Untitled Dream Girl
I started writing a play in class. That play had an excerpt read as a part of that class.
And then it was selected to have an excerpt produced outside of that class.
These are the videos of those performances.
And now I'm trying to make the play two acts.
The Boy and The Fool
It all started when Rachel Healy said, as she had many times before, “Come into class with a character or story for your project”. She was absolutely fine with, and in fact encouraged folks to bring in existing stories. I was running low on fuel. The options I’d come up with were great stories in other forms but I knew I wouldn’t be able to achieve the same satisfaction that I got from their existing movies. Well, Rachel had brought in this book with some gorgeous writing and illustrations, and on the cover was a skull with a little fox standing on top. The theatre-kid brain naturally thought “haha what if I did Hamlet?”.
But I kept thinking about it — what if it’s Yorick, living and breathing, just with the character design of the skull. The image popped into my mind of Hamlet playing with Yorick in the woods and the same spot fading into Yorick’s grave where Hamlet will eventually retrieve him. I thought of how fondly Hamlet speaks of Yorick, especially because he never has the same tone towards his own parents. Maybe Yorick is the one who really raised Hamlet — taught him to walk, to run, to explore, helped him mourn his father’s death, helped him learn to be resilient. What if the chaos which unfolds in the text of Hamlet is not solely about Claudius and King Hamlet’s death, but maybe it’s exacerbated by Hamlet’s loss of a support system and a best friend.
And so the piece was born! We only had to make one puppet, but I was excited for both Yorick and Hamlet to be fully present. Their heads were made with styrofoam, aluminum foil, glue, tissue paper, gesso, and some additional paint. Their bodies are foam, scraps of fabric hot-glued and partially sewn on, and their hands and feet are polymer clay to give the limbs weight. And then there is a rod to control the head, and a longer coat hanger situation to support the body and the strings for the hands.
I designed the coffin to be a holding container to make transport easy and to give the effect of the story all coming from, unfolding, and ending in the same inescapable space. Of course, that container also makes up the three sets. I was especially excited when I thought to do the cradle within the coffin itself just because that contrast feels so juicy.
After designing all the physical elements, I took some narration I’d been toying with, fleshed it out, and created a soundtrack. Not only does the music help to set the mood of each scene, but it also helps to create the beats of performance and maintain some sense of motion.
After I’d created the soundtrack, I walked through the different scenes I anticipated filling each beat and tried to find where each ought to take place and just how much could happen in the beat. During that process I wrote down the stage directions relative to the audio track so that they would be easier to communicate to Kendall when we got to actually rehearsing.
My favorite element of the performance itself is the process of bringing out, unpacking, and repacking the coffin. Part of what I’d initially imagined in the design phase had included the idea of pallbearers, and so when Rachel suggested creating a sort of ritual out of unpacking the coffin, I was so excited to take that idea and run. That’s also part of why I chose not to wear gloves or wear blacks (although I’m definitely harder to see on camera), because I wanted to have the puppeteers not necessarily as characters, but certainly present as figures. Figures there to watch over the story, preserve it, and keep it safe.
Bug Table
Scenic Practicum Final Project
Concept
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Design
Assembly
In Acting III with Timothy Edward Kane, we each composed a manifesto to run 10 minutes. Minimal instruction was provided on the project to not box in our ideas.
The piece below is what I put together
Experiencing Lint
a personal and artistic manifesto
*Everything in bold is to be read by a participant*
The audience sits in a clump at the center of the room,
adjusting whatever way is most comfortable for them to watch.
The following is spoken from a rehearsal cube at the side of the room
What do you think of lint?
Lint?
Yeah, lint. Like collecting it from the dryer.
Oh, yeah I like lint. I like collecting it from the dryer. I like scooping it in my hand and preventing the dryer from blowing up.
Is that what that does?
I’m pretty sure. Why do you ask about lint?
Because I was just scooping it and I was thinking about how good it made me feel — scooping it — and I was thinking about how you can’t scoop lint off your clothes, only out of the dryer. And at first I was sad because that means I can’t get the high of scooping lint from anything but doing laundry. And then I realized that even if I could scoop it off my clothes, it would be in such small quantities that it wouldn’t even feel like a high, it would feel like a chore. Like doing your laundry.
Okay.
Well what does that say about humanity? I mean I know I’m not everyone, but when you think about it, we really like feeling like we accomplished something. We like letting problems build up until they simply can’t be ignored, we ignore them a little longer, and then when we finally go and address them we give ourselves a pat on the back.
But doesn’t that stress of letting it build up actually help motivate whatever needs to be done to fix it?
I mean maybe, but there’s too much emphasis on the reward. It’s not the pressure of a deadline that motivates you to actually finish a thing, it’s the feeling of heroism when you nurse a person to health, except you were the one who hit them with a car in the first place.
(beat)
This is a lot of moralizing to be putting on your lint.
It’s not my lint, it’s the world. Chores are chores, they’re maintenance, they are morally neutral, as they should be! But societal chores, interpersonal chores, i don’t know, you make a social promise and you don’t keep it
Oh I do?
You know not You. The general you, the overwhelming you. You All. Y’all, myself included, have promised each other to do the laundry and I just think maybe Y’all should have to hang-dry Y’all’s clothes a) so the fibers don’t fry in the dryer and the clothes actually last longer b) less electricity and money is spent running the dryer, and c) so Y’all can’t access the satisfaction of scooping the lint.
(beat)
Emm goes to the board at the front of the class, trying to copy a drawing of James Baxter, the horse from Adventure time
(take your time with this one)
Staring at Unfamiliar Shadows on Your Wall
You are not a recreator
You are a maker
You are here to feel and experience
Sometimes you will repeat a feeling or an experience because it is not done
You are not here to feel and experience over and over, again and again, same and same
You are here to experience, to feel, to meditate, and to move on
don't recreate
meditate
Emm flips the whiteboard and starts drawing a remixed image of James Baxter
I’m a responder. As much as I try to emphasize that I ought to create rather than recreate, I am not an “out of the blue” kinda creator. I’m no God of any little universe.
My art does not necessarily include harmony. It does necessitate response.
Speech responds to motion which responds to weight shifts which respond to breath and thought.
The orientation of causation or correlation, play with that. Does the sun rise and cause her to wake up? Or is her waking, is her consciousness, so strong that it pulls the sun from under the horizon? Those are two incredibly different relationships and worlds on their own. You know what’s not a story on it’s own? The sun rose and also she woke up. There is no relationship. You have made no sense.
That’s another thing, making sense! Fucking do it! Make some! And let your audience make some! Make them make some! Why would I want to come home from a show and say to my mom or my girlfriend “wow, they laid it all out for me, they totally made all of that sense by themselves and I didn’t have to do any of it”? If I wanted to marvel at someone’s genius, I’d go look at a spaceship.
To deny an audience the opportunity of making meaning themselves is to shut them out. You can lead them to your meaning, there is totally room for that. But if you only want that thing to have the meaning you gave it, babe you’re creating for an audience of one.
Emm goes to the back of the room and sits on the couch
I try to make things that I like.
That’s the thing that will keep me from making my living as an artist. I can do things with cool people and for cool money as a craftsman. Totally, sign me up. But if I am generating the initial meaning and/or form of something, I have to care about it. My art resonates through me. If that pitch is rancid, it will vibrate through and poison me.
My common app admissions essay was riffing on a PhilosophyTube video about Simon Critchley’s Split Mind theory of the Ideal and Experienced selves. In that video, the creator tells this story about planning this elaborate trip to Australia to see some dolphins or whales or something, and after all that flying and money and everything, she gets on the boat to go see the dolphins or whales or whatevers and they just aren’t there. They don’t show up that day.
Her Ideal Self is berating her with no mercy, I mean really going at her, and not just about this one flub.
But then — she sees the sunset, this fiery sunset that apparently you can only see in this part of the world. And it grounds her. Her Ideal Self shuts the fuck up and disappears while her Experienced Self gets to experience that beauty. For a moment.
That’s what I felt well-crafted art could do.
I concluded that my artistic goal was "the beautiful delivery of important ideas".
I still believe that, although I’ve come to understand my crafts as existing in a social and personal context for audiences, which has changed some of my approach (novelty, the flower ba ba ba)
Emm sits in the middle of the clump
I believe that the mind is in an intimate and sometimes coercive relationship with the body and our physiological experience. Our mind is more open when our body is at ease. Is it the mind that feels the good vibrations and loosens the reins on the body? Or is it the body letting its guard down to give one entrance to the mind? Both are interesting relationships, but that’s not what I’m exploring right now. The target is to connect with thought and breath, head and heart. If you only appeal to one, the other will get in your way.
Emm says that anyone who is willing should put a hand on Emm’s face, neck, chest, or ribs
Emm looks up and sings “Everything Stays” to the ceiling