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Rehearsing inside the Fossil Cave

Posted by DCA Theater on May 31, 2011 in January-June 2011 Season, Lighthousekeeping

by Jessica Hutchinson, Director of Lighthousekeeping & Artistic Director of New Leaf Theatre

The Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue was established as an artists’ haven in 1885, and housed - among other artistic institutions - the Little Theater of Chicago, by some measures the city’s first storefront theatre.  The building is ten stories tall, one of two buildings in Chicago that still employs elevator operators, and alive with the echoes of vocal and instrumental artists, working away in their separate studios.

Working in one of those studios - Malcolm Ruhl’s new rehearsal space at Final Score Music - during the Lighthousekeeping rehearsal has been a gift.  Downtown, its location has prepared us for the neighborhood in which we’ll be performing, and the size and feel of the building itself has a lot to say to the scope of the story we’re telling.  This physical space has certainly informed our work.

Part of what we’ve always valued about the New Leaf rehearsal process in the LPCC is rehearsing and performing in the same place, a luxury that allows us to bake the show and its life into the walls.  During this process, I think the reverse has happened; the walls, steeped as they are in a creative history, have baked themselves into us.

In Lighthousekeeping, a cave is discovered in the mid-1800’s that is lined and framed with fossils.  So to, the stories we tell, the records we make of our own lives are framed as our personal fossil records, “cumulative deposits,” the individual images frozen in time that make up our lives.

On Saturday, we took the day to really inhabit our Fine Arts Building home, and see what it had to teach us about waking up a space with so much history living in its walls.  Our cast broke into two groups and was given a menu of elements the original 3-act pieces they were to create should contain – things like 15 consecutive seconds of stillness, a moment of everyone looking up, music from an unexpected source.  And the best one – the perfect use of space, any space they could access in the building.  They were given 30 minutes, and titles for the three acts: The World As It Was, The World As It Is, The World As It Could Be.

The moments the actors created were stunning, beautiful images, the creation of which opened our ensemble’s eyes and minds to wonder about the other people who inhabited these rooms and walked these halls before us.  These moments are hard to describe in words – they were pictures that blended into other pictures, made up of benches and clocks and dark hallways and arias.  There were staircases and elevators and rewards for me - the audience for a day - for taking risks in spaces that weren’t comfortable at first.

Excited as we are to move to the DCA space this week, there is something magical, almost mystical about the Fine Arts Building that I’m reluctant to leave behind.  My hope is that, like our story suggests, nothing can be left or forgotten, that we carry our fossil caves with us, adding to them, making room for more, still holding to what came before, and letting what we learn in one journey transform our experience of the next.