Orchard Project - We've Never Been So Sappy!

We just got back from developing INBSH at The Orchard Project in Hunter, NY. We left the day after the public showing of the work we did (Scenes 1, 3, and 5) with the University of Texas Musical Theatre Initiative that was thoroughly and beautifully blogged by UT dramaturg Christina Gutierrez (thank you!). She just sent me all of the pictures from the 2 weeks at UT and they really do tell the story of that amazing workshop! Orchard Project - yes, so Kirk, Lana, Thomas and Peter Stopschinski flew to Newark, rented a car and drove to Hunter without incident. We arrived and were ushered immediately into a play reading, which was really amazing - the experience of it, the play itself. Annie Baker wrote it, Patch and Mike performed it along with our assigned Core Company Member, Sean Cummings - who at the age of 19, (yup - twice as old, ouch) already knows more jokes than anyone alive. I'm not sure what we did next, but I think a game of mafia probably ensued and everyone learned that Kirk, the great obfuscator, should be killed early if the townspeople want a chance a survival.

WORK TIME
The next morning we took up residence in the old cinema on main street - our dedicated work space - and met to decide what to present for the workshop production in September. We only have enough money left on the project to do it exactly as we did December '08 - 7 rehearsal days and 2 weeks of performance. Then it's all over, unless more money drops from the sky. This means, for all of us, that we have to walk in with performance booths conceived/built, script done, music done, overhead design done and directing as done as it can be without bodies. Kirk came with a draft of the ending. It used to end with a long song by the father (now the mother, Julie) about the "3 possible ways this could end" - I'm sorry to see that song go because it brought a really great gospel feel into the piece, but happy to have an ending that delivers so much great writing and music, and another dance number(!).

First - we read the draft of the piece, gave Kirk some time to keep writing on it, and came back later that day to talk about Annabellee's story - the gender politics of the piece, and some fairly funny plot points created by a land conflict between Julie & Brutus, the magical properties of the rope that Julie uses to tie Jeremy to the lion, and the unexpected demise of one of the characters. Over the next few days, Kirk worked on the draft and wrote a new first scene, "Annabelle's Dream," to complicate her story.

Peter kicked his time off by teaching us the word dongle and making the mountain lion song - death metal, yes. In all, he wrote & recorded 5 songs. Thomas and I climbed a small mountain, created a new layout for the room, brainstormed performance booths (they will be outside now and before the show, we think), story-boarded the entire play, and created a new dance for the lion hunt. Honestly, we could not have accomplished this much on the project anywhere else.

Our open rehearsal/presentation on Friday included the new first scene "Annabelle's Dream" which was performed by Core Company members Starry and Alisa (thank you!); the lion hunt dance which was performed by me, Thomas and Core Company members Starry and Tyler (thank you!); and the Julie vs. Brutus scene, which is a song about the "western way of living" from their perspectives that jump-cuts to Annabellee setting her trap for the lion, performed by Peter, Lana and the lovely Shana Gold. We were so ahead of the game, we really didn't know what to do with ourselves Saturday. Thankfully, we had a long brunch meeting about the OPs future, we led a master class with the Core Company on "collaborating alone" and we tried to help them with the devised piece they've been assigned to make. And the rest of the day was goodbyes. We ended the day doing a full (and wine-sloppy) recording of the entire play so Peter could make a demo with all of the songs (demos too). Big thanks to Sarah and Meg who dropped in just in time to read.

In the end, we still all agree that our dream for this piece would be a ghost-town tour of America. A full day of exploring performance booths throughout the town with scenes happening throughout the day and into the night around a campfire. BYOBBQ, definitely. Very chautauqua - Charlotte, you would be proud. But for now, we want to hang on to the booths in this theater format because they were so integral to the December workshop and offer an active route to audience engagement around the deeper themes of the piece.

PLAY TIME
Oh people, we were so lucky every single day to be hanging out with and seeing work from Mike Bartlett & Nick Gill from Royal Court, Louis Cancelmi, Shana Gold and Leila Buck from The Public, and the team the team the team - rumors of a trade are indeed true. We played mafia, wiffle ball, board games, we attended an AMAZING cabaret put on by the Core Compay and OP Staff, we made smores around a campfire in the rain, we played capture the flag and the other team CHEATED all night! We walked away winners in the joke contest (thanks, kirk), the dance-off (thanks, thomas) and a bizarrely overpopulated round of mafia (thanks lana & peter). Alex Harvey & John Gromada - we hung just enough to know we should know each other better. So sad we just got one night with Naked Angels... call me on my cel, MIKE JONEZ!!!

THANK YOU ORCHARD PROJECT!

the blur that was orchard project

from jill @ the team

games we played: euchre, wiffle ball, capture the flag, settlers of catan, and mafia.

there was also a prom. and we danced a lot.

and we made a bonfire and ate smores.

dear mom and dad i love summer camp please send me back next year i will get lots of work done and play very hard. i miss everyone so much already! there were fireflies and it was magical and i loved it. i loved it!

Dear Jill,

We are afraid we are afraid that sending you to camp every single summer will spoil you rotten. So on the off-years, we will be sending you to stay with your cousins in Texas. It's very affordable, but it is terribly hot. You are allowed to swim in Barton Springs as much as you want, and we have allotted enough cash for you to have at least one happy-hour margarita per day. If you want the queso and chips, you might have to get a job while you are there. Our cousins are very very poor, and can only give you a bicycle and a floor to sleep on, but they are hospitable and when they aren't fighting with each other, can be a load of fun, we promise. Your cousin Kirk will spoon-feed you only Mexican food. Lana agrees to attend every happy hour. Thomas swears he will teach you that b-boy dance. Peter promises to write you a song if you promise to sing it every time you see him. We hope this will make you happy. Much love, mom&dad

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Electric Signals Through the Line: I’ve Never Been So Happy Workshop Day 10

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin

Near the end of Friday’s final I’ve Never Been So Happy workshop day before the work-in-progress showing Saturday, we ran the Scene 1 vocals with the musicians. Those of us not in the trio of Western woman sat on the stage floor near where we’d be manipulating puppets to mark where we’d come in with background vocals. Since Erin was not at today’s workshop, we opted not to run the projectors. For the first time since we’ve had the musicians, I got to sit back and watch. And it was mesmerizing. Even without the crazy shadow puppets and accidental choreography of the puppeteers. When the song ended, there was a brief moment of silence that was strange to hear in a space usually so filled with voices and music. “That. Was. Amazing,” said Lana. “I’m ready to listen to ya’ll do it over and over again.” And that was the moment that I realized, work in progress or no, we’ve got something. Something that entertains even in a completely stripped down version and even after we’ve lived inside it for two weeks.

Anyone watching today’s live feed would have seen an excellent example of the balance we’ve searched for over the past ten days between a showing meant to inform future work on the project and a product we’re proud to show the family, friends, and funders that will be here tomorrow. We spent most of the day refining moments in all three scenes—marking entrances, sharpening choreography, practicing our developing puppetry skills, syncing ourselves with Peter and the musicians, and, just before we finished the day, figuring out the mechanics of the transitions. We began the day, however, with an experimental overhaul of Scene 1, projecting the rope images onto the trio’s long white skirts rather then the enormous cyc. No ladders, no physical coil of rope, no projected sunset image. Most importantly, no anxiety about having to completely re-stage the scene hours before our invited audience show up. The new configuration may wind up in the final showing, and it may not. For now, it’s enough to know that it’s an option.

Rather than waiting until I got home to post this last workshop day blog, I’m sitting alone in our work/performance space as I write. Ostensibly, this is so that this last installment before the showing can be posted by the morning and also ready to be printed as part of the display I’m setting up for the pre-show reception tomorrow. Somehow, though, it feels right to be doing this in the space that is still littered with our lengths of rope, extension cords, projector carts, baskets of puppets, music stands, stray rolls of gaff tape, stack of production posters and plastic toy horse that has become the tech/writers’ table mascot. The whole point of these two weeks has been finding a way, as my high school math teacher used to insist upon, to show our work. There will be no effort tomorrow to hide the bodies of the puppeteers, just as those of us who continually find ourselves completely incapable of recovering from the fall to the ground during the rope dance won’t try to pretty up our attempts to stand just because there’s an audience in the room. The pre-show reception will allow audience members to try out the cool looks we discovered with the projectors, and maybe even make some of their own. Thomas and Lana will fill the transitions between scenes with discussions of the process and explanations of some of the effects. The post show discussion will (hopefully!) include questions from live feed viewers typed into a chat box and read aloud. (Which means you can participate too! Go here to watch and chat at 4 p.m. central). In a work like this, the audience serves as the final collaborative layer, and, after today’s work, we’re ready to show them the ridiculous, beautiful, crazy, low-tech and highly amusing things we’ve found.

“It Turns Out it’s a Musical:” I’ve Never Been So Happy Workshop Day 9

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin

“I thought, ‘Oh, we could make a musical. Why couldn’t we?’ But I don’t know how to make a musical. So I sent an eight page monologue to my good friend Peter.’” Kirk told this story on the first day of the workshop last Monday, and then again on Tuesday’s KUT interview with John Aielli.  Over the course of the last nine days, that eight page monologue, which Kirk and Peter worked into a three part song in the days before the workshop started, has grown into Scene 1 of I’ve Never Been So Happy. Our process for the first scene is emblematic of our work as a whole on the project. Piece by piece, we’ve layered on singers, projections, choreography, and finally, on Thursday, an eight piece string ensemble. Turns out that eight page monologue makes for some pretty gorgeous music.

As I sat at the table I’ve commandeered as a desk next to the stage managers’ set up and watched Peter teach three scenes worth of his score to the musicians, it hit me: “Holy crap. We made a musical.” Even after being reminded of the scope of the piece on Tuesday at the podcast recording, having eight new faces in the room made the work somehow more real. To some degree, they felt like our first audience, except that this was an audience that was creating right along with us. We’d grown used to running scenes and dances to the pre-recorded mix tracks Peter played from his computer—the same ones you may have heard on Tuesday’s recording. One of the great things about working with recordings is that we can stop them at any point, start over, rewind, skip ahead, and generally use as tools to build scenes. It can be a bit difficult to feel any sense of responsibility or collaborative energy from a computer track. Not so with live musicians. We spent most of our time with the musicians running Scenes 3 and 1, syncing our choreography to their cues. I don’t think I’ve ever been more committed to wrapping myself with rope and flopping onto the floor or pulling puppets across a projector screen as I was when there were eight ridiculously talented musicians playing along with me. There’s generally a moment in every rehearsal process when it becomes clear that the product of all of the work is much greater than any individual contribution to it. Thursday was that moment for I’ve Never Been So Happy. The addition of the musicians brought a new perspective to the physical and vocal aesthetics we’ve been exploring.

All of this is not to say that the musicians’ playing stopped our own. We’re still working to solidify puppet and projector choreography in Scene 1, and spent some time in the afternoon experimenting with bubbles and a rubber bat. We reconfigured some of projector positions and solidified which puppeteer is responsible for which effect. We added two more ladders for the trio, reasoning that if one giant ladder shadow was good, three would be even better. In the last few moments of the day’s work, we tried on costumes left over from the December workshop. Tomorrow, our last full day before the showing, will bring work with the musicians on Scene 5/6, and probably a few nerves.  Of course, there’ll be a few new experiments as well.

I’ve Never Been So…Unleashed! I’ve Never Been So Happy Workshop Days 7 & 8

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas at Austin

Tuesday found all of us—students, Rude Mechs, UT faculty and staff, not to mention an Austin radio icon—stuffed into KUT’s Studio 1B recording a podcast for John Aielli’s “Aielli Unleashed” radio show. During our hour of airtime, we recorded musical selections from Scenes 1 and 3, Lana, Kirk, Thomas, and Peter talked about the evolution and shape of the project as a whole and our work over the past week and a half, and Peter played snippets of music from the December workshop production. For the majority us, Tuesday’s field trip to KUT represented the first time we’d been in a recording studio, and the experience of singing in acoustically dead space while gathered around a microphone and wearing headphones was a bit surreal. Rehearsing the pieces in the enormity of the Payne theatre, it can be difficult to separate our vocal work from the world of projections and crazy rope dances. Although it seems obvious that radio is all about sound, Tuesday’s recording allowed time for all of us to take a break from the sometimes frenetic pace of the workshop and truly live in the music for an hour.

Listening to tracks from the Rude Mechs’ previous work on the piece next to the songs we’ve been so focused on learning was another reminder of how our work on distinct moments of the musical will fit into I’ve Never Been So Happy as a whole. Peter has written music ranging from opera to Texas twang to heavy metal, woven together into a piece that seems to be cohesive because of it’s variety. You can listen to the podcast here. For those who won’t have the opportunity to see Saturday’s workshop, hearing Peter’s eclectic score will give a great indication of the multi-genre extravaganza that he and the Rude Mechs are creating. You’ll have to imagine the fifteen foot shadow puppets and spastic rope choreography for yourself, though.

After the taping, we headed back to the Payne and dove into some intensive work on Scenes 5 and 6, adding details like a soft shoe dance performed by prison inmates and interweaving moments of dialogue with an incredibly high operatic solo sung by UT sophomore Julia Guitri. It is in this scene that the Julie/Jeremy/ mountain lion plot meets the Brutus/ Annabellee/dachsunds story as Brutus plots to propose marriage between Jeremy and Annabellee. As usual, the trick here is staging something that is cohesive enough for those members of Saturday’s audience who will not have seen the December workshop to follow, while still creating something that will inform later work on the piece. Here especially, then, the combination of spoken dialogue and song reflects the various story threads that begin to meet at this point in the piece. In continuing to build the musical bed of this section, it became apparent that Julie’s world in this scene is mostly operatic, while Brutus’ is spoken. The sheriff, who interacts with both characters, speaks and dances. The combination of musical theatre elements comes to represent the colliding plot lines.

On Wednesday, our last day in the space without live musicians, we worked each of the three scenes we’ll be showing on Saturday, with a focus on bringing together some of the specific moments we’ve been working on separately. We ran Scene 3 in its entirety, practicing the transition that occurs mid-scene from dragging each other across the floor with lengths of rope to choral singing. We added projections to Scenes 5 and 6, re-staging the conversation between Brutus and Jeremy at the end of the scene so that the audience sees both the live actors’ versions of Jeremy and Brutus and their puppet incarnations simultaneously. We ran Scene 1 numerous times, incorporating new projector effects and sections of spoken dialogue in between the verses of the nine minute long song. The time crunch is becoming more apparent, but the scenes are coming together (I’ll resist the temptation to saddle you with yet another rope weaving metaphor here). Working all three of the scenes like this, it was a bit of a shock to realize how much ground we’ve covered in eight days. The blocking notes I’ve written in my script range from “twirl prism in front of projector bulb while pulling knot across screen” to “three hops backward, fall over, spastic kick,” to “slowly drip water onto Jeremy silhouette.” And I’m the dramaturg. Thursday’s addition of the musicians will provide another collaborative layer to the work, and with it, another step in the development process.

“Let’s Just Try It:” I’ve Never Been So Happy Workshop Day 6

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you,” I asked Jared Oberholtzer, one of the workshop stage managers during Monday’s I've Never Been So Happy work. While I could have been referring to any number of things about the workshop process, including the tray of cupcakes one of the actors brought in to share, as I asked the question I happened to have a length of rope tied around my waist, and I happened to be slowly turning in a circle as Jared wound the other end around me from head to toe. For the seventh time in an hour. Five minutes later, I’d be running full speed across the stage, waiting for Jared to jerk the rope still tied around my waist so that I could fall to the ground and have him slowly pull me back in. “Oh yeah,” he grinned. “It’s a stage manager’s revenge.”

Jared and I were only one of seven pairs of dancers who spent most of Monday wrapped in rope and refining the dance moves we’d experimented with last week. We learned how to avoid landing painfully on knots while falling over, how best to contort ourselves on the ground in order to have a prayer of getting back up, and—in the end—just how much this show relies on a cohesive ensemble. Both of the moments we worked on Monday—the rope dance of Scene 3 and the opening moments of Scene 1, required all of us on stage, quickly transitioning from dancing to singing to manipulating projections and setting up screens and rope piles. This is not a show that anyone, including the artistic and production staff, gets to sit around and watch. It’s a full-fledged Western carnival that requires some full body contact.

Of course, it’s not technically a “show” at all. It’s three scenes of a show. We found ourselves continually reminding each other on Monday that the goal of these two weeks is a work-in-progress showing. With all of the focus on refining details like just how many seconds of music we have to unravel ourselves from our ropes, the work can feel an awful lot like a rehearsal for a finished product rather than a step in a larger process. While we want to present something Saturday that will generate useful feedback, this workshop is not the place to answer large scale questions about the form and structure of I’ve Never Been So Happy as a whole. We’ve got four days left to workshop before the showing. The musicians will be here Thursday, which means that we really only have Tuesday and Wednesday left to experiment with moments and images before they have to be more or less set down and put to live music. With the time crunch comes the pressure to continually remember that we’re not rehearsing, we’re learning.

While retooling one of the projection moments near the end of Monday’s work, Erin finished a conversation with Lana and Thomas with “Let’s just try it. I’m done thinking today.” For the next four days, our discoveries will happen on our feet. That process will continue on Saturday; we’ll just have some extra eyes in the room to help us see them.

Knowing the Questions: I’ve Never Been So Happy Workshop Day 5

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin

For those of you who tuned in to Friday’s live feed at  the work you watched probably looked more like a traditional rehearsal than anything we’ve done so far. No one wrapped themselves in rope and flailed across the floor, for example. Instead, we combined the extensive vocal work that our trio of singers has been doing on “the hardest song in the history of songs” with the new puppets and projector effects Erin brought in, and attempted to run Scene 1. Almost immediately, however, we had to ask questions that felt natural and worth pursuing to us, but probably aren’t standard fare for rehearsals of, say, Death of a Salesman. Questions like “wait, where do we put the audience?”

Since this workshop, unlike the December Off Center workshop, uses a cyc as a giant projection screen in the first scene in order to play with extremes of scale and perspective, we’d originally imagined putting audience in the Payne house for the first scene and then potentially moving them onto the stage for Scenes 3, 5, and 6. This set up would have made the entirety of the Payne stage our all-purpose backstage area and the workspace for the projection team. Ideally, the singers and musicians would also have been behind the cyc, making the projections the only visual mode of storytelling for the whole of the first scene. We hit a snag in this plan when we realized that it’s basically impossible to hear singers who are trapped behind a floor to ceiling screen. So, we thought, move them in front of the screen. Simple, right? Well, not really. In that configuration, those of us working with projections and puppets couldn’t hear them. As the images on the screen illustrate and interpret the lyrics of the song, everything is timed (and tied) to words we couldn’t make out. So, if it doesn’t work to separate singers and projectionists, and the audience and the singers have to be on the same side of the cyc, the answer seemed to be, well, everyone on the stage.

So we moved the audience (played on Friday by Kirk, Lana, and Thomas) behind the cyc. With the projectors. And the musicians. And the singers. Watching Scene 1 at UT now means watching the images on the screen and the people who are making them, seeing live actors and their projected shadows, much like the December ’08 workshop production. There will be no “backstage” for Saturday’s showing because, in this workshop format, there is no backstage anyway. The work is part of the show. Just as it’s really interesting to watch someone wrapped in rope struggle (sometimes successfully) to stand up and dance, we discovered its also kinda fascinating to watch as tiny puppets and giant coils of rope become unexpectedly detailed and strikingly beautiful projection images. Projection artists became performers as well, executing intricate and precise choreography while moving puppets from screen to screen. This new seating configuration also means that the technical aesthetic of the show is readily visible. It seems important to the world of the musical to have the audience realize that we’re making this happen with old-fashioned overhead projectors, not cutting edge digital technology. Interestingly, what we wound up with on Friday was close to the look and feel of the December workshop. The experiment was in separating audience and performers. Turns out, keeping them together just works. I’ve Never Been So Happy now simultaneously tells the interwoven stories of Julie, Jeremy, Brutus, and Annabellee and the story of its own creation.

Of course, what we show on Saturday will not be the full musical. That will happen in April of 2010 at The Off Center. Lots of Friday’s conversations were about how the work we’ve done at UT will translate to a space without a giant proscenium and a 500 seat house. In the spirit of giving every idea the space to be a good one, we’re finding it possible to take full advantage of the Payne space. The answer to what that will mean for the future of the project isn’t clear, but at least we know the questions. 

“It’s Like The Music Man, But With Cursing:” I’ve Never Been So Happy Day 4

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin

You wouldn’t think flopping around on the floor wrapped from head to toe in rope could look beautiful. You wouldn’t think that a tiny curly haired actress could play a massive rancher named Brutus Baghand. You also probably wouldn’t think that the best way to stage inmates in a jail would be to put them in front of projected bars. As I learned during Thursday’s I’ve Never Been So Happy workshop, however, thwarting expectations like these makes for some pretty compelling storytelling.

The first half of the day was a continuation of Wednesday’s rope work, but this time with an eye toward nailing down sequences of steps. Or, in this case, sequences of spastic hops and waddles. Seven of us entirely wound ourselves in rope and tried our damndest to execute choreography. One of the moves involved falling to the floor, rolling onto our stomachs, and then attempting to get up and continue. All went as planned until the fall. After realizing just how differently the rope forced us to move, most of us found ourselves completely incapable of actually getting back onto our feet. As we wiggled, writhed, and generally struggled, Lana, UT dancer Lisa Kobdish and our stage management team laughed hysterically. Eventually, we all made it off stage, hopping triumphantly and trailing rope coils behind us. Rather than take the move out when we realized just how ridiculous it was, however, we made it the center of the dance, continuing to choreograph based on the assumption that only a few of us would actually make it back to our feet to finish the sequence.

As the workshop’s dramaturg, the last place I expected to find myself on Thursday afternoon was stuck on the floor of a UT dance studio trying to find a way to get my feet under me without using my hands or bending at the waist. And I really didn’t expect to (finally) stand up, hop off stage, and say, along with everyone around me, “That was awesome. Let’s do it again!” And yet, we did do it again. And again. And somehow, we knew it was worth chasing down. If Scene 1 is the “virtuosic DIY” world of Erin’s incredibly intricate and rickety projections, then Scene 3 is it’s stylistic and structural opposite. Here, beauty and meaning come from the gritty physicality of struggling bodies learning to work differently than they ever have before. I hope the audience will root for the performers tied up on the ground with the same enthusiasm I expect they’ll have for Scene 1’s enormous knot projected on the cyc.

After a break, which most of us spent removing rope splinters and downing cold water, we began work on Scenes 5 and 6. In these scenes, Jeremy’s mother Julie, desperately missing son, comes to the Sheriff’s office to file a missing person’s report. Simultaneously, Jeremy, newly severed from his lion, meets Brutus, father of Annabellee, who attempts to arrange a marriage between Jeremy and his daughter. (The Brutus/Annabellee story is the thread the Rude Mechs followed in their previous workshop last December. The Scene 5/6 moment is the first time the two story threads begin to weave themselves together.) The focus in this section is sound. The goal is to create an aural “bed” for the action of the scenes, comprised of amazingly high sustained operatic notes, twangy Hee-Haw beat-boxing, and the intermittent jangle of coins in an enormous money bag Brutus carries, to name but a few. Unexpected notes, like UT MFA actor Marlane Barnes voicing the surly and generally unpleasant Brutus, abound. Erin joined us with a few improvised projection images, like the jail inmates the audience will see from both the inside and the outside of their cell. The result was yet another method of storytelling, relying on an auditory landscape that was as much a playground as we found the rope work to be. It’s musical theatre with all of the strings showing.

We’ve now touched every scene we’ll be showing next Saturday. Now, the task becomes refining them—defining sharp and distinct moments, cleaning up images and sounds, and integrating everything we’ve discovered over the past few days. Inevitably, new discoveries will bring new questions, and new ways to stage our efforts to answer them.

Let’s Call It a “Person-Powered Slack Hammock:” I’ve Never Been So Happy Workshop Day 3

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin

Today’s work was about bodies. Well, bodies and rope, actually. After learning part of “Electric Signals,” Jeremy’s song from Scene Three, as a group and spending some time with Erin working through a more realized version of the visual score of scene 1, we hunkered down with giant coils of rope and, well, danced. Or something like it. The goal? To come up with what Kirk’s stage directions call Jeremy’s “ballet with a mountain lion.”

We started knowing only that we eventually wanted to capture the moment in which the knot that ties Jeremy to his lion breaks. To get there, we tied ourselves to each other, pulled each other across the floor in various poses and at various tempos, jumped rope, played an epic game of tug-of-war, painted a desert landscape with the rope’s coils and folds, and watched as two people created the biggest and slowest tumbleweed ever, made completely of rope and UT students. We crawled on the ground, rapelled off the Payne’s back wall, attempted to pick each other up using only strands of rope and accidentally created what we called a “person-powered slack hammock.” Patent pending soon, I’m sure. For now, I’ll leave it to your imaginations.

The projections created by Erin Meyer & Noel Gaulin will tell the majority of the I’ve Never Been So Happy story, freeing the dance work from having to carry or convey narrative. Structurally, the rope sequence is an extended riff on a single moment, immediately following the rapid-fire series of images and plot points of the first scene. We get to set story aside for a moment and explore the world we’ve created for ourselves, figuring out what weird combinations of bodies and rope are interesting to look at, and, of course, which are fun to make. The magic of this process is that when we were done, we realized we had a sequence that makes perfect sense as an expansion of a single moment and as a thread of our overall visual and aesthetic story. How? Well, maybe it had something to do with working collectively and on our feet. The rope work brought most of the company—including the singers that have been spending most of the workshop time learning what Lana has called “the hardest song in the history of songs”— together into a single room, working to illustrate a single moment, but, as with the projection work, from multiple perspectives. There was a noticeably high kinetic and creative energy in the room. Our ideas built off of each other, twining around themselves and knotting into something that resulted from bodies working and exploring together. Sure, what we created needs tweaking, but that just means more discovery. And possibly more swinging from the fly system. Always a good time.

This workshop picks one thread of the I’ve Never Been So Happy story. The Rude Mechs’ December workshop followed another. Eventually, they will be woven together into a single piece. Our rope work is yet another strand. We’re creating a visual and narrative playground for the audience, but realizing, as Erin noted about this kind of work, that “none of it is any good unless people care about what they’re building.” Judging from the gleeful comparison of rope burns and filthy rehearsal clothing that resulted from rolling around on the theatre floor after Wednesday’s work, I’d say we’re nailing it.

Desert Voodoo: I've Never Been So Happy Workshop Day 2

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin

Desert Voodoo

In the middle of constructing a giant laundry line suspended between two eighteen foot ladders and hung with everything from large cotton bloomers to silk slips to a feather boa with a giant plastic bird’s head at one end, during Tuesday’s I’ve Never Been So Happy workshop, we realized something about the nature of the world we’ve been creating. The gender politics of the West can be a bit hairy. In imagining the exclusively females space of Julie and her sisters in the first scene, we’d been drawn to the images of the wash lines we’d thought would make interesting alternative projection spaces. As conversation continued about the “world of women,” however, a few of us became uncomfortable with immediately associating women with washing. Later, we worked to create female silhouettes from plastic cowboy and Indian dolls, challenging the expectations we have of these toys and our gendered understanding of them. Part of the work of this process is finding interesting and nuanced ways to both challenge and embrace our understanding of the West and all of its implications.

By calling the time we spend in the UT Payne theatre a workshop rather than a rehearsal period, Rude Mechs has allowed space to make these kinds of discoveries. Sometimes, as with the ill-fated washing line, our playing with images, sounds, ideas, text, and movement leads us to near-immediate conclusions. Other times, however, the answers are not as immediately apparent. We spent a good portion of Tuesday afternoon lying on our backs on the Payne floor, watching as Erin riffed on projected images of landscape and the desert night sky created with dish soap, food coloring and India ink. Rather than immediately trying to ground the beautiful and provocative images in the text, we tested possibilities, learning how substances interact with each other on a projector, and what associations we have with them on a screen. Wednesday will bring a more structured storyboarding process, but the work we will do then will only be possible after Tuesday’s science experiments.

We played quite a bit on Tuesday with perspective and scale, using the Payne stage’s cyc as a giant projection screen that we could use to create a version of the knot that Julie and her sisters use to tie Jeremy to his lion that consumes the entirety of the space. In imagining the opening scene, we learned that perspective and audience placement will be crucial. The Rude Mechs’ December workshop in The Off Center began with a Western performance party (including costumes, margaritas and a talking bobcat) before the show that allowed the audience to participate in the art making process. The start of the show, the overture, made the transition from the interactive world of the performance party and the projected/choreographed world of the play nearly seamless. The University of Texas Payne Theater is a more or less traditional proscenium space leading us to experiment with outside the confines of The Off Center's black box. Maybe the audience's trip from the lobby to the house to the stage can lead them deeper and deeper into our version of the West. We hope our projected world will open into the live action of the piece, but the audience’s experience of the projected images will be the key to understanding the story.

All of our work for the past two days has been underscored by Peter Stopschinski and Lyn Koenning’s work with the singers who will voice Julie and her sisters in the first scene. As the week progresses, I look forward to integrating their haunting vocal work with our image work, and the choreography we’re developing with the ropes and ladders. As we continue to discover, in this West, everything’s tied.

I've Never Been So Happy UT Workshop, Day 1

A guest blog series by Christina Gutierrez, a Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin

This will be a blog about being tied to a mountain lion. And about the biggest knot in the whole world—a knot so big that there are cities tangled up in it. And about what happens when you combine a few Rude Mechs, 8 University of Texas at Austin students, 6 overhead projectors and some buckets full of watercolor paint and weird, tiny toys and puppets. And there’ll be some damn fine music in it too.

As the dramaturg for the latest workshop installment of I’ve Never Been So Happy, the Rude Mechs’ Western-themed carnival of a musical, I’ll be documenting our work on the piece and our experiments with the collaborative process. You can also catch a live video feed of the workshop from 1 to 6 p.m. Central, Monday-Friday.

Starting with the assumption that every idea can be a good one, and that the boundaries of traditional theatrical roles—acting, singing, dancing, writing, making music, directing, design, and dramaturgy—were made to be broken, we’ll be exploring the story of Jeremy Jessup, whose mother tied him to the last mountain lion in Texas to make him a man. Monday was the first day of the workshop, and we jumped headfirst into the West, spending an afternoon imagining and testing ways to bring the Texas desert onto the stage of UT’s B. Iden Payne theatre, where next Saturday’s work-in-progress showing will be held. Most of our work was on the first scene, in which Jeremy’s mother explains her plan to toughen him up. Co-director Lana Lesley and projection designer Erin Meyer are interested in the interaction between what they call the “virtuosic DIY” world of the projected puppets and landscapes and the live actors on stage. At the top of the show, the projections both reveal, and define Jeremy and Julie’s world. The shifting images on the screens let the audience see multiple perspectives at once and allow simple images, like coils of rope, completely consume the space of the theatre. Under the light of the projectors, the Payne house became a yellow and dusty desert space, a playground for the group of us interested in the difference (if there is one) between the authentic West and the portrayed West of TV and movies.

We created a giant Texan landscape on the Payne’s back wall, with a turquoise blue sky over red and yellow rolling hills and plains, across which we can track Jeremy’s (literal) growth from childhood to maturity. We projected a shadow of Erin’s silhouette over the house, making Julie Jessup loom over her son as she sets him on his journey. We used prisms to throw images of rope from the walls to the house to the floors, and came up with a way to show both the live and the shadow version of Jeremy pulled out his bedroom window by a huge coil of rope simultaneously.

I left the space yesterday after having my mind blown about six times. The process, like the projections, is turning the art making process upside down. And sideways. And inside out and backwards. Time to grab a piece of rope and hang on for the ride.