Haymaker

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.