Her answer is here.   

Check it all out!  Two performances down, 18 to go… we’re pretty excited about what we’re seeing on the stage, and the enthusiasm of the audiences.  Phew and yay!!

Wanna read the GERM prop list?

A diverse juxtaposition of items!  Watching rehearsal (the one with the jukebox, not the one with a smile on a stick), I thought I wanna see that prop list!   So I asked our awesome prop designer Rachel Schapira, who’s had her hands full in 4 different worlds, for it:

Coke from old fashioned coke bottles (5)

Giant evil coke cut-out

Beer bottle

Phone for Anon

“Drink me” bottle

Alice’s keys

Grace’s handheld mirror

Painter’s tape for Grace’s mouth

Jerry Garcia Bear

Smile on a stick

Smile “fishing pole”/walk the dog

Giant hypodermic needle

Piece of paper and pen forAlice’s letter

Hookah hose

Marble notebooks with graffitti

Tambourine

Rusted out tricyle 30 packs Big Red gum Hunting rifle Backpack Antlers (actor friendly) Bar Rag (checkered yes) Bar Glasses dartboard Juke box – old timey Dead deer Pint/flask sized whiskey bottle Backpack for Jackie Tarp Homework/workbook for Jackie

Map of Byzantine castle

Goldor and Allendor

Bart’s ipod

10 sided dice (switch out for 20 sided)

Bart’s laptop

Goldor and Mythyka script

laundry basket of clothes

Boy’s Computer

Fed’s Badge

Gerri’s make-up bag

red lipstick

compact

mascara

chapstick

Bart and Holly’s cell phones

Bag of money (bank bag)

Money

Screen remote for DJ

keyboard

Electric Guitar

Bass amp

Electric Guitar

Guitar Amp

Drum kit

Xmas decoration

New Years Decoration “Happy 2009″

Happy Valentines 2009

“Call me” card 530-6676 card to hand to audience (index cards)

Small “HORN” card to hand to audience member

Candy Box

Spray bottle A book of Keats poetry Baseball glove Baseball Handwritten letters with envelopes, 5-20 knife plate salami and mustard potato chips carrots Peanuts in shells bowl peeler Pillow cases (2) Topsheet Bedspread 1 Bedspread 2 Pillows Laptop Backpack of Schoolbooks Paper for Fernando’s poem Hairbrush hand gun

Our Band is Awesome!

So you may not know that two of the plays in the GERM Project use a live rock band on stage. That’s right! And it’s going to be awesome! Mike Ferraro and the Young Republicans and The House of Leaves will take turns performing with our amazing actors. Germ actor Juan Cardenas will join them on bass during the show. It’s pretty much the best.

We had our first rehearsals with the guys from Mike Ferraro and the Young Republicans this past week. And they totally rocked! Take a peek for yourself. Here are a few pics of the band’s first rehearsal with Juan:

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Thanks to Ralph, our fearless musical leader, and Mike and Juan for sharing their amazing talents with us!

Meeting and Greeting

With four Germs rehearsing simultaneously for the last two weeks, it has been impossible to get everyone involved in the project in the same room together! On May 26, we had a full company meet-and-greet where each Germ cast read through their Germ for all the others. It was really exciting to hear the four Germs out loud, performed by such amazing actors! A few of our peeps couldn’t make it, but it was wonderful to get almost everyone together!  (pix by Marcelo Anez!)

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Glimpse of a Production Meeting

Production meetings for The GERM Project are kind of full of scope and adventure, just like the Germs! With four different Germs in one evening of theater, coordinating the logistics can be a bit daunting at times, but oh-so-much fun! Here is a glimpse into our first full production meeting. Isn’t our team delightful??

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“This Is Not Antigone”… trike-on!

We’ve got a little red tricycle in this Germ. It’s one of the earliest images from the play, the Antigone-inspired character Anne rides it around in the play’s prologue. Anne is being played by the fabulous Anna Kull, who has pretty long legs for the child-size trike, and so figuring out how she will get around on it was the challenge at the top of today’s rehearsal.

At the end of yesterday’s rehearsal, the project’s scenic designer Nick Francone brought his model of the set & space. How cool! Ladders, levels, and even a jukebox on which to play our Patsy Cline… And so later today as we worked through the Germ’s second scene, entitled “The Sh*t Goes Down”, our fearless director Portia Krieger had a model to give us all a better idea about the space that we will ultimately be playing in.

For this play, the space is going to matter a lot. It’s already sparking my imagination, as I continue to think about and work on the full-length version of the play. I can’t wait to see it all come together.

- Kate Walat, playwright “This Is Not Antigone”

AliceGraceAnon – It’s Happening

Yesterday Kara-Lynn and I met in the Room with a cast of five adventurous actors—Heather Lee Harper, Katie Lear, Zach Shaffer, Jenny Seastone Stern, and Colleen Werthmann—and we read through the WHOLE play.  A crazy play.  A wildly UNfinished play.  To add to the rough and raw atmosphere, occasionally we had to pause while I dictated lines of text that were mysteriously absent from the actors’ scripts because I made the fateful decision to compose this play on Microsoft Excel!  This software program is lovely for making little orderly lists.  For a 95-page odyssey?  It’s the devil’s playground.

But regardless of the bumps in the road, hearing this piece in its entirety with some sort of beginning, middle, and end was a crucial step in this process.  I finally felt like “Yes, this can be done. And we are indeed doing it!”  It was terrifying, but great.  Scary and exciting are a hot match.  Like chocolate and strawberries.

I should maybe describe AliceGraceAnon because if you don’t know anything about it, the title probably won’t help you.  It begins as three separate plays all happening at the same time.  A version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane performing a ramshackle concert, and the protagonist of Go Ask Alice descending into her drug nightmare through a series of diary entries.  As the play unfolds, eventually their separate worlds collide.   To be blunt, here’s the base connection: Grace Slick was inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to write Jefferson Airplane’s seminal “White Rabbit,” which became an LSD anthem during the psychedelic 60s.    A lyric was taken from that song, which then became the title for Go Ask Alice: a found diary written by “Anonymous.”  The diary was later revealed to be a hoax.  It is essentially a long, dramatized pamphlet warning kids about the dangers of drugs written by Beatrice Sparks.  Alice, Grace, and poor drugged-out Anonymous all influenced me as a kid.  Though I grew up in the 80s, I was obsessed with the 60s.  Especially the late 60s.  When Susan Bernfield approached me about writing something “big, adventurous, bold, fun” and many other spectacular adjectives that I can’t quite remember right now, about five minutes after our coffee date, I knew I had to write this.  How often are we given an opportunity to create something so deliciously impractical?

Now we all know that Wikipedia is a bastion of journalistic accuracy (wink), but I do find their definition of the term “happening” to be pretty apt.  That’s how I judge Wiki entries: if I like it, it works.

“A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere (from basements to studio lofts and even street alley ways), are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience.”  In the latest version of AliceGraceAnon, Grace defines this meta-theatrical event for the audience as a happening.  Will this remain in the text?  Nothing can be certain.  But my own understanding of this piece—the most stylistically ambitious I’ve ever attempted to write—and this whole adventurous process is evocative of a more collaborative era.  In art and in life.  I’m thinking about the 60s.  (Surprise, surprise!)  My point?  AliceGraceAnon‘s inception, birth and young life totally feel like an old-school happening.

You dig?

~Kara Lee Corthron

uh… what’re the dates?

by Susan Bernfield, NG artistic director

So of course we told the playwrights and directors to challenge us as producers with what theywrite and otherwise put on stage.  But that’s hardly been the only challenge, nope, nothing is not challenging!  It’s our own fault, we pledged to do things DIFFERENTLY, and swore to keep things open and flexible till we discover what they want to be.   And the artists have been AWESOME in being there while all that happens, while we change the definitions of established practice on them, and it’s been useful to answer their many understandable questions, cause usually it means we get to actually move forward and make some damn decisions.

Like schedule.  We have 7 weeks in the theater, an awesome luxury that’s at the heart of this project, cause it means we could take as many weeks as we want to play with adventurous tech stuff before starting performances.  The idea was to discover the right balance of rehearsing in the theater/performance time, so we didn’t want to set a schedule too soon, until we knew a little bit more about the pieces, how they would work and what they would need.

A few weeks back one of our artists wrote me this:  ”i should know this, but i’ve looked through all my calendars, notes, mad scribblings and can’t find the info.  what are the dates of the show in June/July? what are you thinking the rehearsal time will be?”

What a crazy question!

My reply, in which I try-to-follow-the-new-rules-the-whole-point-of-which-is-they-aren’t-rules:  ”That’s because what you might call vague or undetermined, we call FREEING and process-oriented!  We’re just gonna keep everything  open till we see how it all evolves!  But in the interest of having  you there, feel free to take as but a guideline that rehearsals  ”officially” start around May 10 (you can use less or more time  depending on what you need), the first performance could be, say,  Tuesday June 14, and there’s a chance we’ll have an official  opening later that week (with more time to futz later on!).   There’s one thing that’s certain:  we close Saturday June 9.”

We HAVE set dates since that exchange, and then set them again.  Because at SOME point you have to decide these things (I’ve been the one bucking for sooner rather than later…).  And we’ve figured out a lot of other stuff besides.  Like it’s been important to Sarah that we build in time AFTER opening to go back and change things if artists decide they don’t like what they got.  After all, don’t you always feel something needs changing after opening?  And if this project’s supposed to be different, isn’t this a rare opportunity to accommodate that?

But how do you do that and still respect artists’ and tech folks’ time?  Everybody can’t just be on endless hold, called on to go back into tech on a whim.  And how can we be sure we’re talking big changes that really make a difference, not just futzing with small stuff?  And if everybody’s spent 3 weeks in the space figuring out big cool stuff and special effects, can you really make a meaningful change in one post-opening day of tech? After much back and forth, Sarah and I hashed (oh, we hashed) out a plan that would satisfy both her goal of artistic flexibility, and mine of limiting chaos and time abuse.  During the long tech phase of the project, when we’re in the theater prior to previews, collaborators can decide to experiment with two versions of the big theatrical challenge they’re working on.  Then if part way through the run they want to go to Plan B, we’ve got it, we’ve worked on it, and it won’t take long to switch it out.  Phew!

In that same conversation, we decided we’d take one day a week to do… something else. We’ll have those days on the calendar for cast and crew, so they’ll know something might happen!  But do something else, like tech a new moment, or maybe have a reading of some of the full-length drafts the “germs” are excerpted from, either privately or for the public.  We’re calling that GERM NATION, and it’s gonna be on Wednesdays during the run.  Er… at least that’s the plan so far.

The artists seem excited about the unusual stuff, once they know what it is.  Going back to the drawing board after opening — happy directors.  People like the GERM NATION idea too, at least they nodded and smiled when we talked about it.  I mean, we’ll see how these things play out in real life, I admit to healthy skepticism.

Of course I feel like it’s totally possible to do things differently, to allow for more freedom and flexibility, I’m totally on board with that. But even that requires having some structure, like the Plan B idea, it can be a new kinda structure, an experimental structure, but still… some smart structure.  So people feel comfortable.  Especially ME.