Oya in the Air
Posted by Joy Meads on 2/18/2010
(Joy is the Literary Manager at Steppenwolf)
SPOILER ALERT: this post is intended for readers who have already seen In the Red and Brown Water and may spoil some surprises within the show. If you are able to attend In the Red and Brown Water, we ask that you read this post after you’ve seen the production.
In an email to the cast before a reading of In the Red and Brown Water for our staff, Tina (Landau, the director) described the play as being “three things at once: a story being told, a dance piece, and a piece of music.” The truth of that statement hit me forcefully the first time I saw a run of the show, and I think it’s one of the most exciting aspects of Tarell McCraney’s work. Of course, all playwrights communicate through image and sound to some extent, but Tarell builds these elements into the very foundation of his plays. Their effect isn’t decorative, nor is it employed sparingly to highlight key dramatic moments, but it is rather infused into each moment of the play.
Seeing Alvin Ailey’s Revelations at the age of 13 taught McCraney the communicative power of movement and image, and he describes it as a transformative experience (click here to see moments from the piece). A dancer himself, he studied with Ailey’s company and continues to regularly attend dance performance today. He described the influence of dance on his work: ”I love dance. I watch more dance than I do plays. I try to write how I see dance: in moves, in body language that doesn’t lie, in syncopation. Barely anything in the space but bodies that tell you all the story that you need.”
That last sentence could easily describe Tina Landau’s work. She’s famous for the care with which she sculpts the visual and aural landscapes of her plays: while preparing for The Brother/Sister Plays, she created an iTunes playlist of hundreds of songs and combed the internet for resonant images. This deep synchronicity in their approaches to theatre is easily seen in performance: Tina picks up words and images in the script and the changing music of the dialogue, and, using the Viewpoints technique that she helped to develop, works with the company to reflect in it the movement of the bodies on stage and the sounds they repeat.
One of the most striking examples of this is the use of breath in the play. Oya, the Yoruban orisha who lent her name to Oya in the play, is the god of wind and storms. Tarell reflects this fact in the play by making his Oya a lighting-fast sprinter, and associating her with breath and wind. He writes in the first chorus “Oya in the air Oya… / Say it sound like the wind… / Like a breeze… / A breeze over Oya.” In our production, the company breathes these words like breeze, surrounding an Oya who seems to float on air or water. We hear the heavy exhalation of her running, a sound that sounds like freedom, and helps us to viscerally understand how sprinting makes her feel. This feeling is echoed in the bright, exuberant uplift of her knees in the race. Because of these images and sounds, we experience her elation with her, and we also understand how painful it is to turn down The Man From State’s offer.
What did you think of the use of sound and movement in In the Red and Brown Water? Were there moments where the fusion of image and music helped deepen your experience of the play?