A World of Things Transformed: A Report on the Performative Life of Objects

by Quinn Bauriedel, Pig Iron Co-Artistic Director

A flexible dryer vent, resembling a slinky, may have won the award for most transformative object, appearing as a beard, the wrinkled legs of an African elephant, the tremendous storm rolling across the plains and (no surprise), a telephone. But it was the simple wooden frame that really took our breath away. Carefully manipulated by one of the workshop participants, it began as a cloud, fell to earth as a dried up leaf and then became a window for the actor to peer into, longingly. The absence of an image in the frame offered it myriad possibilities; its geometry carved lines through space like a dancer’s limbs or a painter’s brushstroke and its void allowed the audience to imagine a portrait or a landscape inside the frame.

This summer, Pig Iron gathered 16 creators together for an exploration of object theatre. Early on in Pig Iron, we were quite serious, perhaps overly serious, about the word transformation. Actors transformed – sometimes changing our costumes and our characters in front of the audience. Sets transformed, changing from one space to another with the hoist of a rope or the opening of a door. And objects transformed. We believed that humans had limitless possibilities and so, too, should objects. Our logic went something like this: a man could play a woman, a 22-year old could play an octogenarian, a dancer could play a cockroach, a bucket could play a helmet and a broom could play a corpse. We sought out comic and poetic transformations in our early forays into object theatre.

Recently, we moved away from that idea. Perhaps we felt that we had fully explored object transformation and it was time to break the rule about it. Or perhaps object transformation led to a kind of whimsical world that we, as artists, had exhausted. Oddly enough, it was musical instruments as objects that forced our hand a bit. What happened if we let a guitar be a guitar? Suddenly, we tried to find all the different ways of playing the guitar. How can we be interested in the one-to-one relationship of performer and instrument? We still cared a lot about how objects were handled, about the virtuosity of a performer in relation to her object.

The workshop this past August allowed us to narrow our focus to something which has been a part of Pig Iron’s vocabulary since its inception, further refining our notion of how to work with objects onstage. We revisited some foundational exercises with objects:

• Tell a whole story with one object utilizing it in as many ways as possible.

• Allow one rule about object handling to create a piece of virtuosity (eg, everything is thrown and caught, all objects slide across a table before being utilized, objects have extreme gravity or, somehow, no gravity.)

• Create a scene with 3 different scales: miniature, life-size and gargantuan.

Each exercise reminded us that objects, when given breath and therefore life, become a very powerful theatrical language drawing an intense focus from the audience.

A mysterious guest in the form of TV rabbit ears appears at the window. As its legs extend like a telescoping pointer, this guest’s super-hero powers occur, albeit fairly mechanically, in front of our eyes. Next the picture draws back to reveal a plastic bag performing as a thunderous storm, raining down on our TV antenna hero. Like in a comic book or a movie, we are able to move in for a close-up and draw back to see the whole landscape. Somehow in mixing the two scales, we are able to see the objects and/or characters in context and are therefore swept up in their story.

In many ways, working with objects allows more to be possible onstage. Therefore, the real work is in discretion. As our workshop attendees taught us, objects can express how life can be more than it is but in order to truly draw us in to the world of object theatre, the objects themselves must sweat, breathe and contain a heart just as the actors who manipulate them do.

Chekhov Lizardbrain - Notes on Pig Iron's Work-in-Progress

by Dan Rothenberg, Pig Iron Co-Artistic Director

From October 23 to November 8, Pig Iron’s core company was in residence at the Temple University MFA Acting Program, in Philadelphia. This two-and-a-half week period was our first workshop of CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN, a new creation we will present in March of 2007. CLB springs from a collision of two sources: first, a fascination with Chekhov’s characters, their language, and their amazing ability to not-listen. The second source is a neurobiological theory we came across in autistic author Temple Grandin’s latest book, ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION. Grandin draws some insights into of her own ability to empathize with animals from Paul MacLean’s “Triune Brain Theory.” MacLean noticed that if you dissect a human brain and pull away the neocortex, you end up with a “paleomammalian” layer beneath it, a brain that looks almost identical to a pig’s brain or a dog’s brain. If you cut down to the brain stem, you find a “lizard brain.” MacLean posited that each “brain” represents a different layer of neurological evolution, and that the functions that we share, for instance, with lizards, are controlled by this deepest, oldest part of the brain. So the “reptilian brain” controls breathing, sleeping, hunger, the startle response; the “paleomammalian brain” is responsible for emotions, connections between mother and child and by extension between individuals, hierarchies and some kinds of territorial behavior; and the “neomammalian brain,” our large neocortex, contains the wiring for symbolic thinking, self-awareness, and language.

Pig Iron spent the first week of workshop creating a staged reading – our first ever – of THE THREE SISTERS, together with the MFA Actors at Temple. The second chunk of the workshop was devoted to finding a “new acting style” based on the rhythms of these three brains.

Below are some of my notes from the reading and the workshop.

Post-reading; revelations, excitements, concerns:

-- Excited about our work on ‘contact with the past and contact with the future’ as ACTIONS that an actor can PLAY and that seem to animate Chekhov. This work sprang from all our frustrations trying to enact the “human brain” – how is it different from “real life as a person”? We tried to focus on things that only humans can do: symbolic thinking; self-awareness; two-feelings-at-once; ambivalence; ability to construct a past and a future.

We worked on the rhythms of living in the past, living in the future. The “gaze” of “living in the future” is just what you’d expect – the eyes just a little above the horizon-line. As though we have a spatial notion of “future” as “just over the next rise.” Also, these states immediately slow the gait; and the deeper you go into future or past, the thicker the molasses you walk through.

-- I’m pretty pleased with this idea of living in past or future as a kind of FORMAL EXPERIMENT that Chekhov was working on, not unlike our experiment with full-bodied “melancholia” in HELL MEETS HENRY HALFWAY. When you start tracking it through the THREE SISTERS, you see how much the characters speak of the future or the past. It’s a far cry from ‘realism,’ when you look at it like that.

-- Excited to continue this work on ‘rhythm = reason’ and ‘motivation is more rhythm than psychology.’ I realized that I wanted to say to our audience: “Actually, I don’t know why people talk.” That is, the notion that talking is expression of feeling or calculations towards an objective – that seems, on examination, patently false. Especially in this world of Chekhov, which is so deeply rhythmic and disconnected, as far as logical argument. All the music he insists on. It seems that Chekhov is very keyed into the notion that sometimes you hear a sound and then repeat it, or make a complementary sound in return. This isn’t arbitrary, but it also isn’t “rational.”
-- Pleased by the many people who found the reading “honest” and “moving” – since this was NEVER THE INTENTION, at least never the focus. We never spoke those words once during our 6 days of rehearsal. It seems that the way people THINK you should work on “honesty” is to “concentrate” and “go inside”; but our focus was entirely on “creating a world with the ensemble,” especially sonically. It seems to me that you can’t have one without the other, and that focusing on “honesty” as actors gives you this over-articulated, overwrought regional-theater melodrama.

-- Making lines not sound “like lines.” This is a pretty rudimentary way of putting it, but it’s something that Pig Iron hasn’t had to work through so directly in the past, because of the fluidity we have typically between performer and playwright. In this Chekhov world, it seems that you need support from your stage-mates – but this ISN’T the same as FOCUS, especially in the sense of ‘listening to what is being said.’ When we did our “bad party” improvisations, we found something like 70% non-listening, and this general noise creates pockets of anonymity and ‘privacy.’ These “eddies” and “swells” make space for certain things to be said, repeated. Chekhov seems to be a master of ‘that which is said while no one pays attention.’ For instance, Andre’s complaints that he hasn’t slept, which come soon after his first entrance, right as he is being teased in front of the group – it just doesn’t work that he “continues” this disjointed speech if everyone is paying attention, silently, to his protestations.

So here we have an actor-script problem that can’t be resolved just by an individual actor concentrating on the truthfulness of his or her performance – you must put your focus on the group’s work creating a texture, calibrating a sound level.

-- “A bad party” as a theme – acts 1 and 2 of THREE SISTERS as parties that no one quite wants to attend. A party where everyone lives in the future or the past – hilarious, painful, enjoyable to us.

Post-workshop thoughts and observations:

-- Two emotions at the same time: a human brain phenomenon, something that Temple Grandin points out as she outlines the differences between autistic people and other people. Like dogs, she says, autistic people do not report ambivalence, they cannot love and hate at the same time. While so much of our acting research has been on isolating “one thing at a time”, this work of “having two emotions at the same time” makes for a great ‘etude.’ Improvisations around “ambivalence” were often frustrating as they tended towards apathy. Being “full up” of two emotions, like those syringes of glue that don’t bind until the two components are squeezed together – this is quite moving, sometime breath-taking in a literal sense. The actor is often immobilized by the exercise, sometimes not breathing, and when the actor does breathe, it’s in a terrifically broken rhythm.

Watchers spoke of how unnerving it is to watch someone have these two emotions at once; how strongly we want the actor to resolve it, how hard it is to see something “full up” but without a name. We tried putting the state into movement, but it is almost impossible – movement resolves the emotions into a single, clearer state. Makes sense, often when we are caught in a reverie we’ll try to “get moving” to clear our heads.

Lizardbrain.

Beautiful but demands a lot from an audience. Hard to put in context. Hard to speak or sound from here, and sometimes the speaking lizardbrain becomes a kind of “cowboy” persona. (The long stare, the lack of emotion, can be coded this way).

Most moving is to watch bodies together unaware of social convention, unaware of what parts of the body are “hot” – faces, palms, etc. So a face can end up in an armpit and there is no reaction. Sarah said “from inside this brain, I felt like all the parts of the body I was seeing had an equal value.” So it opens up possibilities for space and touch.

Acting “the startle reflex” is about as hard as it gets.

Dogbrain.
Pure joy. Much, much richer than I imagined. A perfect place to begin work with clown, work with commedia. Having just ONE emotion at a time, it’s infectious, hilarious, immediately interpretable. So much of life as we know it turns out to be dogbrain.

When you try to keep a dogbrain “alone,” it almost never can be contained. It does underscore this evolutionary biology notion about the “purpose” of emotions – emotions are for communication.

Just working on the exercise “One emotion at a time” unleashes a host of behaviors: playfulness; hierarchy; looking for attention; extra energy in the limbs, a kind of roundness in trajectory and in movement.

-- Future dogbrain work involves:

How to repeat such a pure and instinctual, non-lying state with a set script or choreography. Challenging.

How to avoid ‘dogginess’; it’s not about the shape of the dog or the patterns of the dog, it’s a state that we can translate onto our human bodies and gestures.

Sexual desire without shame or forethought – or even understanding of the mechanics?

How to find moments of calm, of blankness, or of smaller energy – although it seems that some “emotions” DO exist just at 100%, there must be emotions that demand less than total energy from the performer.

--- Will CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN be a series of etudes, or a story, or a landscape? How much vocabulary does the audience need to enjoy these states the way that we have in this workshop? As we approach the end of this period, we are drawn more to a geometric, theatrical space; a stage to present states on, as opposed to a setting. This is so challenging to costume, as well – the costumes will, to some degree, signal to the audience where we are.

Navigating the Fringe: Pig Iron's Director of Development Stalks the Company During the Festival

by John Frisbee, PITC Director of Development

Every September, the Live Arts and Fringe Festivals roll around, and I plan on really diving in and soaking up the ocean of cultural activity happening all over Philly. I want to see 35 shows, hear the buzz in the box office, get caught up in the collective adrenalin rush of a festival atmosphere.

What happens? I choke, essentially. I see a couple of shows, then I retreat to my house or office, and watch TV, get some work done, and resume my somewhat hermit-like existence. Maybe I get lured out to the Fringe Cabaret one Saturday night, maybe I don’t. There are a few reasons for this: feeling overwhelmed; feeling sleepy; feeling broke (if I can be brutally honest, it’s cruel of the Festival to start on the day that my rent check is due.)

This year, I figured I’d give it another whirl. Since I’m a giant, obsessive dork, I gave myself a specific project: try to see everything that Pig Iron company members or collaborators were involved in. This had a few advantages, including sucking up to my bosses, seeing some really good performance work, and being able to tune out everyone who said “You absolutely have to go see [fill in any one of 83 different Fringe shows.]” Plus, my status as a Pig Iron employee absolves me of any requirement to be objective – which works out nicely, given that I have no critical faculty whatsoever and like pretty much everything.

I’d actually started out before the festival started, at Gas & Electric Arts’ Voices Underwater, featuring Emmanuelle Delpech-Ramey, Pay Up alumna Leah Walton, and Love Unpunished sound designer Sean Mattio. Gas & Electric Arts is that rare theatre company that seems to have started performing fully-integrated, interesting productions from the get-go; last year’s Anna Bella Eema, by all accounts, was pretty awesome. Voices Underwater is set in an old plantation house in the American South; in the play, there are three co-existing planes of history occuring at once (the late Civil War, the 1920s, and the present). The work’s peculiary physical sensibility and elocution took some getting used to, but after a little while I gained an appreciation for the way Voices Underwater deals with a space that’s haunted by both the past and the future.

The first “real” Fringe show I went to was Dilated, a short (37 minutes, specified the program) piece performed at a gallery in Old City. The performer/creators were Aram Aghazarian, Enrique Villacis, and Dylan Clements – all members of the giant Pay Up troupe at the ’05 festival. The characters – a wine-swilling gallery owner who moved like a spider, a terrifyingly shy South American conceptual artist, and a gallery assistant-cum-amateur psychologist – were hilarious, and extraordinarily well-drawn.

The next day, I headed allll the way up to the Icebox project space, which sits near the Fishtown/Kensington border above Northern Liberties. (Note to readers: do not try to walk here from 20^th and South. It is tiring.) Performing there were Subcircle, the Jorge-and-Nicole Cousineau-led dance and design collective; their piece, Still Unknown, allowed 8 different artists to create a performance installation that explored a question left unanswered in this too-much-information age. Among the participants: Company member James Sugg; Love Unpunished’s Makoto Hirano, and Hell Meets Henry Halfway designer Matt Saunders. I love it when a performance-based medium allows itself to be organized like a visual-art show; ask an open-ended question, and then get a bunch of talented people to answer it in whatever way they see fit. The result was endearingly discursive and loosey-goosey, and featured an astounding amount of good design – set, sound, video, and lighting included.

I took a short hiatus on Sunday and Monday – the house wasn’t gonna clean itself – and came back for //AUTOPILOT//, directed by former Pig Iron Managing Director Lars Jan, on Tuesday. Set in an even tinier gallery space than Dilated, the play – apparently an adaptation of “The Little Prince,” which I haven’t read – shows a downed Desert Storm pilot fighting off demons while waiting to be rescued in Southern Iraq or Kuwait. The show is scary-intense and surreal; having that much madness let loose in a small, loud space was an experience worth having.

Thursday featured a ridiculous double-bill: P’s and Q’s, directed by Lee Etzold (Flop), and starring Sarah Sanford (Love Unpunished, Henry, Lucia Joyce Cabaret, Shuteye) and Pig Iron co-founder Dito van Reigersberg (pretty much everything), among others. This was followed up by James Sugg’s The Sea, a maritime rock-n-roll song-cycle performed at the Wilma at the ungodly hour of 10:30 PM. P’s – which pretty much sold out its entire run – was a study of dinner-party etiquette, integrating sound clips from ‘50s instructional videos and occasional dance breaks. Words like “fun” and “delightful” seem a little shallow and condescending, but they definitely apply here – necessarily, the piece was extremely precise and meticulous, but at the same time radiated a surprising amount of warmth and charisma.

I grabbed a double shot of espresso on my way over to The Sea; at 10:30 PM on a weeknight, you could take me to see a band of brontosauri playing ‘80s metal songs, and I’d probably still fall asleep. Fortunately, The Sea was really good. And really loud, which helped. James’ Tom-Waitsian orchestrations were played by a band of guys in yellow fishermen’s overalls and caps; the whole thing was like a twisted inversion of Moby Dick, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, and The Perfect Storm (with James as a more believable captain than George Clooney). There was a sprinkle of crowd-participation moments and unbelievable video projections (giant hurricanes, semaphore flags, etc.), rendered all the more impressive by the knowledge that James was working on at least 17 other Fringe shows while writing these songs.

I managed to miss Nichole Canuso’s Fail Better over the weekend – other probably-great shows I skipped included Headlong Dance Theater’s Cell (sold out); Jeb Kreager’s The Contest (flaked); and contemporary dance superstar Emio Greco’s Hell (limited finances). I did go to see The Hollow Earth – a Geoff Sobelle-directed cabaret piece about a nautical cult journeying to the inside of our planet, which contains a sun that shines 24/7 and is home to such magical creatures as the “lambear”…oh, the hell with it. Describing something this bizarre doesn’t do it justice. Suffice to say that Bradford Trojan, who wrote all of the songs, has quite a knack for writing a great hook to an unbelievably weird lyric, and that any show with a donut communion is just fine with me.

My final show was Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford’s Amnesia Curiosa, which was set in the original operating amphitheater at the Pennsylvania Hospital. The surprisingly small circular room was incredibly cool – I would have probably shelled out ten bucks just to see someone read from a phone book in the space. As evidenced by all wear bowlers, their 2003 piece which has become somewhat of an international sensation, Geoff and Trey have a remarkable arsenal of theatrical tricks at hand; in places, Amnesia relied on a similar level of inventiveness and physical mastery. What I didn’t expect from the piece, though, was the strong storytelling and sense of personal richness and detail that they brought to this work; only in rare instances do I expect experimental theater to be so open and generous to its audience.

So: one happy final thought is that every show I attended was completely sold out, including some non-Pig-Iron-related shows that I’m omitting here because you don’t want to read a 3,000-word post. This says a ton about the audience that has coalesced around experimental and ensemble theatre in town; it also shows that all of the Fringe staff and all of the performers who hustled all over town marketing their shows did a pretty good job. A heartening side note is that the festival was also overwhelminingly local this year – out of 29 shows in the Live Arts Festival, 20 of them were developed by Philadelphia-based artists. (A brief self-promotional moment: an eye-popping 12 of the shows featured Pig Iron company members or ex-collaborators.) This is a fantastic affirmation that there’s a mature, self-sustaining performing-arts community here in Philly committed to doing excellent work in town.

Big thanks to JJ Tiziou (www.jjtiziou.net) for taking excellent photographs, and for letting us use them for this article.