Shakespeare is briefly mentioned in this article, so we've decided to put a picture of him up here.

Four hundred years ago when Shakespeare was writing plays, he never had to wonder if his hard work would go to waste. Once he had completed a piece, his theater company began the production process without delay. Not only was the bard guaranteed the opportunity to see his finished work on stage, he also had a stable position with his theater. Fast-forward to theater production today: once a playwright finishes a piece, s/he must find a theater company to produce it (if s/he is lucky) and it is not uncommon for production of the play to take several years to yield a performance. Worse, many plays get stuck in workshop purgatory, where they are continually changed and edited but never actually make it through the production process.

Playwrights of Shakespeare’s time would be confused.

To address some of the problems with the lengthy production process, Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre is implementing an innovative new program, The Writer’s Room. Over the course of this spring and summer, playwright Wendy MacLeod will write a new play, which the Arden will immediately put into production; the play will be cast, rehearsed, and open for audiences by mid-July.

Edward Sobel, associate artistic director at the Arden, spearheaded The Writer’s Room and is leading the program. Alongside Sobel, Becky Wright serves as the program’s producer, acting as a liaison to both the playwright and the audience members who will be involved with the process.

“We want to provide production-oriented development that keeps the writer close to the play,” explains Sobel.

Playwright Wendy MacLeod (middle) sits between Arden folks Becky Wright and Edward Sobel in a workshop with audience members.

Sobel’s work has focused on the pitfalls of the production process for several years now. His work has been driven forward by conversations with writers about what is missing in the field and what their needs are. He finds that even when a show does make it through the hoops to get produced, many plays suffer from a condition Sobel brands “premiere-itis,” in which there is a great deal of pressure on the first production of a play but not as much artistic momentum for additional productions.

Through the support of the The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative and the Independence Foundation, the Arden was able to move forward with The Writer’s Room, which Sobel hopes will give playwrights a taste of a shorter production timeline and allow the company to experiment with how the playwright fits into the production process. The Writer’s Room will offer a sense of immediacy and instant feedback for the playwright in seeing his/her play performed for an audience.

MacLeod was indeed drawn to the program by the immediacy it promised. “What appealed to me about [The Writer’s Room] is that you know your play is going to see the light of day, which is very motivating,” she says. As a playwright-in-residence at Kenyon College, MacLeod is no stranger to the tedium of the production process; she was glad for the chance to avoid it.

Another big draw was the chance to sign on with a theater that was invested in following through with the show. The Arden’s commitment to seeing the play through the initial production process is original and indeed welcome throughout the theater community.

“It’s unusual for a theater company to commit to producing something before it’s written and before it’s been tested, so having it all happen in a single stretch of time like this is special,” comments Wright.

And part of that commitment is that MacLeod can enjoy being a part of the Arden community while she is in Philadelphia, allowing her to meet new people and learn about a new city.

“The relationship between artists and artistic institutions is a bit murky. The idea of doing a residency is to make the writer more a part of the community and also to be invested a little bit in the artistic community that is local to Philadelphia,” Sobel says.

For her part, MacLeod is grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the Philadelphia art scene. She arrived in the city just last month and has already seen eight plays and visited the art museum.

“I am excited to feel like I have an artistic home – just to feel like I belong to a theater, even for a limited time, is really great,” she says.

Besides offering a unique commitment to the show’s production and supplying the playwright with the opportunity for immediate trial and feedback, The Writer’s Room is also focused on the audience. A major goal of the program is to create greater transparency in the production process, thereby fostering deeper audience engagement with the work. To this end, a small group of people will receive “Inside the Writer’s Room” passes, which allow audience members a behind-the-scenes look at the whole production process, including meeting the playwright and crew, attending rehearsals, and seeing the finished play.

Sobel hopes that the insider pass “begins to create an audience that is more deeply engaged with the material and more willing to accept risk.” He wants pass-holders to hone in on learning to appreciate the artistic elements of the show, ultimately enriching their experience of theater.

Designing this aspect of the program was tricky, as the objective was making the audience feel included and thoroughly involved in the development process without overwhelming the rest of the crew.

“The goal is to give them a window into how the process actually works, rather than perform a process for them,” explains Wright.

It would be difficult to pull this off with too many audience members in the room at rehearsals, and the show would miss out on diverse opinions if the pass-holders were too similar. They have invited forty-six students, board members, and miscellaneous theater-goers to become pass-holders and enjoy the insider experience.

Though he may wax philosophical as he explains the many facets of the project, Sobel tries to keep the process in perspective and maintain fun and humor as his priorities (the play is a comedy, after all).  As he puts it, “It sounds very intellectual when you’re talking it all out, but the idea of it is to be fun; it’s in the summertime and we’re letting audience members into our room—we want it to be a good time.”

–Prarthana Jayaram

MacLeod’s play will debut July 5th–15th , 2012, at The Arden Theatre, 40 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia.

Random photo in Bangkok that Ellen took, has only tangential relation to the story in that the statue is in repose.

After backpacking on a shoestring through Morocco, Spain, Egypt, Vietnam, and Thailand, I had one night in Bangkok—and, like the song says, I was ready to make the world my oyster. I’d spent the last three months haggling self-righteously over fractions of a cent for the price of everything, shacking up with strangers (don’t worry, Mom, I’m talking about hostel dormitories) and trying not to think about what went into some of the dirt-cheap street food I slurped, all to make such an ambitious trip possible on my part-time yoga teacher/freelance writer’s salary. In the morning I would struggle to zip my bag and begin the 24+ hour journey back to Portland, Oegon, where I live with my parents. So I wanted to live it up for my last night as a world traveler. According to my Bangkok host Krishnan, a friend from college who moved there to teach English, there was only one place worthy of such an occasion—Bed Supperclub.

He wouldn’t go into details, but insisted that it would be an experience like no other on my trip. The Lonely Planet’s description was equally vague, something along the lines of “Bed Supperclub is like breakfast in bed, but without the breakfast or the beds.” When we got off the subway in Nana, one of Bangkok’s notorious sex districts known for it’s “entertainment plaza” of soapy massage parlors and ladyboy bars, I made Krishnan promise we weren’t going to a “ping pong pussy show.” (If you don’t know what that is . . . think about it.) But at the end of the block, past invitations from hustlers to just such a show, we came to Bed Supperclub, which was no naughty bar.

Inside the Bed Supperclub.

In fact, the place couldn’t have been more incongruous with its surroundings. The building was a large metal tube on stilts, shaped something like a bisected super-jet. The front was made entirely out of frosted glass windows, behind which pink and purple lights pulsated. A thumping beat grew louder as we walked up the ramp to the entrance, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was boarding a starship to a planet populated by a race of Euro-aliens. We were greeted by a pair of glamorous hosts who made sure that we weren’t defacing the image of the establishment by wearing flip-flops or t-shirts, and escorted behind a black curtain.

On the other side of the curtain was an ovular, all-white, two-level chamber, illuminated with icy blue lights and backlit with a pink glow. Each side of the room was lined with a long white daybeds, with the bar at one end and a DJ, clad in enormous headphones, bobbing his head at the other end. Other diners, undoubtedly all foreign, reclined on the couches sipping Technicolor cocktails and nibbling at plates of tiny foods. It was as if I had traveled from the streets of Bangkok to the set of Zoolander.

Now for some art.

We were encouraged to take our shoes off and slide onto the white settees. I shifted awkwardly on the pristine white couch, feeling self-conscious about my dirty feet and damp dress. I had cobbled together the closest approximation of a presentable outfit out of what remained of my traveling clothes, but the effort had all been for not because Krishnan and I had been splashed with water on the way there. It wasn’t a Thai forced-bathing ritual for dirty backpackers—the whole week I was in Bangkok was Songkran, the Thai new year during which Thais celebrate by drenching everyone who ventures into the street with buckets of water and super-soakers. Taking in the arctic expanse of white, from the glassy floor to the futuristic plastic furniture, I shivered—the air conditioning, cranked to a frigid 18 degrees Celsius, didn’t help.

We were greeted by our server, who most certainly had a day job as a male model. He handed us our menus, which were also pocket-sized glossy magazines in which the hippest DJs, Swedish home accessories, and local designers were profiled alongside ads for high-end plastic surgery clinics. The menu was in Thai baht, and I pretended that the prices were so shocking only because the exchange rate is 30 baht to a dollar, avoiding doing the calculation which would reveal that the entrees cost more than what I’d recently paid for two nights accommodations. Krishnan and I locked in our order for the set menu, a parade of foods with five first names swimming in reduction sauces, which would also give us free entry into the club after dinner. We sank bank into the plush pillows and waited for supper.

It turns out that Bed Supperclub is not just a restaurant, club, zine publishing house, and model employment agency, but also a performance art venue. Without any announcement, the pink lighting faded like sunset, the room grew dark, and the generic Euro-beat transitioned to a mournful flamenco ballad. We had no idea that we would be treated to a modern dance appetizer before our meal; the performance was part of In Bed With Pina, an ongoing tribute to the legendary choreographer Pina Bausch, performed nightly at Bed Supperclub this spring. The performance was choreographed by Jitti Chompee, the director of Thailand’s 18 Monkeys Dance Theatre, which is heavily inspired by the late artist.

More art.

A hush fell over the diners as dancers entered the room, lit only by candlelight. One female dancer’s arms were outstretched, with tea lights balancing precariously on them and wax melting down her arms. She strode with slow and powerful steps, followed by another dancer who carried a live potted plant in her arms. Three shirtless male dancers followed them, bustling and spinning around the female’s contained movements like lively wood sprites or fireflies. The male dancers lifted the females, whisking them about the space, and then stacked themselves into a wavering tower. One by one, they blew out the tea lights on the dancer’s arms, until the male dancers’ furious steps spun off into darkness and silence like dying embers. The performance seemed to reflect divergent elements of nature at nighttime—light and dark, buzzing with activity and hushed, steady and in-motion. Above all, the performance was a huge contrast to the vibe of Bed Supperclub, which was jarring as the lights came back up and our food arrived.

The last of Bed Supperclub’s many unpredictable iterations turned out to be massage parlor. As we munched on the crispy fried sea bass, tender beef cheek (which was like if someone made butter out of meat), salad of unidentifiable space vegetables, and wasabi ice cream, a middle-aged woman in a white robe climbed into bed with us and began massaging our necks and shoulders—because consuming delicious, expensive food while reclining on a bed and watching a dance performance can really wind you up.

Back to party time.

After our meal we crossed another black curtain to the club side of Bed, which was the mirror image of the restaurant but with black leather couches and a bigger bar. The Beautiful People started streaming in, including Thai girls wiggling around in obscenely short dresses while their doughy sexpat boyfriends bought them bottle service. After that meal I couldn’t afford the bar’s drinks, so I pretended to go out for a cigarette break and downed a two-dollar Long Island iced tea next to a ladyboy in a tight red dress at a car bar, or mobile stand which serves alcohol, across the street. Bed filled up with clubbers bouncing to the DJs who spun the perfect playlist of nostalgic early 00s hip-hop to get me ready to go back to America again. And that’s how, in a place where you can get a full meal on the street for a dollar, I experienced my first, and probably last, four-figure-dinner and massage-club-dance-theater-show.

–Ellen Freeman

The mysteries of sand. Photo by by ShaLeigh Comerford.

This spring (May 31–June 2), at the Live Arts Studio, we are launching our new performing arts program, Jumpstart, which showcases the work of six emerging artists based in the region. Choreographer and dancer Sahar Javedani left Iran with her family when she was a young child, and grew up in San Diego. Sahar recently moved to Philadelphia after seven years as a New York City-based choreographer, teacher, and arts administrator. At Jumpstart she will perform her solo work in the Middle, somewhat aggravated, which explores Sahar’s lifelong investigation of her Iranian heritage, both “the values that I embrace and those I’ve left behind coupled with the challenge of allegiance between these two cultures.” We caught up with the Sahar and asked her some questions about her life and work.

Live Arts: Why is your show title in the Middle, somewhat aggravated? What inspired the initial creation of this work?

Sahar Javedani: in the Middle, somewhat aggravated is definitely a play on the title of a work that William Forsythe created [In the middle, somewhat elevated] and describes my fascination and frustration with being raised between two cultures—Iran and America. The work examines my physical and emotional territories of allegiance—the values I uphold and those I’ve left behind. I believe the idea for this solo began brewing during my graduate work at CalArts [learn about her time at CalArts here] and there were several incarnations of this in the last decade.

LA: What was it like to grow up in Tehran and San Diego?

SJ: I was raised predominantly in San Diego; my family left Iran just before the revolution and the few memories that I have of Tehran are the scents of my grandparents’ rose garden, the lush feel of the Persian carpets beneath my bare feet, and the taste of orange blossom jam. It was wonderful being raised in North County San Diego where the floral and surfboard industry was so abundant and proximity to the beach and parks was fantastic.

LA: How did you become interested in dance and choreography? 

SJ: I’m convinced I was a choreographer before ever being a dancer. I still struggle with the idea of taking technique classes. When I close my eyes and listen to a piece of music, I see the entire production before my eyes—costume, lighting, sets. I am the daughter of an architect and set designer and grew up either performing theater or daydreaming in the catwalks of dark theaters during tech rehearsals.

Playing with light. Photo by ShaLeigh Comerford

LA: A lot of your work investigates your Iranian heritage as well as being someone of two cultures (American and Iranian). Why is movement such a good vehicle to investigate this?

SJ: A wonderful mentor of mine during my undergraduate studies at Hollins University, Donna Faye Burchfield, pulled me aside after seeing me perform a lead role in a Shakespeare performance my freshman year and encouraged me to study modern dance. To this day, I’m not certain what spark she saw in me, but ever since I began narrating my body stories through movement returning to speaking on stage hasn’t had that same kinesthetic charge. Coming from a culture where, traditionally speaking, women are more or less silent in their actions, I’ve inherited the mode of communication through dance with ease and developed an extensive battery of armor of gestural motifs.

LA: in the Middle, somewhat aggravated is a solo work How do your group work and solo work differ?

SJ: My group work is vastly different than my solo work. In my group work, I strive to be inclusive of my audiences—predominantly vibrant family friendly work with lots of costumes and props—it satisfies the aesthetic I developed as a child working in musical theater and my love of world music. My solo work is decidedly more political and sarcastic. It is, more often than not, structured improvisation and I experience a confluence of aggression and peace on stage.

LA: Why did you move to Philadelphia and how do you find it so far?

This dance studio is definitely in New York (as it is not one of the only 3 decent ones in Philly!). Photo by John Hennessy.

SJ: I moved to Philadelphia, after seven years in New York City, to join my new husband who is in Neurology residency and it’s been incredibly rewarding both professionally and artistically thus far. I couldn’t be happier working in higher ed again and while I am still committed to supporting friends’ works in what Mayor Nutter calls “the suburb to the North,” I am proud to call Philadelphia my new home, and love exploring Travel & Leisure‘s No. 1 City for Culture!

JUMPSTART, Live Arts Studio, 919 North 5th Street (at Poplar), Philadelphia, PA, 19123.
Thursday May 31, at 7pm
Friday June 1, at 7pm
Saturday, June 2, at 7pm
$18 for adults, $12 for students and buyers 25-and-under.
Free onsite parking.

You can read more about Sahar in this interview with Culturebot.

The artist with her bike, which has little to do with coffee.

Name: Zornitsa Stoyanova

Company:
Here[begin] Dance



Artistic occupation: Experimental movement artist, graphic and web designer.

First experience with coffee that made you understand coffee: I don’t think I ever “got it.” I understand the smell, the taste of good
coffee, but overall the indulgence of drinking too much coffee for me is
just another addiction.

Coffee you drink at home: 
My indulgent drink at home is David Rio’s Tortoise Green Tea Chai.

How do you like your coffee:
When I do drink it, I like it decaf, possibly Illi—the best coffee out
there without any funky bitter aftertaste. I like it with a lot of 2% milk.

Average no. of cups per day:
About 1 or 2 a month (only when I have a day off, as I crash from coffee so
hard, I need to sleep for hours or lounge in the sun).

Fave coffee shop:
 I haven’t found one in Philly yet to be
honest. I like more Euro type of places, either super design-y or something
like the cafés on the streets in Venice. Fancy small tables, little coffee
drinks and lots of interesting people walking around.
However, my favorite pub in Philly is hands down Grace Tavern.

Fave fancy coffee drink:
Vanilla latte.

Enough about coffee, what are you doing now?
 With my own company, I’m doing heavy research on performance qualities and presence with a group of super talented Philly dancers and actors. I also
have a new solo that was part of Falls Bridge Festival in January and which
I’m bringing to Europe this summer. I’ll be showing the piece at Mixed Grille
on May 26th. I’m also doing an awesome little site piece for Mascher Space
Cooperative that will be revealed soon and creating an atmosphere/lighting
design for Katherine Stark’s new dance. The crazy videos I take of myself dancing and all the rest of the weird engagements you can check out at www.herebegindance.com.

Suspended Wendy (Evelyn Kocak).

This Saturday and Sunday are the last two performances for Pennsylvania Ballet’s production of Trey McIntyre’s Peter Pan at the Academy of Music. We recently heard from two of the dancers (playing Peter Pan and Wendy), but we were also interested in the behind-the-scenes perspective in staging the complex flying sequences. For this production, the flying is not controlled by “eight guys standing in the wings” but is programmed, fully automated, and computer-controlled. We caught up with Brett Perry, a dancer for the Trey McIntyre Project, who helped McIntyre stage the flying sequences on the PA Ballet dancers.

Live Arts: What does the ability to suspend bodies in air allow artistically? And how does the technology of this particular system aid in the creative process?

Brett Perry: I remember being with Trey and the dancers the first day in the theater when they started working with this new flying equipment and noticing how amazing the system was but also how many challenges it would present. When Houston Ballet did Peter Pan in 2002 and 2004, all of the flying was done manually by eight tech guys. This time at Pennsylvania Ballet, all of the flying is computerized. That has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that when all of the flying cues are put into the computer, it will be done forever. Anytime another ballet company wants to do Peter Pan, the flying will be ready to go with little more than a few tweaks here and there. The disadvantage to this system is that it is basically a robot—and robots do not have human instincts. The program doesn’t know when the dancer plies the next move, it is usually going to be a jump. All of those details have to be programmed in and the timing has to be perfect. I talked to Trey about the flying a few days into the rehearsals and he was saying how tedious and time-consuming the flying was. Making a change in the computer and getting it just right was taking hours to perfect. The ability to suspend bodies in the air offers weightlessness that you cannot achieve on the ground. Some partnering that Wendy and Peter do would never work without the assistance of flying.

Holding up Peter Pan. Evelyn Kocak and Alexander Peters.

LA: Did you first use dancers or the computer to put the aerial choreography in place?

BP:  I first worked with the dancers who are flying in the studio to prepare them. I wanted to make sure that the dancers knew what they were doing and the musicality before they were harnessed in and flying. I knew that would save time. There is no way for the dancers to actually know what it was going to feel like to be in the harness flying before they are actually strapped in.

LA: How long does it take from the dancers training and adapting to the flying to seeing the actual art of the performance emerge?

BP: Our first theater rehearsal with the dancers was purely the technical side of the flying and programming. I know Trey and the dancers were exhausted after the first week of flying rehearsals. But once the dancers feel confident and the glitches are worked out, I am hoping we will see a smooth and beautiful flying sequence.

LA: How does the vertical choreography (flying) affect the choreography of  those dancers sill using the laws of gravity?

BP: It’s an amazing moment for the audience when they first see Peter flying in. He comes in and taps Liza (the maid) on the shoulder and you get a real sense of someone affected by gravity and someone defying gravity. The dancers on the ground will have a real reaction to the dancers in the air. It is impossible not to react to a fellow dancer or friends flying above you.

LA: Is Trey interested in pushing this technology into an even more sophisticated realm?

BP: I think Trey is always thinking about what’s next: how can he push the boundaries to keep this art form moving forward. Trey is innovative and always pushing his dancers and his team to take everything to the next level. It is exciting to think about what happens next.

Pennsylvania Ballet’s company premiere of Peter Pan, May 12 & 13 at The Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Streets. Choreography by Trey McIntyre. Music by Sir Edward Elgar, arranged by Niel DePonte, and performed by the Pennsylvania Ballet Orchestra.Tickets here.

Photos by ALexander Iziliaev.

–Josh McIlvain

Photo by Bill Hebert.

This spring (May 31–June 2), at the Live Arts Studio, we are launching our new performing arts program, Jumpstart, which showcases the work of six emerging artists from the region. Choreographer and dancer Katherine Kiefer Stark is bringing her company The Naked Stark to perform Looking For Judy, a series of five duet vignettes that explores the various layers of a person—how she remembers and how she is remembered. The work includes five wooden structures that allow for an interchange of walls and floor. We caught up with the Philly-based Katherine and asked her some questions about her life and work.

Live Arts: Why is your show title Looking for Judy? What inspired the initial creation 
of this work?

Katherine Stark: The idea for Looking for Judy emerged slowly. I began about a year ago to actively remember good memories of a family member with mental illness and deal with the strangeness of losing someone to her own mind.

LA: Where did you grow up?

KS: I grew up in Jenkintown, a suburb of Philly. I spent a lot of time at Ihop, Fiesta Pizza, and the Willow Grove Mall.

LA: The Naked Stark is the name of your company. What are some of the themes or narratives that you are or would like to explore?

KS: My work is deeply personal. I am interested in investigating social norms and politics by reflecting on my own personal choices and everyday experiences.

LA: How was your college and university experience in regards to dance?

KS: Studying dance at Connecticut College was my first introduction to modern and contemporary dance and where I fell in love with being off balance, making movement, and making dances. My time there, particularly with my teachers Jeremy Nelson and Dan Wagoner, fueled my passion for dance and helped me learn how to define, for myself, what it means to be a dancer and an artist.

My graduate work at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, helped me situate myself and my work within the larger field of dance. It also helped bring together my interest in the ways we construct our society and my love of choreography.

Naked Stark dancers in rehearsal, figuring stuff out.

LA: When did you start choreographing, and what spark your interest in doing so?

KS: I made my first dance when I was a sophomore in college. I had something to say and it just made sense to make a dance.

LA: How did you go about creating this piece?

KS: I started with a movement phrase that I taught to Megan Stern and Barbara Tait. I worked with them to create a partnering version of the phrase and I asked them to each make a version that inserted a movement of their own in-between my movements. This became the base of our movement vocabulary. I organized and integrated material to create chunks of dance. Some of these chunks were divided into different sections and one was transposed to a different plane. We started working with a wall for our transposing process and this evolved into having walls as part of the work.

LA: You’re an artist-in-residence as Mascher Space Co-op. What does that entail and how do you use your time?

KS: As an artist-in-residence at Mascher Space Co-op I have a regular weekly rehearsal time to create work. There are different levels of involvement in our cooperative structure. I am the space coordinator, which means I keep the space clean and am working on the improvements to the space outlined by the group in our strategic plan. Being part of Mascher has made it possible to be making work regularly in Philly.

LA: How do you like to spend your last 15 minutes before show time?

KS:  Breathing, bouncing, moving. Staying warm and mellow.

Thank you books!

The Bushwick Book Club is a monthly literary event in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where songwriters perform songs they’ve written in response to an assigned book. We don’t otherwise discuss the book. There’s an audience. It’s not really a book club. It’s a show.

But secretly, it’s not even a show. Secretly, it’s an approach to art making, a way for those of us participating to trick ourselves into creating new work. For me, as a songwriter and performer developing a body of material, it has become an integral part of my creative practice, a way to keep loose, a lab for testing new ideas.

I’ve done twenty book club shows during the last few years, and now my process is pretty consistent. As I read the book, whenever something jumps out at me, I dog-ear the page. After I’m done, I go back through the book and write down the things on the dog-eared pages that catch my eye. I do this by hand. Then I sit on my couch with my laptop and my ukulele and ponder what I wrote down and type a few lines and play a couple of chords. When I sit down on the couch, there is no song. I have absolutely no idea how a song is going to happen. But I’m certain that it will—that on Thursday night there will be a song. It’s a moment of complete ignorance and complete trust. Then there comes another moment when I realize there’s a song where there wasn’t one before. I’ve learned to sit and wait patiently for that magic to happen.

I’ve been a participant almost since the book club began in 2009, and recently I have been co-hosting shows with Susan Hwang, who created the series because she had been writing songs based on the George Romero Night of the Living Dead movies and wanted to create an event around new music written in response to a narrative.  She came up with the idea of writing songs about books. It turns out that the Bushwick Book Club combines a number of elements that are brilliantly helpful when it comes to making art. You don’t have to create a songwriting book club show to access these creative tools, but the Bushwick Book Club provides a great example of what works.

1. Assignments: The book club assignment is to write a song in response to the book. That’s it. This is the perfect kind of assignment, right in the sweet spot between too narrow and too broad; the book provides parameters, but there are no other constraints, so there’s a lot of room to play. Some songs end up being about something really specific, like a line of dialogue or a particular character; others relate the songwriter’s feelings about the book, or something about it that bothered her, or something only tangentially related that the book happened to make the songwriter think of. Part of the assignment is to create the assignment, like designing your own puzzle to solve, or your own labyrinth to escape from.

2. Deadlines: Your song has to be finished by the show. No extension is possible because the show is happening and you are in it. Some people habitually finish their songs on the subway en route to the venue. But even with advance planning, the beauty of the deadline is that it forces you to kill your inner editor, the one that makes you second-guess yourself and question whether what you’re making is any good. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be finished. After it’s finished, it might be good, but that’s the icing on the song-cake.

3. Community: The ten or so songwriters who perform in the Bushwick Book Club each month vary from show to show, but a couple dozen usual suspects regularly cycle through. The monthly event has also become a social gathering, since you’re performing for your friends. General public notwithstanding, it’s like a salon—a circle of people who are interested in checking out each other’s work. It’s extremely motivating to know there are people who want to see what you’ve come up with, especially when you’re trying something new.

4. Peer Pressure: This goes along with the community thing—you can’t bag out, because you know your friends are working on their songs. A social contract is involved. You have to write something.

5. Low Stakes: The venue where the shows take place, Goodbye Blue Monday, is dedicated to letting musicians experiment and try out untested new ideas. That attitude has gotten baked into the book club—it’s a safe space to try something new, have fun, throw stuff against the wall. Was it good? Great. Was it bad? There’s always next month. Of course you show up and you want to be awesome, but that isn’t really the point—the point is to write more songs. Taking the pressure off allows artists to depart from their habits, take risks, and surprise themselves when the experiment is successful.

6. Material to Engage With: This is where I think the Bushwick Book Club does something especially unique. I know of other assignment-based art-making series, where the assignment is to create a work in response to a word or a theme, but having a whole book as the basis for the assignment means having to grapple with and deeply engage with another’s creative work. It forces your brain to make the kinds of connections that make art happen. You have to think about what’s going on in what you’ve read, what speaks to you, what bothers you. You can’t be passive. One interesting thing I’ve discovered is that it makes absolutely no difference, in terms of whether the songs are good, if you like the book or not. We’ve had shows when nobody liked the book but the songs were brilliant. Also, at times, writing the song has made me feel differently about the book and gain a greater appreciation for it. Madame Bovary was like that—I was much more sympathetic to Emma after I wrote a song about her.

The author and her brain. Photo by Emily Raw

Outside of the Bushwick Book Club, I have a band called Sweet Soubrette that’s a serious project I write songs for, and most of the other songwriters have musical projects they’re serious about too. But the book club makes you write songs on purpose, not just when you’re feeling poetically inspired, which is a good way to develop discipline and keep your creative juices flowing. And I’m not the only person who has written a song for the book club that ended up making its way into the serious project repertoire. When we wrote about Anais Nin’s Henry and June, a book I didn’t particularly enjoy, the song I came up with ended up being one of my strongest ever. I’m about to release it as a single called “What’s My Desire.”

Every month I’m surprised all over again by how vastly different ten songs about the same book can be. Each songwriter responds to something different in the material, and everyone has their own style, their own preoccupations, their individual take on songwriting, instrumentation, structure. At a single show we’ll get one guy with an electric guitar and beats looped on his iPhone, and someone else howling into the mic with bass and drums behind her, and then there will be a beautiful piano piece, a musical theater-style number, someone playing folky acoustic guitar, and on. Funny songs, moving songs, catchy songs, weird songs. It’s been an amazing reminder that there are no wrong approaches or wrong answers when it comes to creative work.

–Ellia Bisker (check out her music at www.sweetsoubrette.com)

The Bushwick Book Club has taken on: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, Flatland by Edwin Abbot Abbot, James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, Watchmen by Alan Moore, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, The Bible, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, My Life and Other Unfinished Business by Dolly Parton, Green Porno by Isabella Rossellini, Dune by Frank Herbert, The diaries of Anais Nin, Encyclopedia volume “Q,” The works of Dr. Seuss, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Thesaurus, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, The works of Dorothy Parker, The Americans by Robert Frank. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said by Phillip K. Dick. A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, Life by Keith Richards, Feynman by Jim Ottaviani, Despair by Vladimir Nabokov, The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Flatscreen by Adam Wilson, A Bad Idea I’m About To Do by Chris Gethard, A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Lee Etzold with Madi Distefano, co-artistic directors of BRAT Productions, going over finances.

When it comes to creating art, Lee Etzold is not afraid to work up a sweat.

“I’m not really a sit-down-at-a-computer playwright. I’m more of a get-in-a-big-space-and-jump-around playwright,” she explains.

A lifelong athlete, Etzold has always been a very physical person. She played sports in high school and believed she would play basketball or field hockey in college. Everything changed when she auditioned for a school play and turned her attention to the arts. As an actor and playwright today, she brings her athletic background to the stage.

“Because I was an athlete first, I always have a physical approach to theater. I have better muscle memory than any other kind of memory,” she says; in fact, she never learns her lines until she learns her blocking. [Ed note: hmmm, actors have an excuse for everything.]

After college, Etzold moved to Philadelphia to work with New Paradise Laboratories, the experimental theater company headed by director Whit MacLaughlin. It was Philadelphia that inadvertently sparked her imagination and led her to create her own work.

Etzold originally moved to Philadelphia during the Philly Fringe and saw the city rife with musicians and actors. After the shows, she felt lonely as the city went back to business as usual. “I felt like everyone I had just met had vanished into their other lives. I started writing songs—ridiculously depressing songs that made me laugh at myself.”

Lee in a Bang workshop performance at LAB Test, getting the party going. Photo by Kevin Monko

Etzold started playing the songs for a cabaret put on through Brat Productions. The following year, she debuted them for the Philly Fringe late-night cabaret.

“[The songs] got me thinking, ‘oh, I can make stuff on my own!’” she says.

From the songs, she moved on to writing her own shows, and continues to do so. Etzold draws inspiration for creating shows from a few aspects of her past. She once thought she would become a teacher, and she now finds herself using her plays to poke fun at her desire to educate.

“It’s very pompous, actually,” she explains, “ I feel this need to impart knowledge, so I make fun of that by creating these instructional plays, and that seems to be something I keep gravitating towards.”

(For the record, Etzold, who arrived at our interview wearing an old Van Halen T-shirt, brightly-colored rain boots, and an expressive smile that never seems to leave her face, appears anything but pompous.)

These “instructional plays” have been inspired by sundry sources, including etiquette books and the How to——for Dummies book series.

Her physical approach to theater led to physical comedy and clowning. As she created more of her own work, Etzold found herself branching out and trying new things. In 2002, she was invited to join Pig Iron Theatre Company; she traveled to France with a few colleagues and put together a clown show called Flop.

“That was where I was really able to cut loose with my physical comedy in a more improvised way,” she says.  Whereas at New Paradise the shows had been more structured and scripted, her work on Flop was “all about getting loose and free.”

Her entrance into the world of clowning was a natural outcome after she began to open herself up by writing her own plays and allowing her artistic and athletic senses to intermingle. Etzold admits that comedy comes naturally to her, and she says the simplicity of comedy is appealing, “You instantly know whether it’s working or not; if the audience is not laughing, then it’s not working.”

Having traveled around the world to perform, Etzold has had the unique experience of experimenting with her comedy in various cultures. She recalls a clown show she did in Edinburgh that fell flat. The show made fun of a song by Jewel, but it was only after the performance that Etzold learned most of the audience had never even heard of Jewel!

Overall, her experiences with international clowning have been mixed. In the UK, she says, audiences have been almost “super-saturated with red-nosed clowns.” Because they had had so much exposure to clowns already, these audiences proved more critical of performances; she has found that writing shows for audiences outside the US often requires a tailored focus.

“You have to either plan to make fun of their idea of what Americans are or you have to make it as universal as possible. There’s a new challenge in trying to create international clown work— you have to get to the core of human experience,” she says.

Her current work continues to explore physicality and pushes the limits of innovative and intelligent comedy. She will perform in this fall’s Live Arts Festival in Bang by Charlotte Ford.

Etzold worked with Ford on A Midsummer Night’s Dream a few years ago. Etzold enjoyed Ford’s daring sense of humor and found that it brought out a more daring aspect to her own performances. When Ford began crafting Bang, she asked Etzold to be a part of the production.

“Charlotte really wanted to explore female desire— not just ladies being sexy, but raising the question ‘being sexy for whom?’” explains Etzold. “How can clowns be sexy? Because the clown is such a mask, the characters are very full and your costume has a lot to do with your clown character. What happens when you start literally stripping away the costume—how do you maintain the clown character?”

The show also explores how sexuality can be funny, and specifically how women can make sexuality funny.  Bang is still evolving, but at the moment, the crew is working on building characters to explore different aspects of female sexuality and desire.

Etzold’s next big move will be a piece about stunt women. She says this show is inspired by a PowerPoint presentation she once made about her inherent connections to Sigourney Weaver. With the show, she hopes to take the piece a step further and look at the connections (imagined and real) between actresses and their stunt doubles.

Always seeking ways to bring energy and laughs to her performances, Etzold says comedy has taught her, most of all, to trust her instincts.

–Prarthana Jayaram

Tara gets ready to travel to Philly's other downtown.

The weather app on my phone says it’s going to be a beautiful 73 degrees on Sunday! Where will I be? With marketing manager Dan Comly, spreading the sweet Festival word to folks attending the Chestnut Hill Home and Garden Festival, when they shut down Germantown Avenue and fill it with food, plants, live music, and people. I’ve never been to this Home and Garden event, but everyone is telling me it is the place to be (delicious food, live music, collectibles, face painting, zoo critters!).

Our booth is at 8314 Germantown Avenue (right in front of Gerald Paul Salon). Come visit us (and then get your haircut). I will be sitting by a big prize wheel (you can win FREE tickets!), a big bag of candy, and one of those fans connected to a water bottle that keeps you cool and content. Give me your email and get 20% off your first ticket to the 2012 Festival. It’s easy as cake. Plus, I have been reading up on all the upcoming Live Arts Festival performances, so I’m ready to chat about them!

Moral of the story? It’s never too early to start getting pumped about the Festival. See ya Sunday!

Fast Facts:
Chestnut Hill Home and Garden Festival
Germantown Ave, from Willow Grove Ave  to the top of the hill
Sunday, May 6th, 11am to 5pm
73 degrees
Food & beer
Zoo critters
Plants
Cobblestones

–Tara Demmy

Photo by Enoch Chan.

This spring (May 31–June 2), at the Live Arts Studio, we (the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe) are launching our new performing arts program, Jumpstart, which showcases the work of six new (to us) artists from the region. Choreographer and dancer Jessica Morgan is bringing her solo  Dress and Disappearance—a dance inspired by ghosts, light, and a dress. We caught up to Jessica and asked her some questions about her life and work.

Live Arts: Why is your show titled Dress and Disappearance?

Jessica Morgan: Dress and Disappearance came largely from the dress, which is what inspired a large part of the world within the piece. To me the condition and quality of the dress represents the ephemeral surface of the feminine and contrasts with its darker depths, which can only be partially concealed. Trying to hide and expose these things at once during the piece is what drives it. I have had this dress for a long time in storage and in a sense it finally revealed its purpose to me.

LA: Where did you grow up?

JM: I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and later, Teaneck, New Jersey. Greenwich Village was a raw and vibrant place at the time, filled with musicians, break dancers, and bohemians. I was fortunate enough to go to a public school that strongly emphasized and encouraged artistic impulses. I am sure it shaped my interest in dance and art. Even though New York City was not considered the safest place at that time, I loved it there. Ironically, when I moved to the suburbs later, it was so quiet I was terrified!

LA: How did your interest grow in choreography?

JM: I had a great modern dance teacher in high school, Joanne Koob Brown, who had danced for such people as David Gordon. She exposed us to improvisation and the basics of composition. We even had a choreography workshop and did showings of the work we made. Boy did that fuel my fire for makings dances. It has continued since. RoseAnne Spradlin, a New York based choreographer has mentored me on and off since she was my advisor during Fresh Tracks in 2005. She is brilliant. She has provided me with a lot of feedback over the years and has been tremendously helpful to me. Her work has also been an inspiration to me as well as the work of Susan Rethorst and Luciana Achugar, who has also mentored me. Their work to me is so deeply, utterly female and that is something that has interested me again and again.

Photo by Enoch Chan.

LA: What was your experience at SUNY Purchase like?

JM: SUNY Purchase was a very competitive and conservative school. [Jessica graduated in 2000.] It was not something I really realized until after I got there. It wasn’t the most supportive atmosphere and they definitely had their own agenda in terms of what direction they wanted you to go in. Believe or not they wanted me to pursue ballet! I cut off my hair and started wearing baggy dance pants instead of tights and they got the hint that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in, which did not please them. What I did love there was my composition teacher Tarin Chaplin, who has since passed away. I don’t know how she snuck under the radar and got hired there but she was just what we needed. She supported us, pushed us to challenge ourselves and take whatever chances we saw fit. She didn’t try to mold us, but allowed us to discover who we were as artists. She even took us up to her house in Vermont to make site specific work on her farm.

LA: You’ve made both group and solo work. What attracts you to doing both, and how does you approach differ?

JM: I find solos very difficult, which is why I have only made one before this. I find I spend a lot of time in the beginning lying on the floor and wondering what the hell am I doing with my studio time. It’s different when you have a group of dancers there and you know you can’t ask them to come and just lie on the floor with you. I feel I have to come very prepared with material and ideas so no one’s time is wasted. I do find it easier to work with multiple bodies and feed off their dynamics and relationships. But I have learned a lot with this solo, mostly about quality of movement, rather than just movement itself. To me, solos always have this undertone of vulnerability. There is really nowhere to hide onstage alone. So I can’t help but find that becomes part of what solos are and their quality. With time I am learning to enjoy this feeling.

Photo by John Huber.

LA: How do you like to spend the last 15 minutes before performing?

JM: I still get very nervous, even after all these years. I usually just keep going through the movements of the piece and I pace around like a crazy person. I am great at pacing. And since I had a cold during a show this last October I am paranoid about my nose running onstage so I blow my nose a lot. A LOT.

Thanks Jessica!

Jumpstart, May 31 – June 2, 7pm. Live Arts Studio, 919 North Fifth Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19123. Onsite Parking. Tickets: $15 General Admission, $12 Student and 25-and-under. Featured artists: Jamarr Hall, Sahar Javedani, Jessica Morgan, The Brothers Beffa (Justin Rose and Scott Sheppard), The Naked Stark (Katherine Kiefer Stark, Megan Stern, and Barbara Tait), and Ilse Zoerb.

–Josh McIlvain