CURRENT PROJECTS
    - Performances
    - Workshops

MAY 4—14, 2009

ALICE: END OF DAZE RESIDENCY AND PERFORMANCES AT ARTUS STUDIO IN BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

ALICE: END OF DAZE was workshopped at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York City for three weeks in April—May 2008 and at StageWorks/Hudson in upstate New York, October 2007.

ALICE: END OF DAZE

a surreal musical fantasy adapted from Lewis Carroll's
"Through the Looking Glass"

conceived by director Beth Skinner and composer Edward Herbst

lighting and video design by
Drama Desk-winner Paul Clay

scenic design by Obie Award-winner Jun Maeda

mask and puppet design by WindRose Morris

additional video by Nico Herbst

costume design by Mari Andrejco

video operator: Chang-Jin Lee

performed by Mari Andrejco, Sara Bragdon, Emma Dweck, Edward Herbst & WindRose Morris

ARCTIC CIRCLE juxtaposes a “Magritte” explorer in the Arctic, shaking up the lives of individuals caught in a crisis of fast-disappearing cultures and languages. It explores power—in what is at once an expanding and shrinking world—as both an environmental and inner spiritual struggle.

René Magritte’s portrait of The Threatened Assassin shows one of his bowler-hatted dapper gentlemen, but in this painting he is holding a crude wooden club (while his very likeness is holding a fishing net), juxtaposing propriety and danger, possibly the ever-present threat of the ordinary, the danger lurking behind all the facade of civility. Another close likeness of him is listening to an old phonograph player, a world of disembodied sounds. A deathly pale woman lies lifeless, her mouth covered. The window looking out beyond the confines of his orderly room reveals the splendor and severe contours of reality, of cold mountains (and other lurking threats, of which he is unaware). In Arctic Circle, we worked with these images to develop a character we imagine as the father of Smilla in Peter Hoeg’s novel, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. The tragic amorous relationship between this Norwegian doctor and an Inuit woman, Smilla’s mother, triggered the dynamic between our two characters. Another thread running through the piece is the world of silkies, part seal, part woman, found in so many coastal fishing cultures. The doctor/arctic explorer brings with him the cacophony of languages which speak without invoking the true meaning of things, washing over the airwaves across continents. How does the explorer take leave of the explored? What is the legacy of this interaction?

The images, sounds, and events of SEA CHANGE are all in our lady’s head and body, though they also make up the environment we experience as her ocean cruise. The house musician arrives out of Magritte’s Voice of the Winds, and as far as the lady is concerned, he’s not there. The audience may experience him as a man creating a soundscape of her ocean voyage, but all she seems to be aware of is her immediate sensations, and he is just a mirage on the crests of the waves. Is he making the sounds or just her imagined personification of the ocean’s atmospheric effects? The numbing tasties of the dining room are more than she was expecting, and the visceral presence of her dining room companions, the likes of Magritte’s bodily fragments in Intermission, stimulate a different reaction than she was looking for. As in dreams and nightmares, disparate elements conjoin, match up in odd ways, creating vehicles to transport us where we need to go. A boat fashioned of everyday materials could not take her there, but one might have a chance to see through a spirit boat into some other world. Magritte also has winged gentlemen, inhabiting this world but contemplating ways to take flight to some kind of freedom from human logic, language, and limitations.

THE RIVER SWEPPERS, a site-specific performance which can be adapted for rivers or lakes, was initially performed on the Housatonic River, recently designated by the EPA as one of North America’s ten most endangered rivers. THE RIVER SWEEPERS was created for the Housatonic River Summer festival of 2004 and presented on the river in conjunction with the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. For this production Jun Maeda has built a huge rattan teradactyl puppet and four large bamboo rafts on which numerous tall mask characters flow downstream, along with trombones, trumpets and clarinet, playing newly composed music inspired by loon calls and other sounds from the natural environment.

On tour, a core group of Triple Shadow company members develops the performance event during a one-week residency with local performers: actors, dancers, and musicians from the community.

THE RIVER SWEEPERS—some kind of ancestors or ancient river dwellers— rafting down the river after eons of time, sweeping (as with landmines), cleansing, purifying, purging, reinvigorating, activating, and preparing the river for new life. The drama begins with a corporate guy paddling upstream—with some (inadvertent) results. The River Sweepers and prehistoric bird sense the danger and drift downstream to help a little. While strategic, big-time things must be done by human communities to restore the river, our enactment of a more personal, pleasurable process hopefully restores the Housatonic and other endangered bodies of water to new, inspiring places in our minds and hearts.

TIME AND SHADOW is a collaborative performance project bringing together three companies and complementary visions: Artus (Hungary), directed by Gábor Goda with media artist Ernst Süss, Toaca (Romania), directed by Nona Ciobanu with designer/media artist Iulian Baltatescu, and Triple Shadow (U.S.), directed by Beth Skinner with composer Edward Herbst and designer Jun Maeda. The first twenty-month of the project took place in Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico (February 2005 and March 2006), and in Budapest (October 2006), with intensive collaborative research and creative development between the three companies.

In October 2007 the three companies came together again for a two-week residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute for an intensive period of experimentation, rehearsal and development, and an opportunity to share the work-in-progress with North American audiences. Further development and touring in Europe, Mexico and the U.S. is anticipated for 2009-2010.

The TIME AND SHADOW PROJECT grows out of a series of exchanges carried out in 2003 during which time the principal artists from each company were able to meet the core artists of the other companies in their studios and performance spaces, and to broaden the conversation with other artists in each region. These encounters, developed in consultation with Philip Arnoult (Center for International Theatre Development), moved between the three countries: Triple Shadow and Artus to Bucharest, Triple Shadow and Toaca to Budapest, Toaca and Artus to the U.S. We got to know each other within the three environs, understanding the others’ artistic approaches and beginning to exchange ideas in a shared process of research. In each of these trips, we were able to visit a wide range of artists and intellectuals, presenters, festivals, arts centers and museums, and attend many performances and rehearsals, including those of the core participants: Artus, Toaca and Triple Shadow.

The collaboration has involved two artistic directors from each company plus four Artus performers, two Toaca performers, and two Triple Shadow performers, along with Triple Shadow designer Jun Maeda. There were public showings of our collaborative research and experimentation in San Cristobal and Palenque, as part of a larger process of exchange and sharing through three weeks of artistic activities with local artists. In October 2006 Triple Shadow composer Edward Herbst spent three weeks in Budapest collaborating with Artus, composing a soundscape for their production based on the Chiapas residency, Sztélé, and rehearsing with the company. In October 2007 the three companies came together again for a TIME AND SHADOW PROJECT two-week residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute for an intensive period of experimentation, rehearsal and development, and an opportunity to share the work-in-progress with North American audiences. Further development and touring in Europe, Mexico and the U.S. is anticipated for 2008-2009.

Current Workshops

Skinner Releasing Technique
Movement Workshops
We're all born dancers, with innate coordination and animal-like grace. As time goes by, we tend to lose touch with this natural ease. Muscles tense unnecessarily, and our alignment goes askew. The Skinner Releasing Technique™ (SRT) lets us practice letting go: letting go of stress, letting go of unnecessary holding in our body, letting go of preconceptions about what is supposed to happen, letting go of fear of awkwardness, letting go of the belief that we don't have the right body for dancing. We let go of habitual holding patterns and habitual ways of thinking in order to let something new happen. Eventually, we find energy and power. We rediscover our natural alignment, improve strength and flexibility, and awaken creativity and spontaneity. It's a dance class for professionals as well as everybody else.

Some parts of an SRT class involve 'deep states,' where our brain waves slow down and we journey just below conscious level. This mode is similar to meditation: the senses are heightened and we're open to learning. Moving from this state, or even just visualizing movement, can lead to astonishing transformations. People find themselves moving in ways entirely new for them, that they didn't think themselves capable of, often with an ease they didn't think possible. The class atmosphere is gentle, interweaving guided imagery with a variety of musical environments. Balance is found by expanding multi-directionally. (From the Skinner Releasing Web Site.)

Sensations of Tone
Our voice workshops, geared for dancers and actors as well as musicians, explore internal and external manifestations of sound. The approach reflects Indonesian, Japanese, Indian, Tibetan-Mongolian, and experimental Euro-American sources, but the work is distilled into a more primal process of how we allow qualities to enter us and how we enter into things. The technique is one of kinesthetics and perception, listening for internal qualities and energies which are then embodied in sound vibrations, shaped by spatial orientation and collaborative dynamics. Drawing from various traditions of music, theater and dance, we play with resonance and flows of energy within the body, multiphonics, overtone harmonics and sound contours, opening the door to perspectives on sound in terms of shape, weight, density, heat and color. Sound ultimately becomes a window through which we perceive subtler qualities of thought, spirit, space and time.

Music, Masks and Dance of Bali, Indonesia
Presentation/workshop for Children
A live demonstration and discussion of masks, dance, and music of Bali, Indonesia. In addition to gamelan music played on gongs, cymbals, chimes and drums, we perform songs and vocal styles of the dance and theater traditions of Bali. We also present our own original masks and discuss how to make masks and create one's own characters and movement. Both children and adults are welcome.

Improvisation in Balinese Performance Practice
We offer a lecture demonstration on the aesthetics of Balinese music-dance-theater as well as the underlying creative, generative processes of how these forms are continually replenished, drawing from intuitive, spiritual traditions. The great degree of collaborative improvisation and use of comedy and farce liken Balinese theater in many ways to commedia dell'arte.

Performers agree upon only the barest details of plot beforehand, and the dialogue (sung or spoken stylistically) is composed in performance, drawing freely from classical literary and musical sources. Linking of voice and movement with instrumental music is also a virtuoso, often extemporaneous task, unified by essential qualities of characterization. This lecture demonstration deals with how poetic and musical forms are used improvisationally within performance in keeping with dramatic characterization. Drawing from themes explored in Herbst’s book, VOICES IN BALI: Energies and Perceptions in Vocal Music and Dance Theater, the presentation also demonstrates Balinese vocal techniques for “the movement of sound through the body,” creating a wide range of voices and textural qualities.