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.