By WELCOME TO YUBA CITY director Quinn Bauriedel.

I had gotten to know Giovanni Fusetti, a master clown teacher from Italy, over the last few years — Geoff Sobelle, Trey Lyford and I brought him to Philadelphia in 2007 as we were beginning to work on the new version of MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES MACHINES.  We knew him only by reputation but he seemed like the perfect person to have around at the beginning of our creation.  He would help set the tone of the work, help develop the relationship between the three of us (how does a comic trio work exactly?) and help us re-awaken the clown spirit we knew would be part of the piece.  That encounter was short - 4 days - and we went quite far away from the characters we developed with him as the piece developed.  Yet his presence remained in the space well after the audience arrived on opening night.  Even 2 years later as we recently performed MACHINESX7 in New York, we spoke of those early rehearsals with Giovanni and how he helped us think about the trio and, perhaps more importantly, how the trio learned to deal with the 4th character, the machines themselves.

In 2008, I brought Giovanni back to Philadelphia to lead a workshop on the Neutral Mask and Clown.  In thinking about starting the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training, I wanted to watch and learn from Giovanni in a pedagogical setting.  What a light touch!  What a mastery he has of physical performance!  We became fast friends, sharing ideas about theatre, the body, politics, gardening and clown. 

Giovanni Fusetti

I really wanted to share the work with the rest of Pig Iron so I invited him back in 2009 to do what he did with me, Geoff and Trey on MACHINESX7.  Thus, for 2 weeks in May, Giovanni led the ensemble through clown boot camp en route to developing the characters and the world of WELCOME TO YUBA CITY.  Strangely, after 14 years of working together for some of us, we have never gone through a clown workshop all together.  It was illuminating to meet everyone's clowns - to recognize many of them from our long history together and also to be surprised by meeting many of them for the first time.

  

Pig Iron Associate Artistic Director Alex Torra in rehearsal.

Gradually, the very formal clown work morphed into discovering the spirit of Yuba City.  The red noses fell away but we were left with this wonderful array of characters and performance states that will certainly become a major part of the show later this summer. 

  

We met a band of small-town criminals and a slightly invisible jackalope.  We witnessed the birth of a chorus of cowboys and delighted in 3 pre-pubescent Yuba City kids recounting an accident that they think they saw.  We met the workers, the travelers, the eccentrics, the kids, the old people, the specific home-grown spice that makes the place tick.  We tried to push past the utter cliches that come with the material: a certain vocal twang, an All-American earnestness that has been a trope of our nation's stages for years and all the cultural references we have from TV of a mythical diner. Not an easy feat and one which we will have to keep in check throughout the remaining 6 weeks of development and rehearsal.  We are striving for something far wilder, far less logical and far more ridiculous than the plays that came before us.  We aim to scratch the itch of humanity and let loose the grip of reality.  We are eager to dive back into rehearsals, full-force, on July 20 to see what remains from our time with Giovanni and to see what new directions we will take with the material.

We thoughtlessly scheduled the first day of rehearsal for our DC tour of HELL MEETS HENRY HALFWAY for January 20, 2009.  After some momentary soul-searching, it was decided that the inauguration was not-to-be-missed.  Brazilian actress Bel Garcia from Compania dos Atores took this snap of us Americans watching the inauguration streamed live over the web onto the iMac we've borrowed from Headlong to run sound. 

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.