INCUBATOR Series: The Plagiarists

Final Thoughts 2..

Posted by DCA Theater on January 13, 2009 in July-December 2008 Season, INCUBATOR Series: The Plagiarists

Final Thoughts As We Depart From The Raft (Temporarily) II

by Ian Miller, Plagiarist, writer & project facilitator

For three weeks we had the privilege of taking ownership of a wonderful space at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) Incubator Series. We collaborated with a fun and talented group local actors, directors, and impresarios to workshop and develop our script, The Wreck of the Medusa. The DCA provided The Plagiarists with a large and comfortable space and a generous allotment of time to workshop a script with the intention of being able to present our work to the public at the end of the session. We found there to be little to no restrictions on what we presented at that allowed for a creative environment where we were free to play with form, create characters and quickly dispatch them, draw maps, pictures, and diagrams and many other esoteric forms of expression the serious theatre has little time for in preproduction (unless you’re Anne Bogart and I don’t know how she does it.) Giving time and space to a new work is essential.  There needs to be as much refection and mediation about what you are creating as goes into the process of creation itself. Being given a space, a project, and a fellowship with artists empathetic with your purpose has been rewarding….

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Final Thoughts..

Posted by DCA Theater on January 13, 2009 in July-December 2008 Season, INCUBATOR Series: The Plagiarists

Final Thoughts As We Depart From The Raft (Temporarily)

by Gregory Peters, Plagiarist, writer & project facilitator

Crunch time. We spent the week leading up to the reading examining and discussing written scenes and asking ourselves what essential scenes were missing. We then selected the strongest and most representative scenes to present, with some narrative description to help the audience follow the story. I was so nervous at the reading and immediately afterwards that I had some trouble putting my thoughts about it together. We chose to spend more time in development and less time rehearsing than I had originally planned, and as a result, we hadn’t done a complete run-through of the entire piece with the narration. Although, perhaps this was a blessing as I was terribly impressed by the work our readers did, committing impressively (in some cases to dialogue we had already decided was deeply flawed) and bringing real depth and dimensionality to the text. In fact, there were several scenes that worked much better in the reading than we had imagined. And the audience response seemed very positive – their criticisms were specific, which is usually a good sign that you haven’t battered or baffled them.

The one regret I have is that in our scene selection process, we failed to consider the shape of the piece we were presenting.

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Medusalogue 2

Posted by DCA Theater on December 18, 2008 in July-December 2008 Season, INCUBATOR Series: The Plagiarists

by Ian Miller, Plaigiarist company member

We’ve had a lot of fun playing with the form and structure of this play and have decided there’s no need to conform to ridged type but rather create a menagerie of ideas and style. The difficultly will be making the voice of the play singular and consistent and we’re lucky to have an first hand material and two centuries to help guide our process.

I’ve very much enjoyed this process and think work shopping a script at various stages of development is critical to make ideas clear and simultaneously expansive. I recall learning about the great masters Michelangelo, Veroocchio, Bruegel, and what thriving, living things their studios were. No one artist worked on a single painting or sculpture but many hands and many voices shaped the masterpieces.  The myth of the lonely, solitary artist is a modern illusion. We live in an age that prizes the image of the auteur, the entrupenure, the outlaw over cultural identity and responsibility . The misfits and mavericks have their place but have been fetishized for too long.  Tolstoy claims that the higher up someone is, the more helpless he or she is –that all decisive momentum and inertia are in mass. A sentiment that I’m confidant he shared spiritually with the ancient art of Drama. The Wreck of the Medusa Jr.

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Medusalogue

Posted by DCA Theater on December 17, 2008 in July-December 2008 Season, INCUBATOR Series: The Plagiarists

By Gregory Peters, Plagiarist, writer & project facilitator

A sample draft of what we’re reading on Monday...

CORRÉARD: It started with the boy. Others will say it started sooner, sitting at anchor for a week, or with the storm as soon as we left port, or with the ridiculous maneuvers around Medeira, but that was all just plain silliness and bad luck. No journey is short on small mishaps, just that we forget them when we arrive safely. We look back on failed enterprises with more care, every tiny thing becomes engraved on our memory and where we find a gap, we fill it in with our imaginations. The storm didn’t matter, everyone acquitted themselves competently. Many thought Madeira would be the end of Richefort’s influence on the Captain and so saw it as a necessary evil. But when we lost the boy, that’s when the air began to grow thin and poisonous, when the crew’s muttering became audible to the passengers. We were all watching porpoises at play and he fell out of one of the portholes. A sailor caught him but couldn’t hold on. He then caught a rope, but we were moving so fast. He could not hold on. He slipped away. He was just fifteen. A signal was made to acquaint the Echo with this accident, but that vessel was at a considerable distance. The we were going to fire a gun to second the signal, but there was not one loaded. However, we threw out the life buoy and then turned the ship and lowered a boat – six-oared barge that they only put three men in. They didn’t even find the buoy. He seemed a strong swimmer, but of course that only means that it probably took him much longer to drown. I found out later that the ship is to be turned the moment one cries, “Man Overboard” but it took us some time. This, and the poorly organized rescue, and our distance from the rest of our convoy, this is what killed the boy. Henry says he was lucky not to be part of the tragedy that followed. I believe that he was the beginning of the story that ended with us out there, abandoned just as he was, and always think on him as the first of us to die.

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Slowly but surely

Posted by DCA Theater on December 17, 2008 in July-December 2008 Season, INCUBATOR Series: The Plagiarists

Slowly But Surely, A Pattern Emerges…

by Gregory Peters, Plagiarist, writer & project facilitator

Our theory turns out to work. By articulating what scenes, moments, outside elements, and information we want to see in the play, and then expanding on what those might look like, a shape for the play emerges. We discussed a number of styles, approaches, and works it might resemble, everything from Tectonic Theatre’s Laramie Project & Gross Indecency to The Wire to Sunday In The Park With George, but nothing seemed to fit all the elements we were looking to include. Finally we decided that our structure should follow ideas and characters rather than chronology and not hold to a single style of performance. Sort of collage meets Arabian Nights meets Charles Mee. Looking back now it seems inevitable – in fact we did discuss it briefly – but we needed to see how the demands of the story made it necessary. I am continually amazed at how this group comes to consensus with so little effort on the part of the facilitators. For today, everyone’s going to bring in an exploded scene. I can’t wait….

In the meantime, Gaper’s Block did a story on us, written by the amazing Laura Pearson. Check it out here.

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