Actors and Overhead Projectors
Posted by Seth Bockley on 3/03/2010
(Seth is co-director and co-deviser with Devon de Mayo on The Twins Would Like To Say, part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)
In the above photo, Brandon is manipulating a puppet on an overhead projector as Kasey looks on, laughing, and Millie diligently watches the screen. It is a literally “behind-the-scenes” look at Dog & Pony’s The Twins Would Like To Say, which I co-directed and co-wrote with Devon de Mayo, and which opened on Sunday.
Kasey prepares the next puppet to enter the frame, while Brandon aligns his body to carefully lift a cutout heart, as Millie gets ready for a transition to blackout which she accomplishes with two pieces of cardboard.
It’s a dance of paper and light, made with hands and eyes in rigorous synchronicity.
We’ve been building The Twins Would Like To Say since October. In that time, Millie has been introduced to this shadow medium and to puppetry for the first time. She is a pro now. I love that her eyes are sparkling with concentration, and how she wears a formal sweater and dress, and done-up hair, seemingly at odds with her job as puppet technician. In fact, she’s animating the supernatural thriller The Pugilist (a shadow puppet show-within-our-show) in the few minutes between her intensely emotional scenes as Gloria, the mother of twin authors June and Jennifer.
This image represents the hidden “Twins” I know: the five-month collaborative journey that has asked actors to be dancers, designers to be authors, choreographers to work with text and disco lights. Devon and I believe in collaboration as a procedure and philosophy… asking all our artists to search for the best ways to tell this story. We also believe in total theater for an audience, in immersion, as well as the simple visual or textual gesture distilled from the effort of many minds and hearts.
This collaborative process reflects, I think, our approach to the story itself - we offer itinerant audiences the opportunity to choose their own path through the room in order to see the troubled silent identical twins June and Jennifer from many perspectives - their parents, psychiatrist, school bullies. The Twins, in their journeys through adolescence, throw everyone around them into activity and chaos.
After our final preview, an audience member said to me:”“This is the first theater I’ve seen in a while.” His buddy laughed at him: “What do you mean?” He responded, “This wasn’t trying to be a film or something. It was a live event. It couldn’t be anything but theater.”
That’s a great affirmation of the work Millie’s doing. Crouching behind a screen in full dress and makeup, ready to swipe a sheet of cardboard across the projector to artfully transition to the scene where the tiny puppet dog undergoes surgery - yes, that’s live theater, and couldn’t be anything but theater.
Over the next two months, Millie and Kasey and Brandon will perform The Pugilist 36 more times. Over that span, they’ll get damn good at that shadow show. I love to watch it from an audience’s perspective, seated on the risers. But just one more time I’d like to wander behind the screen and see these actors sweat as they shuffle a tiny paper doctor toward his strange and tragic destiny.