Or: HOW DID SOME GUY FROM STOCKHOLM NAMED DANIEL (DAH-nyul) RUDHOLM (RUDE-home) MEET PIG IRON AND MAKE SWEET BY AND BY?

By Dito van Reigersberg

 INGREDIENTS-

One (1) chance encounter, eight years ago, between Slava and Pig Iron in Potsdam, Germany

One (1) bunch of muscular Swedes who train in a hardcore, running-and-singing, you-can't-stop-till-we-say-you-can kind of a way, plus

One (1) bunch of Americans from Philly who love music but who hadn't really dared to connect their acting and their singing before, finely minced

Four (4) pounds of folk melodies sung in three-part harmony that get stuck in your head

Two (2) level cups of ensemble training

One (1) tablespoon of mutual admiration

Four (4) medium cloves of serendipity

One (1) heaping teaspoon of Slavic essence, to taste

Begin with Fabrik, a German dance-theatre company; after seeing both Slava and Pig Iron at the Edinburgh Fringe, they will mix both companies together throroughly for a week. Take the Philly bunch and allow the bunch of muscular Swedes slowly “kick their asses” during the weeklong workshop exchange in 2000. Then as you allow both bunches to rest, slowly introduce a performance of GENTLEMEN VOLUNTEERS that the Swedes admire. Allow both bunches to separate while contemplating what to do together. Fold in visa complications and the time-space continuum between Stockholm and Philly. As you let both bunches marinate in their own juices for several years, they will continue using each others' exercises in warm-ups, creation periods, and workshops of their own. The separated dough will begin to rise. Occasional visits take place. A collaboration will become inevitable after 8 years.

Helpful hint: If you are American, do not make offhand jokes about ABBA or Ikea. It will imperil all communication and the Swedish-American soufflé will surely collapse. Also: do not offer a cheesesteak to a Swede of otherwise iron-clad constitution; s/he will surely experience intestinal distress.

If you are Swedish, offer to host meatball parties. Introduce lingonberry jam. The Americans' attention will be captured immediately.

Carefully peel back the possible layers of shared interest. A space musical? An adaptation of PEER GYNT? A Brecht play? The title character in MOTHER COURAGE is certainly Swedish. After a lot of simmering, an idea about a one-man show will rise to the top. A show that can capitalize on both the folk-music tradition of Slava and the unusual playmaking methods of Pig Iron. A show about a Swedish-American labor organizer and songwriter named Joe Hill.

Your SWEET BY AND BY is almost ready. Allow Daniel Rudholm to bring harmonica, accordion, banjo, and his voice into the mix, with the added spice of a loop pedal. He will offer up the story of his own great-grandfather Georg (YAY-org) as a nice pairing to the story of Joe Hill. He will craft delicate animation sequences as garnish. Keep the lid on until the end of August. Do not overcook.

Rio de Janeiro, Day 5:

Spotty notes from today:
Enrique begins with stretches, lunges, a tiny bit of yoga. All the warm ups I've been a part of, from Lecoq to Pig Iron to New Paradise, are always about warming up the center: the pelvis in space, a reminder of where it can go, and how breath connects to it. Different practitioners want different states from the pelvis, different “ready positions,” but there's no way around warming up that incontrovertible physical center. Enrique leads this simply and clearly.

“Start to walk,” says Enrique, “but as a fish.” He speaks about seeing without focusing on any particular thing - I'm reminded of David Brick's walking dances, his interest in global awareness and sensation. It's a good metaphor for getting at this quality of attention.

 
The walks become exercises in spatial composition for the actors.

Then Enrique proposes an assignment: “Five flashes.” Dito and I are flabbergasted that Compania has evolved an exercise so very similar to one of our touchstones for playmaking: We call it “Five frames” - reducing a story to five pictures as a way of clarifying and simplifying what we've created.

But Enrique has a wildly different purpose in mind. He asks us to think about the experimental films of Eisenstein (which I've heard of, but never seen, I need to admit). His five flashes are going to be etudes in non-narrative storytelling. Rather than use this vocabulary to clarify something, he asks us to juxtapose disassociated images which, next to each other, can make a new, and surprising, meaning. “The inspiration,” he says, “is the Chinese ideogram: Put together 'sun' and 'tree' to make 'sun going down' or 'sunset.'” He asks for “non-continuous editing” - “not young to old.”

“It is a free theme,” he says, “but make sure there is something incomplete about each piece.”

Now this is the exact opposite of how we'd run an exercise like this. Our injunction would be to make sure there is a beginning, middle, end - to find a completeness as creators.

And the actors break up to feverishly make their small scenes. The funny thing is how narrative they turn out, despite our efforts to make them intuitive and non-continuous.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 *

At the end of the day, so many questions. “Is this what you actually do in rehearsal?” “No, it's more of a training; it depends what we're researching, that determines what we do in rehearsal.”

I am particularly interested in when they evaluate what they've generated. Right away? Or after a few weeks? The “three brains” exercises I was doing, I'm pretty quick about putting the feedback loop in place: not that, not that, that is a bit closer. With today's work, we begin with a very open spirit, and at the end of the day each individual speaks about one image from the day that he or she remembered.

A difficult question, and again one that is so individual to an artist, to a company- what's the proper time to start separating right from wrong in generative work? Okada, the Japanese director I observed in July, he is even quicker to bring down the boom than I usually am: he halts his actors after one sentence, one gesture, asking them to do it again, differently, with a microscopic attention to detail that I also admire. Today's energy with Enrique was extremely open and exploratory, with very little judgment. For Pig Iron, this shifts too: part of collaborating with Joe Chaikin or David Brick means trying on different rhythms of generating material, letting the performers sit longer in improvisations, move through several chapters of creating scenes. Finding their own way out of failure.

*

After the day we head out to a nearby Portuguese restaurant. Suddenly we find our days with the Compania have come to an end. We're surprised at how intense the connection felt. We all vow to find a way to continue the conversation, to come down to Rio or up to the States to work on something together, something more substantial, maybe for a couple of weeks…..

Good news - Lia Rodrigues, who has been so difficult to contact, has gotten in touch. She'll pick us up at our guesthouse at 830am to take us to the favela where she works.

A few things I didn't have time to note down or work into the flow:

Kites. Tiny kites dot the sky. A national pasttime? These kites are quite small and flimsy, and the kids who fly them slice them through the air on short strings rather than let them soar high up.

 *

I've exposed Dito's alter ego as the Most Famous Drag Queen in Philadelphia. Much you-tubing of Martha Graham Cracker's exploits at the Pig Iron cabaret. One night, Cesar takes us to the finals — the finals! — of a drag competition (youth category) at “Le Boy… by Gilles,” a club downtown. Men, $10. Women, $100 to get in. To our surprise, the event is sparsely attended, and the four contestants are uniformly unimpressive.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

Hearing about Enrique's early training in Paris at the Decroux school. Eating at a neighborhood Japanese restaurant exactly like Dojo once was in the East Village: cheap and only nominally Japanese, with hearty miso soup supercharged with thick slices of vegetable.

 *

The Bar do Mineiro in Santa Teresa. A “gathering place for artists and intellectuals,” according to the photocopy of Lonely Planet pasted on the wall. The owner is a mad collector, of model streetcars, large cast iron pots, that kind of thing. Former gardener.

  

 *

A visit to the Museum of Art Brut, with its focus on “naive”, self-taught painters, at the base of the iconic Corvacado statue. A large international group is there, with badges, from all over the world. “What's the conference?” I ask. “International Association of Semi-Conductor Engineers.” Oh. I guess they like to go see naive art, too, in their spare time.

  

*
An exchange between Cesar and me about something our companies share: an interest in putting the process on stage, making the art-maker a character — both of us have these plays that are both rehearsal and play, the seams show. “This way,” Cesar says, “it's more honest.” Exacty, I nod.

  

  

Day 4 in Rio de Janeiro…

Today as we walked down from Santa Teresa to Compania dos Atores for the workshop, we were intercepted by Selarón. The eccentric and mustachio'ed artist was sitting on the steps (his steps, the “colorful stairs” those tourists were looking for) that lead down to Lapa. He saw we weren't Brazilian and beckoned us over.

He opened a portfolio of dog-eared, laminated press clippings. U2 on the steps. Snoop Dog on the steps (Or “Snoopy dog dog”). Anthony Anderson. He waves us off the street into his small studio. Shows us a studio full of paintings, mostly on ceramic tile. Mostly black lined caricatures - often there are self-portraits of Selarón, and pregnant women from the favelas (slums) are also celebrated.

We are admiring but not interested to buy, so he bustles us back out onto the street gruffly. He hands us some literature, which I later found on the web here.

We begin the day watching videos from Compania dos Atores' history. They have a couple of video reels (one is on VHS) to show. We meet Enrique Diaz, who is very sharp and energetic; we talk about viewpoints. About five years ago, Enrique started studying with Anne Bogart and SITI Company and found that the viewpoints techniques brought his existing vocabulary into focus. I give him my point of view: that I love the idea of viewpoints, but that every time I've tried to work with them in rehearsal I end up with pretentious and self-congratulatory material that has to be cut. I've liked the SITI company work I've seen, but something, I say, has to be missing from the viewpoints training since it generates so many bad ideas from the younger companies I've seen. We spar a little on this point, and I concede that the TEAM, a company we met at the Orchard Project, does use viewpoints and is a killer ensemble of writers and performers.

Compania's video reel was pretty great stuff, though heavily edited. You can tell the work is robust and physical, and it looks busy to me, full of events and very unashamed to use symbols. We were really taken with this one early work, A Bau a Qu, based on a story by Borges, which was full of puppeting other people and had a very dense physical score. One of their most popular pieces, Melodrama, which they still tour, featured hilarious costumes (by Marcelo Olinto), and hilarious “American” melodramatic characters. Beautiful. A more recent one features a crazy mariachi band fronted by Cesar (a master of the silly dance, it appears - something we talked about yesterday, about Joe Chaikin's work with us on Shuteye and his interest in “silly dances”). This was a piece about money-lending (this banner of money is from that show - their set reminds me of the Mexican/Argentine artist Maximo Gonsales who makes dioramas out of money).

We talked about their methods, and, like Pig Iron, they change radically depending on the piece. Sometimes their sources are literary, other times it is stylistic investigation. Sometimes they commission work from a writer and sometimes there is a dramaturgical team. The focus, as with Pig Iron, is on the actor-creator.

And something which really sticks: They talk about Ensaio.Hamlet, the Hamlet-deconstruction they are currently touring. The questions they ask are very familiar, and they put the questions into the work itself. Take Ophelia. Bel Garcia, the actress, begins Ensaio.Hamlet explaining the audience that Ophelia is a teenager and she doesn't know anything about teenagers; she has a teenage son, and she doesn't want to think about teenagers, and this, they said, was the “way in” to understanding Hamlet - through Ophelia.

Cesar talks about the ghost, Hamlet's father's ghost. And the question they ask: “What is a ghost? What is immaterial?” “What would Shakespeare think of a ghost if we were alive today?” Dito and I nod vigorously, vigorously — these are the kinds of questions we ask, too. Never about how to respect the classic material, but how to make it alive today, now; how to cut out everything that isn't going to hit, as theater, today.

From the right: Bel Garcia and Enrique Diaz in the studio

  

Then Dito and I led a workshop for about 2 hours; we went back and forth last night on how to get anything at all accomplished in such a short time. This can be so hard to pitch correctly - you don't want to do stuff which is too “beginner,” but at the same time it's so hard to dive into the later vocabulary without all the other concepts present as a base.

We thought about working with these concepts of “ordinary and extraordinary,” vocabulary which formed the basis of Shut Eye and then came back in other ways for Pay Up and Love Unpunished. But in the end we discarded that idea - having just arrived in Brazil 3 days ago, we felt that our sense of the “ordinary” here was going to be distorted. This stuff is pretty culturally specific - how close you can stand to a stranger, where you look when you pay for something. A recent trip to Japan double-underlined this for me (I kept trying to hand money over when the salesperson keeps trying to catch the money in a small tray… a comic dance).

So we decided to attack the “Three Brains” work we explored to dive into Chekhov Lizardbrain. We explained that this vocabulary is still very much an inquiry and a provocation - we tried to put all 3 “brainstates” into Chekhov Lizardbrain but ended up following a side-story about a character inspired by Temple Grandin (and Solyony from Three Sisters). But I still am in love with the acting research into these simple states.

We only were able to get through a couple of exercises - taking the actors through “lizardbrain” and “dogbrain.” This work is all about failure, trying many things that don't work in the search for something which does.

Enrique and I have a small back-and-forth about “emotion”; the dogbrain, I'm explaining, has one emotion at a time, and I take these actors through a gamut of emotions as part of the exercise. Enrique distrusts this word, “emotion”; with so much fake emotion, don't we need to wait for something real to arrive? For the purposes of the exercise, I say, “real emotion” doesn't interest me. It's ok if there are “signals” and “fakes” - right now the focus is on rhythm, this rhythm of switching which comes from the dogbrain. Going completely from one to the other.

This is such a fascinating exchange, I wish we had more time to explore it. It's something that every theatrical style has to grapple with: what's an emotion? What's a real emotion? Does it matter if I really “feel it”?

Enrique tells me that he focuses on “tasks” much more than emotions, because this word seems like such a trap to him. Which makes sense to me; but I've become suspicious of tasks, myself, as a basis for acting training, because I want people to be able to create in stillness, in quiet, with the minimum. But it's funny, looking at the videos of Compania's work, I now see how many tasks were in there, and they were beautiful, musical things.

In the end, there was provocation, confusion, and some success at the first workshop. The best you can hope for in 2 hours I would say.

I leave the Compania's studio thinking hard about “the artistic project” versus “taste.” I've had a couple of opportunities this summer to query people about what their artistic project is - I recently spent a couple of confounding and delightful weeks in Japan with Toshiki Okada, a playwright-choreographer who pairs a very specific kind of text with a very unusual, “unconscious” and awkward style of movement.

There were so many things in his work that seemed cohesive to me, but when I asked him about certain details, he insisted “That's not important.” That is, the artistic project, what he's trying to do, that's one thing - the other stuff is just to his taste. It's not necessary to the work.

But it's funny - in thinking about Enrique speaking about his work, about Dito and me talking about Pig Iron - for the first time I'm starting to see how we both know and don't know how our work hits the world. Or how the stuff we think of as ornament may in fact be what is most salient to our audience. (I suppose an obvious example is how baffled I would be talking to people who admired the “writing” in Pig Iron's early work, when the writing, the words people said, was the last thing on our minds when we made those pieces).

More on this another time.