From our promo shoot to the second draft, Jade has been in the room for most of it. A week after our draft performances at UNC’s Process Series, we thought it would be interesting to get her take on the project thus far… 

In the lead up to our draft performances tonight and tomorrow night, we’ve asked a few of our friends and collaborators to share their thoughts about Elektra. Sometime in early March, we stumbled across Carra Sykes’ great MOTHER + DAUGHTER project.  It seemed eerily aligned to our aim for this second draft, so we asked her to collaborate with us. As you’ll see at the performance, what developed was a great extension to both our projects.  

We know that you’d been doing some portraiture work while staying with your Mom after graduation. Tell us about the moment of inspiration behind the MOTHER+DAUGHTER series? Did you do something that reminded you of your mother or vice versa? (Or are we projecting?) After graduation, I didn’t have a job lined up but I had been doing freelance and searching for a job. I kept applying to places (all out of state) and either hearing “no” or not hearing back at all. I began to get super bummed out about it and needed to do something creative to lift my bummers. I try to keep busy with personal projects in my free time, and I had been doing tons of self portraits and felt I needed to bring someone else into the picture. At this point, my mom and I were staying with my grandmother for a little while. We were around each other all the time and I was reminded of how my uncle likes to pick on her for wearing my clothes occasionally. Really, she just ends up wearing old band shirts I try to give away to Goodwill, but it’s an ongoing joke with her and her twin brother. I had been wanting to do a photo project that was a series and so I thought it might be kind of funny to take almost identical photos of my mom and me while wearing some of my clothes. The first photo was a tester to see if it would be a project we’d want to continue, and it definitely became one! We got a major kick out of it and so did some friends on instagram and on the flickr community. We smiled and laughed and it was the perfect project to lift my spirit.

We found your mother + daughter photos on a lesser known site. Later we found out that they went VIRAL. How did it feel to have your project spotlighted by The Guardian and The Huffington Post?  I never even thought about how many people would want to see the series! It was crazy when I started getting emails from various sites wanting to feature the project. I was honored and stoked to be able to make people laugh or want to do a similar project. A lot of why I do my work is to try to get people excited about making and creating! I still forget it happened until someone brings it up again, haha!

Can you give us the story behind the three images that you’ve allowed us to use to promote the draft performances? (The boat / The plate / The Santa Fe theme)

In the boat photo we are wearing a shirt from the non-profit I do a lot of work with called To Write Love on Her Arms. Sometimes I just grab extra random props to make the photo more interesting or to have us have something else to interact with while posing. This time, looking back, it reminds me of the flag on boats that would read “don’t give up the ship.” To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit that helps find help for people struggling with depression, suicide, addiction, and self-injury. I guess in a way, holding the ship has us thinking “don’t give up the ship,” which is super neat to think about when looking back.

The plate photo was taken earlier on when we were still at my grandmother’s house. I rearranged some furniture to clear it out a bit because it felt like it should be just the chair and large plate. This one definitely feels like a set for some type of production. Here we wear my high school soccer hoodie and hold the yellow pillow. We are posing like queens in a way, which is funny to think about in a mother/daughter relationship.

The curtain background photo was taken because I got a shirt that reminded me of the curtain. I thought it would be interesting to play with patterns that were similar and almost create a camouflage look. The added accessory of the headband created another line of sight and extra interest. Sometimes the props are completely random and other times they are chosen because they bring the photos together. I like to go with whatever I can, and then make it work! It’s fun to see how the props interact with my mom and me creating a whole new narrative for each photo.

Do you have a favorite image in our collaboration? I think my favorite photo is the one where my mom and I are both sitting down together. It’s pretty eerie. At this point, looking at it, I feel removed from the photo and I’ve become an onlooker. This is a new story for me to create, even though I was actually a part of the photo.

Other thoughts? We had a ton of fun doing the warm-up exercises (in rehearsal). I enjoyed seeing my mom interact and put on neat costumes and makeup. I still think it is so rad that y’all are in North Carolina and I am too. Haymaker is the only NC group to contact us about the series. When I was contacted, I was so excited to do a collaboration in person and not just on the internet! Thank you so much for hanging out with my mom and me! Keep making, keep creative.

Carra is a graphic designer and photographer. She currently lives in Greensboro, NC. She and her Mom, Marti, are most definitely good people. See her work at www.carrasykes.com and our draft performances tonight and tomorrow night: http://elektraprocess.eventbrite.com/

 In the lead up to our upcoming draft performances, we asked our composer, Jenavieve Varga, to create  a playlist of mom + daughter songs inspired from this draft. Behold the magic…

“Cherry Bomb” The Runaways 

If Elektra ever got her shit together, I think she would put on some fishnets, platforms and take to the stage. In my rendition, Cherie Currie would play Elektra.

“She Drives Me Crazy” – Fine Young Canniballs 

Cly might love this song because it lightens the burden of love she has for Elektra. I picture this: Cly puts this song on repeat and blasts it while she cleans the house. Elektra is forced to listen to it over and over again while she pouts in the dungeon and thinks about how much she hates her mom.

“Laisse Tomber les Filles”- Pigeons 

Agamemnon has a lot of lady problems. As if Cly didn’t have an axe to grind with him after he slaughtered their daughter, he brings home a tramp. Pigeons does my favorite rendition of this song, but you can check out the lyrics in this English version “Chick Habbit”- April March.

“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”- Joss Stone

Subject to her husbands duty, Cly decides she will not play by his rules once he is gone.

“We Gotta Get Out of this Place” – The Animals 

If Orestes would just hurry up and get home, Elektra could finally be free. A prayer from Elektra to Orestes in song form.

“Killing Me Softly” -Roberta Flack 

Elektra doesn’t recognize Orestes at first but has a feeling about him…

“How Do You Ruin Me”- Black Prairie 

Elektra and Cly might as well throw in the towel and sing this together at Karaoke. Maybe then, they would realize they are not so different from one another.

Jenavieve Varga is a classically trained violinist who began playing at the age of three. She plays violin for Hindugrass and various classical engagements. She is also addicted to LaCroix water. Get your reservations for April 22 and 23: http://elektraprocess.eventbrite.com/.

In the lead up to our upcoming draft performances, we’ve asked a few of our friends and collaborators to share their thoughts about Elektra. We hope to see you on April 22 and 23: http://elektraprocess.eventbrite.com/

I’m a performer. I’ve often viewed what I do as using a coloring book. A real artist has created something that tells a story and I function to merely shade in what they’ve done. I facilitate the telling of that story but I am not a creator. As an actor I am normally quarantined from artists. Unless you are one, it’s rare to be with artists while they create. There’s something incredibly beautiful and humbling about being in a room with them, sharing common space, purpose and vision. In the devising process I am expected to create, a) because I was invited and damn well better make myself useful and b) because they actually think I’m useful. Both are appropriately terrifying. While there is still performance, participating in the creative process requires actual creation which is not something I thought I did or could do.

The act of creation has begun to shift the way I work. Devising requires access to everything I can get my hands on: text, images, materials, gestures, dreams, memories, etc. The first few things on that list I’m familiar with employing. The last two I’ve fled from at all costs because of The Method. I’ve found actors who employ it to be selfish, cutting off real emotional relationships on stage in favor of personal catharsis.  But with devising, dreams and memories are essential. Maintaining psychological distance from an idea or memory of my Mother allows me to mine it objectively. What is personal and specific may be common universally and therefore useful.  Catharsis is no doubt in ready supply, but is certainly not the point. My personal experiences matter, not just to me, but to the other creators in the room.

On the road home from rehearsal I used to play the lunatic, spouting Shakespeare at 65mph. Elektra has found me more introspective, recording thoughts about my Mom while I travel. I am more mindful of the process while I read leisure materials* or watch a film. And while sheets of butcher paper, magic markers and lists of personal family rules may look like group therapy to those on the other side of the glass, they are merely tools with which to create a world accessible to a greater audience.

*Terry Tempest Williams wrote a beautiful book about journaling, wildlife conservation and the death of her mother: When Women Were Birds. It is a lovely read and I have found it rather useful in orienting myself during this process.

Prior to moving to Durham,  Amber Wood was an actor with Virginia Stage Company and resident teaching artist at Park Place School in Norfolk, VA. In addition to being in our draft performances on April 22 and 23, she is an Urban Garden Performing Arts collaborator and can be seen in Manbites Dog’s “The Homosexuals” opening on May 2. She is the kind of good people who says ‘hello’ with a smile.

In the lead up to our upcoming draft performances, we’ve asked a few of our friends and collaborators to share their thoughts about Elektra. We hope to see you on April 22 and 23: http://elektraprocess.eventbrite.com/

About a year ago, when I began to work on a new version of Elektra, I had no idea Haymaker had set out to do the same thing. I currently live in New York, working as a director and designer, and I am beginning to dabble at playwriting. Having grown up in Raleigh, I try to keep some connection to theater in the Triangle, and I decided to workshop this version of Elektra at Meredith College.  The performances were scheduled one week before Haymaker’s draft performance at UNC. There were, on the surface, a lot of similarities between these works. It was spooky and weird to say the least.

A couple of months ago, however, Haymaker and I had a Skype session to talk about our versions of the play, and found just how different they actually were from each other.

To me, Elektra is interesting as a character because of her inaction. For an entire play, we watch the central character do nothing. Why do we want to watch someone who does nothing? Why do we care? What makes her story interesting – not to mention tragic? This mammoth task of creating a character who is lethargic, self-conscious, and pitiful but also watchable is what drew me into the play.  She puts herself down. She stops herself. Her self-awareness, her judgment, and her nostalgia for what might have been takes up so much of her time, that she cannot do anything else.

When writing the play, I faced my own demons and self-doubts. I procrastinated and edited myself before the play was even on paper. I laid in my bed one night, after throwing out a complete draft and thought to myself “I’m not good enough!”. I then learned just why I related to this character. She is that little voice of judgment that lives in all of us. Just like Elektra, we all know what it is like to walk around putting ourselves down. We know too well these feelings of procrastination. We know what it’s like to go on Facebook, to see our distant friends and relatives, and to compare and judge ourselves all too harshly with the outside world. I quickly learned that a character that does “nothing” can actually be doing hundreds of things throughout the entire play, all of them relatable.

Haymaker, in my  understanding of it, has come at this inaction from a different angle. What is it like for us, as an audience, to do nothing while we watch violent atrocities onstage? How are we, the spectators, responsible for what is happening in front of us? How can we claim the actions of the characters onstage as our own? In this version, the audience is literally forced to put themselves into the violence of the play. With all of the talk of gun control due to the overwhelming number of recent tragic shootings, being forced to deal with violence in the theater is eerily relevant. By confronting the audience with actual weaponry, chopping wood with an axe to demonstrate that an actor onstage could physically kill the other actors in front of us, we are forced to deal with a reality we are not often asked to deal with in the theater.

Yet somehow, I believe that both our versions of this classic may be dealing with a similar issue. For me, it is the violence of emotional self-destruction, and for Emily, Dan, and Akiva it may be a more immediate violence. But it is not the violence that makes this play truly tragic.  It is not a play about violence. It is a play about the possibility, somehow, that this violence and self-destruction doesn’t have to happen. And, to me, that’s the tragedy.

Come to Meredith College Studio Theater on Saturday, April 13th at 7pm, and hear us talk about this and other issues surrounding creating our own work, before a showing of Elektra at 8pm.  Tickets are $10 for adults, and $5 for students and seniors, and can be reserved at boxofficemeredithedu  (boxofficemeredithedu)  . The show at Meredith runs tonight until Sunday. Make sure to check it out before the performances of Haymaker’s Elektra on April 22nd and 23rd at Swain Hall.

Chip Rodgers currently lives in NYC, working as a director and sound designer for theater. He’s good people. See the stuff he’s done here: http://chip-rodgers.com/.

We’ve read a lot of Elektra adaptations during the course of our exploration into The Elektra Project. From the traditional versions by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles (translated by the likes of Ezra Pound); to other classic interpretations like Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto from Richard Strauss’ opera and Eugene O’Niell’s Mourning Becomes Electra; all the way up to contemporary re-writes like Electricidad by Luis Alfaro and Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters trilogy.

In all of these versions I noticed a trend that wasn’t jiving with me:

These authors all seemed unable to shake the predominant portrayal of Elektra as the shrieking, unreasonable – yet impotent – daughter, and Clytemnestra as the domineering and unloving mother.

None of these versions seemed to tap the true love and hate that go hand in hand with being a mother of a daughter and being the daughter of a mother.

Forgive me if I’m oversimplifying things here – my mother has not yet (to my knowledge) murdered my father, so I don’t know firsthand. That said, I just can’t imagine losing all of my love for her – no matter what she did. I may love her a lot less. I might lose 99.9% of my love for her. But I believe, truly, there will always be a part of me that will love her forever. I wouldn’t be able to lose all of that love. And if she did something truly awful, that love would become a torture.

I can’t see the conflict of this residual love in these versions of Elektra. Some of them get incredibly close – but I want to get closer.

I want to feel the torment that Elektra is going through – feelings of having to defend her father at odds with the pain that eliminating the person who bore her into this world would bring. I want to see her need for her mother through the screaming.

I want to feel Clytemnestra’s heartache over taking away something so important to her daughter, even though she feels completely justified in it. I want to see her protect, defend, and love Elektra – not just fear, abuse, and mock her.

I want these things because I want characters to be complex. I want their relationship to be volatile and loving. I want them to look like a real mother and daughter…

Public presentations of the second draft of Haymaker’s Elektra Project are April 22 and 23rd at 8pm in UNC’s Swain Hall. Haymaker is an artist in residence of the Process Series at UNC. For more details or to RSVP for the draft performance, click here.

I spent the first ten years of my professional life working on what they call “classic theater.” Plays by your standard Dead White Males: Ancient Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare and friends, Moliere, Ibsen, Wilde and Shaw, et al. And what those plays have in common is that they are incredibly language-dense. Nothing happens onstage in Greek plays – just debates about issues and poetic descriptions of things that happened offstage. Shakespeare’s plays had no scenery – the language is the scenery. Wit and banter stand in for spectacle and decoration.

So when we started work on Elektra, a Greek play with even less happening than most Greek plays, that should have been in my wheelhouse. Hell, language-based plays were my specialty.

But good lord was I bored. We read other adaptations, all by great writers, and the paint could not dry fast enough for me. When we made our own first draft, all about getting close to violence, we included a verbal face-off between Elektra and her mother as one of the scenes. It was …fine. But next to the feeling of an ax chopping wood a foot away, or of a woman being strangled in our laps, or of a wailing violin, that arguing scene felt like some weak tea. It was petty and small, and not even great acting could make it immediate. It was all head and no guts, an intellectual debate. No amount of one-note screaming could conjure up a family’s history of hurt. If Aeschylus couldn’t make that scene compelling, I sure couldn’t. It all felt fake.

The mission in this second draft has been to chase what feels real. Not realistic, mind you – real. When I remembered the fights I had with my parents, there wasn’t much screaming involved. What happened was that an innocent comment or two from them filled me with a huge amount of emotion – rage or sadness. I was getting emotional at things they didn’t say.

I started reading about parent-child relationships, and I found a name for that unspoken emotion: “metamessage.” Underneath the literal meaning sits judgment or disappointment or anger, and whether the speaker means it or not, that’s what the listener hears. It’s like a secret message piggy-backed on ordinary speech.

Finding out about metamessages is making it easier for me to fight against those ten intellectual years. It’s hard work for me to make a play where what characters feel is more important than what they say. The messenger’s speech from The Persians and the Ghost’s speech from Hamlet and Aeneas’ speech from Dido Queen of Carthage – great feasts of descriptive language –  those were the reasons I loved theater in the first place. The teenaged version of me loved plays because their language was beautiful, and now I have to throw that overboard. It’s falling in love when you’re eighteen compared with falling in love when you’re thirty. It’s a different universe.

In this draft, I want scenes made up of a few words and silences to feel like they have axes and murders and violins in them. The unspoken parts will bypass the brain entirely. Ordinary nothing will sting. Without thinking about it, you’ll recognize your parents or children. I want an audience to feel this way, and I want myself to feel this way. I need to show myself that I can make a play where beautiful words aren’t the point.

Public presentations of the second draft of Haymaker’s Elektra Project are April 22 and 23rd at 8pm in UNC’s Swain Hall. Haymaker is an artist in residence of the Process Series at UNC. For more details or to RSVP for the draft performance, click here.

White Pines Elektra Scenes Performance. Photo by Chase Varga.

Last year, while making What’s That Cost: The Federal Budget and You, we began experimenting with a process of creating multiple drafts of our pieces.

The purpose of these drafts was to experiment with themes, characters, ideas, and structures that we were interested in exploring for the piece. Each draft had rules that governed it and experiments we wanted to try.

And each draft was very different.

In Draft 1 of What’s that Cost, there was a shag-dancing octopus; in Draft 2 there was a hands-on museum exhibit; and in Draft 3, Drs. X and Y appeared.

At the end of each six-week drafting period, we would invite select friends and colleagues in to experience the piece and give us feedback. We would conduct a brief talk-back after the performance of the draft where we asked the audience about their experience and shared our own. As audience is so crucial in our work, we need audience reaction to help gauge the effectiveness of our experiments.

Usually, we would find one or two kernels from that performance that would launch us into the next draft, though we often scrapped the draft entirely and proceeded in a new direction for the next draft.

In the past, these draft performance were invitation-only. Frankly, we were weirdly nervous about inviting anyone other than friends to see our messy, unfinished, rough work. Over time, though, we realized that we were doing ourselves a disservice by not inviting more people into our creation process. We talk about our work being focused on the audience experience, but how can we know what that experience is if we don’t invite them in? We were also thrilled with the idea of giving people more opportunities to engage with us as we take two years to build a piece.

All that brings us to Elektra and the Process Series. With the encouragement of the director of the Process Series, Joseph Megel, we received a grant to become Artist in Residence and present these drafts throughout our year at UNC. The Process Series encourages audience involvement in new work creation, and it is the perfect place for us to solidify our Draft Presentation process.

Our first draft presentation is Tuesday, and we’re so excited for you to be a part of that audience. We hope you can join us.

Haymaker’s Elektra Project: Draft Performance #1
January 22, 2013 @ 8pm
Swain Hall, Campus of UNC – Chapel Hill
Free, reservations recommended.
Click HERE for more details or to join us.

Carl Martin in 70 Scenes of Halloween. Photo by Alan Dehmer.

Many of you know that we’re running 70 Scenes of Halloween right now for Manbites Dog Theater’s 25th Anniversary season. Dan and Emily are acting in the production, which was co-directed by Akiva and our friend Adam Sobsey. It’s not a Haymaker production. We don’t usually work from existing scripts. But this one is fantastic, and it’s written by Jeffrey M. Jones.

So why do a play written by someone else?

The kernel of the idea — “putting on a play” — was bumping around in our head last winter, when we were plotting out our schedule for the year. We knew we didn’t have a Haymaker show to produce this fall, but we wanted to put on something for the community and for ourselves. And then we met Adam at Six Plates in Durham. We had just read his article on the Duke Performances blog about Shakespeare (to which Akiva had responded with this article). After a few drinks, our conversation turned to the similarities between Shakespeare and modern experimental theater: non-naturalistic scenes and monologues, lyrical language, and fantastical events happening within the story. Adam recommended that we read a set of playwrights from the 80’s to compare the two. So we started getting together every few weeks to read these plays out loud. We read a small sampling of plays from Mac Wellman, Wallace Shawn, Len Jenkin, and then we read Jeffrey Jones’ 70 Scenes of Halloween. After reading 70 Scenes, Adam told us that seeing the play twenty-five years ago – in a production which happened to be Manbites Dog Theater’s first show –made him want to be a playwright. Soon enough, the idea to put on a 25^th Anniversary remount gained momentum. (Check out our last blog post and listen to last week’s The State of Things for more on the show.)

For us, working on 70 Scenes gave us the chance to learn from an existing script that was better than what we can write while also allowing us to work on aspects of the process that we normally don’t get to focus on:

An existing experimental or ‘avant-garde’ script: Written in the 1980, 70 Scenes is what we constantly strive for our texts to be: accessible yet challenging. It experiments with structure and form in a way that really fits with our own aesthetic. The story of the play is simple, and the characters and the initial world are very recognizable. However, the scenes are mismatched, reordered, imaginary, and repeated with slight variation to keep the audience – and performers – ever-guessing at what’s really going on with Jeff and Joan.

Defined roles: Not only did we want a chance to focus on a single role, we wanted a chance to try a less democratic process. For a Haymaker piece, we’re often finishing rewrites to the script just as we’re opening it. A well-written script by a great playwright gave us the freedom to have a completed text, and to focus on the performance and the final product. It gave us the freedom to concentrate on our single, individual roles on the production (acting or directing). When you’re not wearing a bunch of different hats, or all trying to wear the same hat, the experience is much different.

Working with others: When we work on a Haymaker original work, we try to bring artists into the room as much as possible. But our four-days-a-week-for-a-year-or-two schedule is a bit restrictive for other people – you know, people with lives. So we wanted to do something where we could work with more of the awesome talent in the Triangle. And – wow – we are truly blessed for it. Amber Wood and Carl Martin knock our socks of with their acting chops, great attitudes, and incredible professionalism. Shaun Jamieson and Karen Burns are two technical gurus that have our back at every turn. Liz Droessler, our lighting designer, and Sarah Widgeon, our costume designer, amazed us with their patience, artistry, quick work, and great attitudes. Adam Sobsey shined as a playwright/director, and really instilled his passion for the play into this production. And that’s just to name a few people who signed on for the ride. We’re lucky, ever-grateful, and we hope to continue to work with them and more in the future.

We’re so fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to play, to work with great people, and to perform at Manbites again. Durham, you’re awesome!

Come see us, this final week: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8:15pm. Tickets available online, over the phone (919.682.3343), or in person (703 Foster Street).

Photo by Jon Haas

Been a while since you heard us? Now’s your chance: at noon today, we’ll be on your radio or internet. North Carolina’s WUNC 91.5 has invited us on their show The State of Things to talk about what we’re doing these days.

We’ve been wrestling this play called 70 Scenes of Halloween for the last six weeks, and it’s been a real wrestle. It looks at a marriage that’s falling apart from every angle you could imagine, from the mundane to the supernatural. We sweat out a few pounds a night performing the play, but we love how funny and strange it is. It’s a blast to perform and to watch. It’s at Manbites Dog Theater through December 15th – come down and see it some time.

Now, 70 Scenes of Halloween isn’t a Haymaker production; we don’t usually work from existing scripts, and we don’t usually make shows in six weeks. But it came to us from our friend Adam Sobsey, who saw it when he was 16 years old and decided then and there to start writing plays of his own. It turns out that the production he saw was the first show ever from Manbites Dog, who were so welcoming to us when we arrived in Durham (they presented our Living With the Tiger). We thought it would be a cool gesture to remount that first play for the company’s 25th birthday this year. This production lets us thank Jeff Storer and Ed Hunt for what they’ve done for theater in the Triangle, and for their kindness to us as we were starting up. And it lets us sharpen our skills on a great experimental play, while working with more outside collaborators. We’ll talk more about why we decided to take on a fully-written script on the program.

So tune your transistor to 91.5 at noon or nine, or find us after the fact at wunc.org/tsot. And then grab a ticket to see us in person at Manbites Dog Theater now through December 15. Get your tickets online (http://www.manbitesdogtheater.org/403/), by phone (919.682.3343), or at the door (703 Foster Street, Durham).

A lot going on, y’all.

 We Missed You: Let’s Have a Beer

Saturday, November 3, 2012
6pm – 9pm, drop in anytime

The Tune Inn
331 Pennsylvania Ave SE
Washington, DC

RSVP HERE!

Oh hey!! Hi! How’s it going?!

It’s been a minute!

Gosh, yea, it’s been almost a year since we last updated you! Sorry. The three of us are still down in Durham making things. We’ve had a year full of new pieces and grants and residencies and collaboration…

You know, we should just grab a drink and catch up.

We would love that.

We know this funky little bar we used to hang out in back when we were living in DC. They have great mozzarella sticks, Keno, trophy game on the walls, and cheap beer! Oh, and we have a souvenir for you from NC.

So, we’ll meet you there sometime after 6pm next Saturday?

Awesome. See you then.

Photo credit: Patricia S. Hill

We begin our next project in earnest this week: a site-specific adaptation of Elektra with music. When we tell this to people, most nod their heads with interest and yet purse their lips with skepticism as if we’ve just said, “We’re climbing Kilimanjaro next year.” In truth, though, that’s probably an apt analogy. Their responses also mirror some of our own nervous and excited energy.

We like tackling big ideas, and Elektra is definitely about BIG ideas. It’s also a story we all know. It’s ingrained in our DNA. It’s Greek, for fuck’s sake! Where do we even start? Well…a little background.

Dan ran into the beautiful and violent libretto of Richard Strauss’ opera in a workshop in the summer of 2009. Part of his assignment in the workshop was to come up with a basic concept to guide a pair of designers in building models for the opera’s set, in role-playing the professional designer/director relationship. What came out of the process was a curiosity about the text and the story, as well as some questions about form and space.

From Dan’s initial curiosity, we’ve taken some central ideas as guideposts for starting our own adaptation. One idea is the notion of violence as a form of familial communication. To be clear, this communication isn’t necessarily physical aggression but rather a style of quick, pointed and blunt expression. The other idea concerns space. We’d like to explore this epic, violent story in a completely intimate environment like one of Durham’s abandoned homes: will this mean the audience will have to wear earplugs if there are opera singers? Will the audience become characters/participants in this non-theatre space? If so, how does that change the story? We’re still in the beginning stages of finding/discussing space, but if you have recommendations we’d love to hear them!

We plan to open this monster in the fall of 2013. This is by far our biggest, most ambitious project to date. And we’re starting early.

First, we’ll be outside of Philadelphia for a week-long retreat sponsored by White Pines Productions starting July 19. Take a look at these digs — we are stoked. We’ll use our week to build the foundation of the text and probably some aspects of the physical world.

We’ll do this by collaging existing text (from a variety of sources) with improvisations on scenarios and scenes, physical experiments on what communication through violence is, and attaching some of the music onto those ideas. We’re also really excited to work with new collaborators. Joining us will be Jenavieve Varga from the band Lost in the Trees, Chase Varga, Dana Marks from Little Green Pig, Amelia Sciandra, Andrea Ryan, and Kashif Powell.

The second public iteration of the adaptation will be for the Process Series at UNC in April 2013. At this point, we think we’ll be presenting pieces of the adaptation to experiment with how the audience reacts to the many ideas we’re connecting.

A site-specific adaptation of Elektra with music: It’s a mouthful of words and a mountain of concepts. We’re excited and nervous to climb toward opening in fall of 2013.

We’ll be posting ideas, images, and invites to draft readings soon. Don’t be a stranger.

Hot damn! Our first public performance of What’s that Cost: The Federal Budget and You was a smash! We performed with some pretty great acts and met other artists doing work like ours at Burning Coal’s Politheatrics Festival. The Independent Weekly was extremely generous:

“Haymaker is establishing an intriguing track record for exploring risky, diverse takes on obscure subject matter in their performances.”

Whoa. Yea. That’s awesome.

So, what are we going to do to follow it up?!?

Well, Step 1: re-writes. We are perfectionists, after all, and we always discover new things to explore when we put work in front of an audience and ask them to react to it. So after our Elektra Project retreat, we’ll be making a few changes to the script and then…

Step 2: Perform, perform, perform. We’ve designed this piece specifically to tour. We’ve created What’s that Cost with the goal in mind of performing it 30 to 50 times before the end of 2012 in at least 10 different venues. House parties, galleries, clubs, theaters, corporate meeting rooms, convention halls, and schools, we’re willing to take it anywhere – anywhere that will have us – anywhere that will expose us to new audiences – and anywhere that will pay for it. (Hey, it’s nicknamed “The Budget Show” for more than one reason!)

Do you have a place we can perform?

Drop us a line and let’s make it happen.

There’s this game we play – stolen and bastardized from this guy. We create stories by asking each other “What comes next?” One person starts a story and gets to keep telling it one line at a time until his response is no longer believable (or he’s taking too long to think about a response). At this point the asker responds with a “Nope!” and the roles reverse. Asker/Listener is now Storyteller.

We’re on an island.

What comes next?

Emily needs to poop.

What comes next?

There’s no toilet paper…

You get the idea.

For us, it’s an exercise in storytelling, gut response, and trusting each other’s imaginations. It drives creativity in a non-threatening and energized way. Very often we act out the physicality of the story, and the game becomes about putting each other into awkward physical situations.

We’ll play “What comes next?” in the rehearsal room while warming up and while building shows, scenes, and characters – but we’ve been known to use the same technique during business meetings.

Last January, we met to decide what comes next after What’s that Cost: The Federal Budget and You.

Each of us brought a series of ideas into the room on what we were curious about in the world, what we’d like to explore together, and what we’d want to give to our friends and family and you.

We each laid out our ideas and started asking questions. What excites you about this? What interests me about that? Where does my personal story fit in here? Where does the universal experience go there? Then a scary thing happened — we played What Comes Next and laid out a production calendar through 2014.

We had dozens of projects to choose from, some which will make it into our lives through independent work, side projects, or play readings. But at the end of the weekend, we had decided on the three projects that Haymaker will focus on in the next 2 years.

1. This fall, we’ll be working on a well-written play not by us and not using our semi-democratic devising process, a show that will help us focus on other aspects of our work.

2. We’re beginning work on an adaptation of Elektra that will include original music, to be produced in full in the fall of 2013.

3. And for the spring of 2014, we will create an original work exploring our obsession to preserve the “American sugar-high,” titled (for now) America Forever.

All of these shows are already in various stages of development, and we’re plotting ways to begin sharing with you the process we are going through to create them. We’re also adopting a model of putting up multiple preview drafts, so a staged reading of one of these scripts may be coming soon to a Rehearsal Shack near you.

And now, with those already in the hopper, we’re a little excited and a little scared because come next January, we’re going to be asking again: What Comes Next?

So much has changed since last we wrote about our little Federal Budget project. This project has gained a title and seen lots of different iterations. We’ve done a few private performance drafts for friends and collaborators attempting to hone what we want to say about the budget and how we want to say it. Sadly, the actual octopus got cut a few drafts ago.

During the course of all these re-writes, we’ve learned a ton about the Federal Budget and the economy and about America. And we’ve also learned about how much we didn’t know and how much is left to know.

And we’ve learned what excites us the most about this project. The whole structure of the Budget – for us, at least – is about fight or flight and that our basic nature is to try to corral chaos with organization. Revolutionary? Maybe not, but how to communicate this to an audience has been an exciting challenge for us.

The epiphany for us came when we layered fear onto the Budget itself. “Defense.” “Social Security.” “Health and Human Services.” We observed that the budget was more about protection than progress, and we began to ask what were we protecting ourselves from. This is not the total point of the production, but a glimpse for sure.

We’re anxious to show this to you. It will open soon enough at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh for the Politheatrics festival. Afterward, we’d like to take it to different places – house parties, galleries, clubs, theatres, BBQ’s, really any place that will have us. We feel that this project wants to continue to evolve and get better.

Well, and so do we.

So, if you’d like to have us, we’ll come to you. The piece is specifically built to go most places (electricity willing) and short enough to drink a beer (slowly) during.

We hope to see you soon.

Auditions are scary as hell.

Last month, we attended the Triangle-wide auditions at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham, where more than a hundred actors showed up to peddle their wares to a panel of directors. We don’t envy actors who have to stand up in front of strangers and pour their soul out for no more than sixty seconds. We watched for four hours while auditioners told stories of murder, love gone wrong, and murder because of love gone wrong (note: these were not autobiographical stories).

And the talent, not to mention the guts, was pretty amazing. We’ve all lived in bigger cities with more actors and more theater companies, and the Triangle talent depth stands up with any of them. So way to go, actors.

But we’re doing more than just casting a show or two; we devise our plays, which means we build them together in rehearsal. It’s not enough to call back a few actors to read from a script, to see a few pairings, and to make a snap decision from there. We need collaborators, people we want to work with again and again, people who are game and interesting and fun to have a beer with.

So over the next few weeks, we’re going to start inviting some actors from that brief (but dramatic!) snapshot in the audition to play with us for a night. We’ll ask them to take a crazy text and make a tiny play out of it. We’ll ask them to make a dinner scene on the moon with us. We’ll ask them to declare their love to a teddy bear. We’ll ask them to bring in the music they like or their favorite food or an unbelievable story.

And when we’re done with all of that, we hope we’ll have new operatives for our A-Team. Without the right folks, the trick don’t work.

Those of you who are coming, we can’t wait to (re)meet you. And those of you we missed, drop us a line and we’ll invite you in.

Let’s do this thing.

The United States Federal Budget takes your money, divides it up unfairly, and then spends that hard-earned cash on frivolous things like missiles and food stamps. The United States Federal Budget connects you to me, responds to the needs of 313 million Americans, and remembers your grandparents’ greatest fears. The 2011 United States Federal Budget reported taking in $2.3 trillion, spending $3.6 trillion, and running a deficit of $1.3 trillion. Haymaker investigates.

Created by Akiva Fox, Emily Hill, and Dan VanHoozer
Performed by Akiva Fox and Dan VanHoozer
Directed by Emily Hill

With special thanks to Jade Bettin, Burning Coal Theatre Company, Cara Clark, Jerome Davis, Duke University Development, Julia Fiore, Sid Fowler, Ed Hunt, Madeline James, Shaun Jamieson, Manbites Dog Theater, Dana Marks, Allie Mullin, Jay O’Berski, Jeremy Parker, Charles Phaneuf, Raleigh Little Theater, Tim Scales, Jeff Storer, and Megan Thrift

Upcoming Performances

Check back with us for future performance dates.

We’re looking for venues!
What’s That Cost: The Federal Budget and You is coming soon to a theater, bar, house party, or corporate event near you. Drop us a line at howdy[at]gohaymaker[dot]com if you want us to perform at your event.

Past Performances

Politheatrics Festival
June 28 – July 1, 2012
Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh, NC

Click Here to check out the preview article in the Independent Weekly.
Click Here to read the review. Four Stars! — Independent Weekly

Allie Mullin Photography

Is this a tupperware party? Is that girl singing opera in the kitchen? There’s blood everywhere… Haymaker and violinist/composer Jenavieve Varga team up to build a new adaptation of Elektra. An American family. Bad dreams. Retribution. And matricide.

As Artists in Residence for The Process Series at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Haymaker will present a number of in-progress drafts of Elektra throughout the winter and spring of 2013. Check back here for more updates, or sign up for our mailing list and never miss an invite!

Written by
Haymaker

and
Aeschylus
Luís Alfaro
Jade Bettin
Euripides
Leah Gibson
Julianne Harper
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Mao Hu
Shaun Jamieson
Dana Marks
Ellen McLaughlin
Amelia Meath
Ezra Pound
Kashif Powell
Andrea Ryan
Nick Sanborn
Amelia Sciandra
Steph Scribner
Alex Smith
Richard Strauss
Sophocles
Megan Thrift
Chase Varga
Jenavieve Varga
Jenny Wales
Amber Wood
…and likely others we’ve forgotten to list…

Upcoming Development Events

Elektra Draft #3 — September 2013
This draft will focus on the original composition for Haymaker’s Eletkra Project and will be led by composer Jenavieve Varga. Check back in July for more details, or sign up for our events email list and never miss an invitation to a Haymaker Happening. Click here to sign up.

Past Development Events

Our next show is about the Federal Budget.

Here’s the skinny…

The year we spent creating Living with the Tiger allowed us to wander freely through our artistic and creative imagination. We had no logistical restrictions, except for the performance date and location. The only artistic restriction we had was that the three of us alone would perform it. This meant we could explore every avenue and sink into the artistic process without self-imposed limitations. We allowed ourselves the complete freedom to take Tiger in any direction it wanted to go. We learned a lot about how we worked and what we wanted to say with our work in the process.

This time around, constrained a bit more by time, we’ve decided to play around with that freedom. We’ve given ourselves a set of limitations in creating this new piece– some for practical reasons, but also in an attempt to challenge ourselves again to think about how we make things and how we want to make things. Here’s what we’ve set before us for the first draft:

- Create a piece about the United States Federal Budget

- Explore “presentation” as performance

- A time limit of 20min

- One performer

- An octopus has to show up

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Haymaker show without source materials:

http://www.deathandtaxesposter.com/

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_bohannon_dance_vs_powerpoint_a_modest_proposal.html

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/10478

We don’t know what all that means either yet – but we’re really excited for the possibilities!

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What’s our next production?

It’s the question we’re most commonly asked. (And thank you for that).

We decided after a few weeks of absolutely no tiger talk to spend a whole weekend discussing what exactly is next.  So much to consider…what do we want to say to the world? What’s going on personally that would relate to y’all? Do we set a time or do we let the muse and only the muse guide us?

Then we got a call from our friends at Fullsteam: “Want to help us throw a strange and beautiful Christmas Party? With a Variety Hour? And live art? And a holiday gorilla?”

Hot Damn! DO WE EVER!!! Strange and beautiful are our team colors.

Don’t you love it when the Universe provides? Quick and dirty. Turn on the broiler: we’re cooking up this party in under a month. We’re so excited to collaborate with the artists at Fullsteam to produce  A VERY MERRY DURHAM. You should join us, literally:

Friday, December 16^th at 6:14pm

Fullsteam Brewery, 726 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham

6:14pm – 7:30pm: Holiday Shenanigans (holiday crafts, live art, puppetry, appearances by Poetry Fox, and much more)

7:30pm: A Very Merry Durham Variety Hour

 Admission is FREE with the donation of a new, unwrapped toy (but don’t be a Scrooge — $10 value recommended).

Show us your SKILLZ!

Join the fun by strutting your stuff on stage!

We’re looking for home-grown talent to take the stage. All kinds of performers: musicians, actors, dancers, singers, jugglers, steppers, puppeteers, you name it…all are invited to pitch an act as part of the show. Want to play “Silver Bells” on wine glasses? Reenact a scene from “A Christmas Story”? Juggle ornaments? No matter how unusual your talent or your idea, we want to hear it.

Sign up HERE to join the fun!

Damn, people love us!?

If we didn’t know it before, we definitely discovered it during our opening weekend.

From as far away as Nashville, New York City, and Dover, DE, and especially including the band of people who drove the four-hour drive from Washington, DC, a host of friends and family came to Durham to see our first show, Living with the Tiger. That includes our awesome new friends in the Triangle who supported us; man, do we feel the love. To those of you who couldn’t make it and probably won’t in the next two weeks, you’ll definitely be missed.

To be honest, we feel a bit like kids who got too many presents on their birthdays. With so much, how can we ever say thank you enough?

Like the poster says,” No bullshit. Without you, none of this would have been possible.”

Sure, it’s the great American novel. But try to forget that for a second.

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is also the craziest American novel. We read a bunch of it out loud this summer (tigers, whales, what’s the difference?), and it’s full of everything! It’s like America in a blender – a million different subjects, styles, voices and stories, all packed into a few hundred pages. We want our play to have that same kaleidoscopic feeling to it, and that white whale is a lot to live up to.

Actually, we want the play to feel like this sentence from Moby-Dick:

“These are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”

Good, right? But don’t believe us: click on the link below to hear special Haymaker guest Tim Marr (of UNC fame) talk all about what a whale has to do with tigers and America.

Thar she blows!

Freedom, Love, Hate, Sacrifice, Messiness, Desperation, Brutality, Community, Get rich quick!, Violence. A thousand words, songs, poems, movies, books, etc. describe our Grand Experiment. Everyone’s America! is their own ideal. Like our country, that fact is both perfect and broken.

Our play is very much about the three of us trying to find out how we fit here while simultaneously attempting to come to a common ground on what we’ve seen and continue to experience. We’ve had to ask ourselves more than once what exactly America! is to us. We keep coming back to two words, pursuit and possibility, and the idea that what has always felt most like America! to each of us is “the road.”

Coming to these realizations, we recently asked our friend HannaH to help us finish Living with the Tiger. Specifically, we’ve asked her to help make a road trip possible in the theater, and to and lend her thoughts on America! She’s been traveling all across this land of ours for the past three months. So we thought it might be nice to have a guest to describe the America! she’s seen and experienced with a mix tape for you to listen to:

“The road is sound. Constant sound set by speed. Speed creates rhythm which is followed by a collage of melodies arranged by the passing cars, the sights that slowly come into full scale view and pass in a blur of shape and color, the light that falls through the trees dancing on the windshield, the characters that populate the sidewalks, and of course, the yellow line. And in that moment when all of this syncs up… music in motion. RoadMotion. Hear it?”

Songs for RoadMotion America

For more on HannaH’s adventures, visit her Tumblr page.

One morning you wake up and decide to see America.

It’s your right to see what’s going on with your neighbor in South Dakota, Oregon or Vermont.

“Maybe I’ll visit the beach, visit the mountains, visit family, visit someone in some place I don’t know at all…and they’ll be glad to talk with me because I’m an American too. And maybe I’ll have the best Mexican food of my life in Iowa,” you say aloud in bed as the sun creeps through your blinds. See the USA. A glorious destination is reachable…Slowly.

One of our Dads retired this year. And his retirement dream was to bike US Route 30 (the old Lincoln Highway) the entirety of its current route — Atlantic City, New Jersey to Astoria, Oregon. 3,200 miles. 49 days. About 70 miles per day. It took 6 ½ days to cross Nebraska — a trip most would try to do in their car in one day.

A funny thing happens when you travel like this. Face to face with America’s expansiveness, hour after hour, boring transforms into detailed beauty. Seeing the same 360-degree view for hours on end causes a heightening of the senses and explosion of the imagination. You spend miles marveling over sensory experiences that you would never have noticed had you been screaming down the road at 65 mph, blasting your tunes, and trying to get somewhere.

You become intimately familiar with the road. You feel every crack in the crumbling infrastructure of our nation: your ass is literally numb with them. You marvel at the thickness of road paint. Road kills become fascinating and gruesome attractions. Deer, raccoons, robins, opossums, squirrels, turtles, snakes, ducks, cats: you try to identify the casualties. You marvel at fresh guts, mangled legs, bits of fur, and blood scattered for hundreds of feet down the road. You’re stumped by the petrified road kill, weeks old and completely unrecognizable. Beautiful carnage.

Face to face with nature, the weather conditions affect your travel and mood. A headwind causes intense frustration and a desire to get off this goddamn bike! A single cloud offers relief from the punishing sun. An imposing rainstorm causes a re-evaluation of the day’s goals. Blue skies, cool mornings, and a slight tail wind start perfect 70-mile days.

The horizon offers deceptive goals. Grain silos and water towers are the first signs of approaching towns, indicating upcoming pit stops still almost an hour away. The flatness of the land means that each hill seduces you with the hope of panoramic views that never materialize, just stretches of prairie bracketed by small ridges running parallel to the river valley you ride. Reaching the crest of a hill reveals only the next incline as you slowly crawl toward the continental divide.

Animals along the road become your companions. Red-winged black birds squawk and chase you away from their nests in the ditches. Pheasants explode from bushes and screech across fields. Cows and horses stalk your movements as you pass. They look up from eating and watch you intensely. They give no notice to the cars and trucks that fly by, but you get their undivided attention. “Who is this crazy creature on two wheels?” they seem to be asking each other. You talk to them because you’ve been silently riding for four hours and mooing feels good.

You notice every car and truck that passes you. The courteous ones that give you a wide space as they pass. The ones that elevate your heart rate as they come intimidatingly close. The huge trucks, which at first you find scary, but later appreciate for their headwind-blocking power and the exhilarating boost of speed you get from their manufactured wind tunnel when they pass you. You notice the trains. Full coal trains creeping back from Wyoming. Empty coal trains heading out to be refilled. You’re delighted when a conductor blows the horn in response to your mad waving.

And out there on the prairie left alone with your thoughts, you can’t help but think of our ancestors who made their way across the country just like this. Route 30 in Nebraska follows much of the original Oregon Trail. You can see the effect of this mass migration – from the towns spaced 7-13 miles apart to the actual wagon ruts of the settlers carved into the hills. You realize that even though you thought it was brave to take on this journey with little preparation and no plan, you’re nothing compared with them. They crossed this state when the grasses were four feet high, when there was no paved road with a wide breakdown lane to ride in, when there was no AmericInn with hot tub to stay at, and with everything strapped to their backs or to an ox-drawn wagon. They went on foot with their entire families for months on end, because they were told that something might be out there that’s better than here. They paved the way through this great beauty and vastness, and made it possible for us to go coast to coast in our cars, by train, by plane, or even by bicycle.

Slowly, quickly, see the USA.

Why didn’t our third grade field trips look like this?

This injustice needed redressing. So we got some friends together, made sure all the permission slips were signed, handed out snacks and juice boxes, and drove out to the Carolina Tiger Rescue in Pittsboro.

This place exists because people decide to keep big cats as pets, and then find out that’s a bad idea. When they do, those animals need a place to live.

Wow. Being two feet away from a full-grown tiger is a hell of a thing. Just a little chain link fence keeping everybody where they belong.

As luck would have it, we brought along a recording device to see what our field trippers thought.

Click Here for Field Trip Audio

With a special cameo from Lincoln, who knows of what he speaks.

Allie Mullin is amazing. She took the great photos featured in this blog, and you’ll see more of our collaborations with her soon. To see a full portfolio of her work check out: http://www.alliemullin.com/. Need a great person to do amazing photos for you? Allie Mullin‘s your gal.

Like Bearden, we have a deep connection to the material that we find. They – our “scraps” – propel our process by giving us a foundation for a hypothesis on behavior, illuminating why we think a character has to move in a certain way, and even provoking the question, “Where the hell do we go from here?”

Our scraps can come from anywhere and go anywhere… a radio show lends us a structure for narration; a package from a parent sparks a strange dance about consumption; a TV show sets our head spinning about the larger whole – content, language, visuals, characters. And on top of this overwhelming volume of materials, our lives are constantly bleeding into our work (as they should be).

So we’d like to do a bit of show and tell. You can find some of these materials and texts on our Living with the Tiger page. Here’s a few scraps we found, how we stumbled upon them, and where they took us:

Radiolab: Jad Abumrad cuts his shows in an overlapping, circuitous, goofy style that seems to fit our desire to say everything at once. And these episodes got our brains focused on organisms, growth, and when the larger system starts to mirror the smaller parts that make it up: Emergence and Cities.

Moby-Dick: We read most of this out loud. No lie. It’s one of Akiva’s favorites, and the more we talked about what we wanted Living with the Tiger to feel like and say, the more he kept saying, “Melville already said all this.” To top it off, it’s amazingly strange. Melville is constantly abandoning the whale-chasing part to digress on a series of related topics. He writes a play, documents the citations of whales in literature, tells you everything you need to know about the color white, and, yes, includes a short chapter about a whale penis. Check out “texts” for a short selection.

I AM THE BEST! What’s next?: At some point, we started to think that our story was less about tigers than it was about the people who decide to keep them in their houses and back yards. And that took us right into the lap of Alexis de Tocqueville, who was writing about how unusual our country was in its young days. He talks about how living in this huge democracy makes Americans progress addicts, never staying with one thing very long. We always need to have the next and the best. More on that “texts” page.

Road Trip:  The idea of compulsive progress kept coming up, and circled back to discussions about Manifest Destiny. And the idea of the road trip arrived one day and then just never left. It’s a third of our show now. We’ve mined many sources here: On the Road, The Night of the Hunter, Lolita, Rabbit Run, Heart of Darkness, and Stephen Shore’s photography (among many others).

Animal Collective: Most recently, we needed to a way to show a woman’s euphoric relationship with her tiger. From its sound to its lyrics, Animal Collective’s “Bluish” nailed it in an almost eerie way.

Baudrillard: As we talked more about what drives desire in America, consumerism became a hot topic in rehearsal. Baudrillard’s The System of Objects was helpful for its framing, and in talking about our reliance on Wal-mart.

Space: When we’d finally gotten a rough draft of our script, we started thinking about where that story could take place. Gursky, Rockwell, and Dali have been the most helpful of late.

My name is Haymaker. I’m an institution addict: This journey started when we thought about why someone would want to own a tiger. We knew what it was like to feel exalted and then trapped, what it was like to love and to hurt the ones you loved, what it was like to be addicted to progress. Oh, DC. Thanks for letting us have a taste of large institutions at their largest.

The skinny is that we’re geeks who make plays. Well, “make” might not cover it; we kind of tear and rip and punch and paste and tape and glue and gum them together from bits of our lives, memories, dreams, that short story from back in junior high, a Stones’ song, or the way Kermit moved his arms. We even hijacked the idea you told us yesterday. 

People are hot on the terms “repurposing,” “creative reuse,” and “upcycling” in Durham. They all mean to take something that had an original purpose and redefine it to use in a new way. Our style is similar. We collect fragments, and through our collaboration with each other and with whomever else is in the room, we attempt to organize all the pieces into something cohesive. It’s sort of like turning a bunch of empty candy wrappers into an insulated lunch box.

Two weeks ago we held a 40-plus hour intensive workshop at the Durham Arts Council to hone our Living with the Tiger script. We were transforming eight months of research, scene writing, character building, plot creation, and visualization into a performance structure. We cut characters and created new ones. We merged scenes. We created whole dance numbers from someone’s humming of a Chevy commercial. We developed sections of the play based on a plastic bobblehead, and imagined the performance space as if it was the offspring of Salvador Dali and Norman Rockwell. We played and rewrote, experimented and built, struggled with our egos and our exhaustion, and in the end…we emerged with the skeleton of what most would call a script.

If you’re performance geeks like us, you might call this process “devising.” “To imagine, to compose, to suppose, to guess, to purpose, to mediate, to describe, to depict, to scheme, to contrive…” is the definition that we lifted from Complicite’s teachers guide to devising (see below for the link). We are drawn to this style because devising lends itself to the free use of different forms and techniques in the creation process– movement, visual art, and music. Basically, it makes it possible to use anything in the world to create a performance.

There are thousands of examples, many from groups who’ve been doing this for a lot longer than we have, but we used this one in rehearsal this week. It is not what you might think of as theater, but rather an excellent example of disparate fragments forming a whole, compelling performance piece. Our theory and hope is that, like Mr. Reich’s piece, what will emerge in October from our collaged texts of literature, news articles, songs, interviews and personal stories will be something complex and detailed and meaningful to us and to you.

For much more on “devising” theatre see: The Rude Mechs, Pig Iron Theater Company, Complicite, The Civilians, SITI Company, Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, The Debate Society, 500 Clown, Neo-Futurists, the TEAM and on and on…(the list is endless, really)

Also, Complicite’s teachers guide. A wonderful packet on devising.

Or, for more on creative reuse in Durham, stop by The Scrap Exchange.

Finally, an excellent blog post from Deborah Stein on the nature of Collaboration.

What’s with all the tigers? They’re all over our website, business cards, events…and America?

One night last fall, we saw an episode of a show called Fatal Attractions on Animal Planet that caught our attention. In October 2003, police were called to a Harlem housing project to check on a tip that there might be a dangerous animal living in a fifth-floor apartment belonging to one Antoine Yates. They were shocked to discover that Yates owned a 400-pound tiger he named Ming. After a day-long standoff with the tiger, police were able to remove Ming from the apartment by rappelling down the exterior of the building and shooting him with a tranquilizer gun through the window. Even though Ming had mauled him, triggering the series of events that would lead to both of their incarcerations, Yates told reporters he wasn’t worried about his injuries; “it’s the pain in my heart that’s really bothering me.”

“Whoa.” “No way.” “That’s crazy.” Those were our first reactions. Followed immediately by “We need to make a show about that.” And thus began our tiger obsession.

Surprisingly, we learned that Antoine Yates’ case wasn’t unique. Tigers are kept in private hands in America at a rate unrivaled through the rest of the world. In fact, almost twice as many tigers live in captivity in the United States as live in the wild world-wide. Some live in zoos and preserves with trained professionals, but a significant number live with “private owners” like Yates, or like this lady or like this guy – who may or may not be our neighbors.

With so many tigers in private hands, the question that became the basis for our performance was not simply why a person would own a tiger, but rather what it is about Americans that makes this desire to own dangerous predators so common?

The pioneer spirit that built America makes us one of the most resilient and creative peoples in the world. We live in a remarkable place where we are allowed to define our own success. But where’s the line between dream and delusion? And when does a single person’s pursuit of happiness become a menace to society? Or is it all just part of being an American?

Living with the Tiger runs from Oct. 20 – Nov. 5 at Manbites Dog Theater.

More info on Fatal Attractions and an additional interview with Antoine Yates.

Postcard design by Liza Donovan.

We had followed the right path: the right families, the right educations, the right internships, the right career paths at the right institutions in the right cities. So why didn’t we feel right?

Last summer, after a long day slogging through institutional politics, we were mid-drink and mid-complaint when a little shoulder-devil started poking at us. “What are you afraid of?” it said. “Just jump off the cliff!”

We started to say those words out loud to each other. And the more we talked, the more exciting that cliff edge looked. So we started to look at where we might want to land.

We had worked at the top of the game, in big-name companies in big cities. But again and again, the work that meant the most to us had been built with a small group over months of steady work for a wide audience. We wanted to clear away the clutter, and spend our time working that way.

But where could we do that? Not in the city where we lived: it loved bigness too much, and the rent was too damn high. Most of the other usual suspects were stuffed too full; we’d get lost underfoot.

Then the shoulder-devil came back. He pointed south. “We’ll bite,” we said. “What’s a Research Triangle?” “Only the third-fastest-growing combined statistical area in these United States, morons!” he shot back. We started to read all about Durham, North Carolina: overflowing with under-40s and retirees, educated to the gills, with cutting-edge chefs and restaurants, the prettiest minor league baseball stadium around, a world-class performing arts center, a great music scene, and rent so cheap it made our toes curl.

So we jumped.

Where: Manbites Dog Theater, Durham, NC

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