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From the very beginning of the piece we are tipped off that this will not be a linear narrative, when a young red headed white man comes out and introduces Reggie Watts, but the next person to enter the stage unexpectedly is a white woman. When on stage she recites yet another sort of introduction to the art we are getting ready to see, and establishes that the artistic work in the piece seeks to “challenge perspective in a seemingly unchanging world.” In terms of logic I am not entirely sure if the preface given is in regard to the following movie sequence that plays, or if she’s speaking for the whole of the piece. I am certain it pertains to both.

At the beginning of the piece the movement feels like with each change we are moving further and further away from reality. When we finally meet Reggie Watts, he is a large black man with funky hair, dressed in white garb, and is speaking with an English accent. Yet again he reaffirms that the world we are entering is unfamiliar by saying, “What world is this, let me just say that the answer is not to be arrived at so soon…” The first time through this piece I somehow missed all of these warning signs, and it took me watching the piece a second time to understand even vaguely that throughout the piece we would be dealing with distance and perspective.

Reggie’s ability to play on words, beyond the contemporary vernacular is impressive, and extremely hilarious. There are moments where I thought that he might be taking a page from Shakespeare’s work, but its simply coming from his brain. In the progression of his Shakespearean speech, I loose the trajectory of his thoughts. He is speaking passionately, and yet it seems as if he isn’t saying anything. There are plenty of other times in the performance that his work runs off into an abstract land, and you’re left wondering what the end point was. No matter how annoying it may be, I know that Reggie does in fact have a purpose. However, it drove me crazy trying to figure out where the serious content of the piece was.

In one particular speech Reggie begins by saying in a very serious tone by saying, “I don’t know if you guys remember you were when it happened. I was in the place where we heard about it first. I was on second ave. lower east side Manhattan. I was on the phone, and then I lost the call…” As he continues to speak about this moment “where he first heard,” he describes two flying objects and an aftermath of two smoke clouds. Given these circumstances, my brain immediately jumps to the events of 911, as most of our brains would. But not Reggie, instead he continues to describe how New York was hit by a solar flare—which is entirely possible, it still is absurd.

Perhaps one of the biggest keys into Reggie’s work comes during on of his transition. After reciting this Shakespearean monologue, he starts djing and singing this perhaps improvised song about technology while wearing a shirt that reads, “subvert the subversion.” Finally in this moment, it becomes clear that is his purpose with this piece.
For the most part, moment-by-moment I understood the logic of the performance, but I had a hard time understanding what larger questions or message the piece was presenting. While reading thoughts around the work, it became clear that I wasn’t the only one who was struggling with understanding work as a whole.

In order to better understand Reggie’s work I had to watch another piece of his work, so I watched a music video of his called “Fuck Shit Stack.” After watching this video, which is out-right hilarious, I understood Reggie’s work so much more. He seems to be really interested in the origin of meanings, particularly words, and finding away challenge the meaning we place subject through the labels we place on it.

For audiences who have seen more of Reggie’s work, they say that his work tends to mirror itself. Most of the physical media images are re-used, and the structure of them are beyond similar. This is a curious idea for me, because I would like to know why Reggie would remake a new project that only slightly deviates from one previous created? If I were to attempt to answer this question given Reggie’s work, I would guess that because of his interest in subversion around how we define art.

I couldn’t tell whether or not I hated this performance, or whether I loved it. As I watched the piece, I constantly wanted to stop it and find something else to watch, so I could actually write a review. It was really a tribute to Reggie Watt’s showmanship, and the fact that I had to write a review about it that I stayed engaged. This is a piece of theatre that will unravel for me throughout the years.

To open the show, the music sounds a heavy base, and the slowly the curtain draws and two men are revealed, one twisting, one shrinking and exploding with equal energy.  As this is revealed the music picks up into a fast paced electronic rhythm; haze machines go off, the glowing apple of a macbook is visible, the lights flash, the band wears white and black stripes.  The scene is extremely familiar; this kind of music, the style, it is indicative of the intense popularity of raves and electronic music in the United States and Europe currently.  The band and the eye makeup of the performers echoe A Clockwork Orange.  What drew me to watch this piece was what I read about the director and the style of the show.  It is an incredibly apt piece through which to discuss innovation in the story telling techniques of contemporary theatre, and whether they overwhelm or clarify the story.  The dealer (Wojciech Niemczyk) and the client (Tomasz Nosinski) speak, sing, whisper, scream, and beg into the microphone, one expounding on the value of his goods and his dependency on the exchange, the other extolling his virtues and why he should not make the deal.

The exact nature of the deal is unclear, but in a compelling, affecting way.  They could be a prostitute and a potential client, but the scene also recalls the current intense scrutiny the role of commerce in our culture.  The power of the seller versus the buyer is what’s at stake here, and that power shifts frequently, with stupendous energy, precision, and sense of stakes.  In addition to their tremendous control of their voices, the physical life of the performers is astounding.  They writhe, twitch, convulse with a wonderful balance of intensity and ease.  The movements stir questions regarding the relationship of physical images and the text of the story.  Their physicalities draw out the subtext.  They are not symbolic or natural in their representation of the images, they seem to embody the visceral feeling.  I also wondered about the balance of choreography versus improvised movement.  There was SO much movement, and it took place on such a scale that I felt it couldn’t all be set, but there was such a clear and specific vocabulary that they were using that I felt it had to be.  The movements of Nosinski are particularly vibrant yet precise.

What also struck me about the piece was the relationship between the actors and the audience.  As I said the performers spend the entirety of piece in their own pools of light, until they meet at the end.  All of their text the speak out to the audience, not at each other.  I really enjoyed that they were essentially bringing a poem to life by standing and speaking it into microphones, but with an effective sense of the stakes and the rise and fall of the action.  And the text itself is fantastic.  The images are striking and poignant.  The power of that is giving to natural elements; the land, the hour, the moon reminded me of Lorca.  Both the dealer and client give tremendous importance to the time at which they have encountered each other.  The music underscores the struggle between the two wonderfully, it highlights the rise and fall of the drama.  As a result, perhaps the most arresting moment of the piece comes when the dealer makes his final plea, the music goes out suddenly and we sit in total silence for a period.  Then the dealer tells the client that the other’s greatest power is the ability to reject, something the dealer cannot do.  He tells him the greatest cruelty is not destruction, but to leave a man unfinished, in mid-exchange, “the error of a gaze.”  A huge amount of significance is placed upon this gaze, for it is how they began this struggle.  In the silence the dealer says “the only thing that really matters is that you looked at me and our gaze met.”  When he says this the client turns to look at him for the first time, but the dealer stays facing the audience.  When he has finished his plea the dealer begins to wail, the sound building and building into the music returns, picking up the note of the dealers cry, the cry builds into a scream of pain and hate until the dealer abruptly turns and vanishes into the dark.

Up until this point I was riveted.  There are a lot of people trying to do what this piece does, but it too frequently the technical elements of formal experimentation become gimmicky, their use to the story becomes unclear.  Here I felt the form and the relationship to the audience worked really well because the piece was the exact opposite of what it looked like.  The actors are not drug addled ravers, they are in complete control of their instrument.  The piece does not indulge in shock value for no apparent reason.  It was like good stage combat, the more in-control and safe it is the more effective it is, and this piece held back from many of the traps of this kind of work.

UNTIL

After the dealer burns himself out and retreats the client gets completely naked.  At this point I was still bearing with, it seemed like the ordeal had scarred him in some way, the power of the connection between the two was such that I bought that the severing had severely damaged him.  But then the stage lights go out and a screen above the band comes on and for 15-minutes we are treated to a variety of sexual, violent, and just plain weird images that ruined the piece for me.  Control became indulgence, effective innovative storytelling became nonsensical shock value.  I really tried but the ties to story were hopeful at best, the piece fell face first and deep into all of the traps of this kind of theatre.  Eventually it returned to the two actors, and they either made a form of piece or consummated the exchange, but I had been so turned off by the previous section it really didn’t matter to me, I was thinking about what I was going to write and what I was going to do after, I waited for it to end.

Ultimately I was extremely excited to be introduced to the play itself, I think the language is beautiful and true to itself.  Furthermore I think the idea is fascinating.  The stakes of the encounter, the power of the seller and buyer is an extremely compelling relationship at this moment in time. I think if the relationship did not play on the sexuality as much though, I think it would be more effective.  That element is certainly present in the text, but personally I think it’s more exciting if you let it affect you there, beneath the surface, don’t indulge in it, it’s inherent.  Bottom line though, I really wish they didn’t have that section on the screen, because I think it could be a wonderful piece to look to as an example of how theatre can employ intensely modern conventions while valuing story above all, but it isn’t.

I know that I had promised to post some information on Jay Scheib, who directed the American premiere of Women Dreamt Horses, so here it is!:

“Jay Schieb is an American stage director noted for his contemporary productions of both classical and new plays and operas. Scheib is Associate Professor of Theater Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he teaches performance media, motion theater, media and methods, and introduction to acting. He is also a regular guest professor at the Mozarteum Institute für Regie und Schauspiel in Salzburg, Austria, where he conducts an annual “viewpoints and composition” studio.”

In my eyes, Jay’s work is notable for its experimentation with film and projections, which explodes the onstage action, his collaborative processes and his actors’ commitment to fully physical actions.  He creates worlds that interrogate and distort what we take for granted and devises relationships that are ridiculous, yet too human.  Here are some links for further exploration!

Jay Schieb’s Website

Jay Scheib’s Vimeo Account

So I began watching this narrative style show taking everything these actors were saying at face value.  I thought this was a group of actors pretending to be a group of actors who had actually really existed.  The premise is that they are putting on a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, but without the characters Stanley, Stella, Mitch or Blanche.  Sure, it sounds weird, but not necessarily the weirdest idea for a show that I’ve ever heard.  Then the company starts describing some of the exercises Stella would have her own company perform.  For example, there’s crying practice, where all the actors stand silently in a line and try to make themselves cry, then there’s kissing practice, where they line up and take turns kissing one another.  Although the exercises are comical to watch, they aren’t completely off base.  So it wasn’t exactly the premise of the acting company or the zany methods they use that made me start to question the reality of the world, but more like a feeling that started creeping up that something wasn’t as it seemed.  First of all, while the actors are rehearsing there is supposedly a loaded gun in a birdcage in the corner of the room, just to remind the actors that they are capable of killing one another.  And the entire time, the attitude of the actors seems a little off.  Like they’re all sharing a secret that the audience isn’t in on.

The structure of the show itself is scenes delineated by how long the company has until opening night.  The set is pretty simple- a table and some chairs, a piano, an old-fashioned overhead projector, and that gun in the corner.  The floor has exaggeratedly large, colorful spike tape- it’s literally the stuff you’re “not supposed to see” behind a production.  Although there’s a fairly linear timeline, the show is also punctuated by events that are seemingly outside the world of “reality”, including a speaking tiger and men running around with balloons tied to their penises.  By the end, I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t, so I had to just experience the play as it happened.  There were moments of great humor, suspense, and sadness within The Method Gun.  One of my favorite parts is that at the top of the show, the audience is asked to write down the name of their mentor on a piece of paper and hand it to the actors.  At the end of the play, there is a slideshow of the names of people to which this show is dedicated, and we realize that it’s the names that the audience members contributed.

I purposely try not to research a show too much before I see it because I want to be able to have the experience without a lot of context first, and then layer in understanding later.  So after I finished watching The Method Gun I decided to google Stella Burden, half expecting her to be real, half not.  The first search item was a call for “research” on Stella Burden for the production of The Method Gun, and asked for submissions from people who had worked with her.  Then I realized that all of the search results for Stella Burden were for this show, and that Stella Burden probably is not a real person.  I love the idea that this company of actors created an alternate reality in order to share a story.  It’s fairly obvious that Stella Burden is sort of a stand- in for Stella Adler, but not the same person.  By establishing a “reality” and then exploding it, The Method Gun asks the question of what is truth, and is there a difference between truth once removed and truth four times removed?  Is one more “valid” than the other?  They pose the questions, but leave it to us to determine our own truth.

“La Petite Mort (a French reference to the tense throes of orgasm) is a befitting name for a gallery with an appetite for the ecstatic. Definitely sexy and committed to indulgence, La Petite Mort is an eclectic ode to diversity.”

After reading this, I checked out a majority of the artists included in the gallery and interacted with their work.  Most of the artists had work which I could understand as something other than simply pornography.  For example, I am enamored by the work of Zachari Logan, especially pictures like this:

The way the artist describes his inspiring work:

“My body is a catalyst for my fascination with stereotypic masculine portrayals.The act of weightlifting, attaining a well-sculpted body is envisioned stereotypically as a visual mark of masculine enterprise, an act I partake in on a daily basis. Without needing to see me engaged in the act itself, my drawn body infers a performative athleticism. This athleticism coupled with the theatricality of a doppelganger or triplet existing on the same stage is designed to subtly evoke feelings of competition, fear and omnipotence- all in relation to performance anxiety. Although in most of these drawings I depict my body in a life-sized scale, the pictorial space in these drawings is quite shallow, with enough room for the figures to exist and interact. This lack of spatial depth is referential to Neo-Classical space, in which Spartan bodies were used to visually epitomize the strength of empire. The containment of space in these drawings is structured to illustrate a sense of claustrophobia and is directly referential to the viewer’s own body. This is a space that is in-between or marginal, a visual realm that is too small to exist within comfortably — but is considerable enough to contemplate being in.”

I’m totally on board with this artist, and I’m especially fond of his relationship to Peter Berlin and the multiplying of self as a technique.

What I’m not fond of is the work of Scot Sothern.  In my eyes, the work of this artist feels exploitative.  A man is photographing nude prostitutes and that makes me uncomfortable.  Is it because the artist is a man?  Would I feel any different if the artist was a woman?  What about the women themselves?  I assume they’ve consented to having their portraits photographed.  So why should I take issue with the work?  These are all questions that come to mind when I interact with my uncomfortableness to this work.

Lastly, among the Emerging Artists who are represented by this gallery, I’m challenged by the work of Drasko Bogdanovic.  His photographs edge a little too closely to pornography for my artistic taste.  One could argue that there is a lot going on in these photographs, and that there are formal experimentations being employed, but what’s the difference between this and a Pornographic magazine?  But does it matter?

I’m grateful that a gallery such as LPM exists.  It challenges my values and makes me question my views on sexually charged art.

When I was in New York over spring break, I went to see An Illiad by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Petersonat the New York Theatre Workshop  featuring Stephen Spinella and Denis O’Hare on alternating nights.   I saw Stephen Spinella. The script was very interesting and engaging at certain moments, evoking thoughts and feelings about the seemingly everlasting nature of war.  Going in to see An Illiad, I was a bit tired, my fault, but I remained tired throughout, which I think had something to do with the production.  While I left the theatre feeling somewhat unsatisfied, I also left thinking, largely about why I felt unsatisfied by the production.

The script was very engaging at moments. One interesting tool that the playwrights employed was that of requiring that the audience fill in some of the play’s imagery.  The entire story was very imaged based, it is after all, a one-man show, so throughout the play, both actor and audience inhabit and create many different images.  Often, the poet (the narrator of the story) would evoke and image of a character, by saying for example, “Hector, he was a good father, an all around good guy, a guy you want to be friends with, kind of like…”  And then he’d move on without filling in the blank.  This requires the audience to personally engage with the story by supplying their own image of who that person is from their own lives.  Sometimes the modern parallels were drawn for the audience.  In order to allow us to understand the rage that came over Achilles, for example, the poet says something along the lines of, “you know like when someone cuts you off and you think I could just kill you right now, hit you with my car, and if that doesn’t kill you I’ll get out of my car and tear you apart, limb from limb.”  This story uses modern examples in which rage, fear, love, the need to protect, betrayal, etc. arise, thereby insisting the audience relate these “far away” events of the Trojan war to their own lives.

Of course the play was not just about the Trojan war, but rather war in general, which is very present today.  These feelings and situations are not unique to ancient Greece, not even to organized war, but actually occur in our daily lives.  We are all capable of these acts.  And we all have the potential to commit them or to choose not to.   I had trouble filling in some of the images left up to the audience.  This was just as interesting to me as the images that I could fill in.  For example, we were at one point asked to imagine standing in a field of bodies, we were told “you know what that’s like”  I don’t know what that is like.  It made me acutely aware that these horrible things are happening in the world and I have no idea what that feels like.  In some ways I can relate to war and in some ways I am completely removed from it.  What does that mean when citizens are removed from war?  Does that enable the war to keep going?  If all of us knew what it was like to stand in a field of bodies would wars even be happening?

One incredibly moving moment was when the poet simply recited wars throughout history, the list when on for a full five minutes or thereabouts.  We were forced to sit there and listen to the names of all these wars, some of them I was familiar with and some of them I was not.  Through telling the story of the Trojan war, the poet is telling us the story of every war throughout history, and reminding us that it is indeed a story that we all know.  Towards the end of the play, the poet does not want to finish the story.  He can’t go on, it is too heartbreaking.  Instead of re-enacting the story as he has been mostly doing up until this point, he simply recounts it in a narrative form.  And instead of focusing on the brutal elements, he focuses on the soft, human elements.  He describes all of the different parties of war sleeping.  Reminding us that we are all human.  He even says that Achilles is thinking, beneath his armor, “I’m scared, couldn’t we just get a beer?”.  The poet high lights the miscommunication that often fuels or even starts wars by even in this image of getting a beer instead of fighting, showing two parties disagree on the name for a herron.  Communication is lost because of language.

Overall, I think the script was very effective and engaging.  However, the acting left me wondering what the play might have been had I seen Denis O’Hare instead of Stephen Spinella.  Sit was very clear that Spinella was an accomplished, very trained actor.  However, I caught myself admiring his technique often instead of following the story.  Spinella seemed to repeat the same rhythms over and over again which was somewhat lulling instead of engaging, although this may also have been inherrent in the script.  I think that these rhythms are meant to make us feel the monotony of war, but it did not engage me as much as it could have were it not so lulling.  Also, Spinella played very much to the back of the house.  I was in the front and felt a disconnect between me and the actor.

One very interesting aspect of the performance was the presence of a musician.  He was on a balcony-like platform high above the audience.  He added very much to the images throughout by playing music.  It added to the epic feeling of this epic tale.

I am not even sure how I can accurately describe what those opening moments were for me. All I know is that my jaw hit the floor, my eyes widened, and I was a 6 year-old girl again. The show began with a graffiti artist tagging a wall, which brought forth a third dimension created by him jumping into a screen. I don’t have the right words to describe the magic that was created.

The Andersen Project was inspired by the diaries of children fairytale writer, Hans Christian Andersen. Lepage delves into the mysteries of a writer whose conflicted psychology plays out in his lesser known tales written more for auto-therapy than for the delight of children. In this one-man show, actor Yves Jacques plays a Canadian rock-‘n-roll writer who is unexpectedly commissioned by the Opéra Garnier in Paris to write a libretto for a children’s opera. Arriving in Paris, he discovers that his living quarters are on the last floor of a building that is also home to a peep show in the city’s red light district. Yves transforms into various different characters, and together Lepage explores the resonances between the characters. The production is a theatrical story telling, in which multimedia serve as other actors on stage. Everything from the lights, to the projection made this performance feel like a rock concert. The piece had a definite European sensibility to it that comes in its rapid changes rhythms, which aided the humor in the story telling.

As a disclaimer projection theatre is something that I am often extremely hesitant about, because I believe that the beauty of theatre lies in transformation. However The Andersen Project found a way to write a story where the actor and the design were able to create a hyper-transformative space. The design elements served as a scene partner and help extend the audience’s imagination to better understand and access the world being created. Somehow the production managed to be both outrageous, and incredibly intimate.

Perhaps my favorite moment of the production was when Yves explores Andersen’s love life. Suddenly a female manikin comes out on a track and Yves uses her to share about Hans’ experiences with love, and they begin to dance. The dance begins as a delicate courtship, and then progresses into a disturbing ripping off of the manikin’s clothes. This action illuminated the sexual repression and violence in Hans Christian Andersen’s life in a beautiful way. I was intrigued by the use of light, not necessarily on a large scale, but during the more intimate moments. There was a moment where a shadow dance was created by the use of a light fixture, when Arnaud was tucking his daughter into bed. As an artist I enjoy working with singular light sources, and exploring all the interesting things you can find through expanding its use.

After watching The Andersen Project, I spent a long time trying to figure out what the central message was of the piece. Then I recalled one of the final images of the piece where Yves Jacques stands in front of an audience, and declares that “theatre is an art form that takes us back to our caveman days when our ancestors stood around fires to tell stories and employed the use of shadows to convey other characters and other voices.” This moment was extremely moving because for the past 2 hours we’ve watched a montage of scenic surprise, and at the core of it was story telling. Simple story telling like the cavemen practiced, yet Lepage used our modern tools to tell a deeply mythological story.

Theatre is moving in an epic direction. In a very Greek sense audiences are seeking a form of theatre that incites them viscerally, and The Andersen Project does just that. The production team seems to be ahead of the curve with the creation of this piece. I absolutely see this form of theatre becoming popular within the next few years.

Although, I must admit that there were times when my senses were accosted by sound and light, but I think that could be expected for an audience member who is new to this multimedia faceted kind of performance. If I had one qualm with the production, it would be that the performance could have been shorter. There was an element that felt like the design was running an Olympic marathon, and had to continue to top it’s previous record. Otherwise the piece was thoroughly enjoyable.

I found this article questioning NYC’s status as the cultural capital of the world.

This is a question I have been pondering over the last year or so. Especially after living in London for a semester, and traveling to places like Prague, Madrid, and even San Francisco that are so culturally rich.

I think for theatre artists the most important thing is to be around other like-minded people. Theatre is a collaborative art, so I think you can make an artistic home for yourself anywhere as long as you have a community to make theatre with.

I think the artists of our generation are not migrating to New York City the way they have in the past. The ridiculous living prices is enough to make young artists flee from it all together. Especially with the current economy, artists can’t afford to be artists in expensive cities.

The article makes the point that for people in the fashion industry, Manhattan is still the place to be.

But even Young Jean Lee said living in Manhattan has “just become uncool.”And you can’t argue coolness with Young Jean Lee.

I also wonder if the movement toward small collaborative efforts as opposed to the more traditional theatre company models has impacted the move out of NYC. It has become more hip to make work in an abandoned school building than on a proscenium stage. Even so, NYC still has Broadway. And that is certainly not going away anytime soon.

Most of the artists interviewed in the article have been living in NYC for a while, and when they moved, there were grant coming at them in every direction. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is the case for our generation.

Still, I plan to try to move to New York in the fall. I recognize it will be ridiculously expensive and hard to get work, but that doesn’t deter me, or others in our class. Even if New York City fades from being the cultural center of the world, it will always be A cultural center because the arts are part of the foundation of the city. And it will always be an exciting, fast paced environment that will draw young people. I certainly plan to have a great time.

And then the screen that was onstage lit up, there was a brief speech projected as a man with long white blonde hair in a leather jacket had his back to the audience, followed by blasting french rap music as the actor, Yves Jacques, transformed into a graffiti artist tagging an image of Andersen while credits played on the other half of the screen. It was very obvious that this was not going to be two hours of narrative, and that I was not going to be bored. Projection was a huge part of the performance as Jacques portrayed an albino music producer from Canada, the director of a french opera company with a sex addiction, and Hans Christian Andersen.

I felt a distance from the play for the first thirty minutes or so as Jacques warmed into the performance. Maybe it was the Canadian accent that took me out, the overwhelming quality of the projections at times, or just a lack of commitment from the beginning. This was a performance that Jacques has been giving for six years… it must be challenging sometimes to stay committed!

A huge part of my experience watching this performance was my introduction to projections. I have taken a long time to write this because I haven’t been sure about my feeling on them as a whole, and needed to check out some other things. I have discovered that projections aren’t really my thing. They don’t get me going when I see them, and although I do think they are a really exciting art form, I am not personally engaged in them. The parts of the performance that I thought were most engaging involved little or no projection.

Jacques did an incredible section where he interacted with a dressed bodice that represented Andersen’s female companions. He stepped inside of the bodice, but in a transition that I’m not even sure was possible. His smooth movement as the bodice was smooth and swirling. It was a moment of theatrical magic. Maybe part of it was possible because of the projection, but a lot of it was magical because of the change in physicality from Andersen to the woman.

I do commend Jacques on that fully, his transformative quality from character to character. He changed physicality (and costume!) so quickly that I was sure there had to be some other actors on stage. Or that half of the time we were just watching a projection! And maybe that is my problem with this type of projection work. I feel like I am watching a screen for the entire performance, and as I said about Newyorkland if I wanted to do that I would have gone to the Regal Fens with my smuggled in Milky Way. I would like to believe that Jacques was always the person I saw in the screen set, but I have reasonable doubt.

One of the most moving moments was when Jacques tells the bedtime story about the man and his shadow. The shadow is an active character cast upon the background with a lamp Jacques holds. How he holds the lamp adjusts the size, position, and clarity of the shadow. I couldn’t look away for the entirety of this sequence, couldn’t blink. It was another pure moment devoid of any fancy tricks or magic. It was theatre magic, and beautiful storytelling.

I did not care so much for the Andersen story that was being told as a commission for the opera company. The story was about a fairy trapped in a tree that wished it was in Paris. This entire story was told in voice over with projections. It was beautiful, the colors, the quality of image, the movement of the leaves were all stunning. But I was not engaged. I wanted more of the shadow story, or the bodice. I found myself hungry for more of Jacques fantastic physical work.

Overall, I found this play a challenge, but one I was ready to face. I needed to form an opinion about the newer form of theatre using heavy amounts of projection, and I needed to have more of a back up then ‘I don’t like it.’ I now realize that when I don’t like the projection work, it is because the physical work is being compromised by it. The most engaging part of theatre these days is that it is a place where people can still communicate with language and movement instead of technology. I wouldn’t say I’m a purist by a long shot, but maybe this is just one thing I will take longer to jump on the boat about.