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Spy Moves

Posted by DCA Theater on May 16, 2012 in January - July 2012 Season, Incubator Series: Sour Mash Productions

Submitted by Gretchen Wright, Movement Director for A Natural Progression of Our Prolonged Stay and Co-Founder of Sour Mash Productions

As Sour Mash Productions was getting ready to dive into the Incubator, Rebecca, co-creator of A Natural Progression of Our Prolonged Stay asked me if I was interested in working on the movement and choreography for the project.

“Wait, what? Aren’t we doing a staged reading?”
Yes, indeed we are. A staged reading of a play about Russian spies, with scripted and executed choreographic sequences.

After a few short weeks of furious work, we have discovered that there are a few worlds in which this story lives (for a synopsis, see our last blog post entitled Initial Synopsis). First, we have suburbia, where Thanksgiving is accompanied by smooth Brazilian lounge music and parents get dressed-up for the PTA meetings. Second, there is the world of Pam and Vince’s past, Soviet Russia. Finally, there is the world of memory and imagination, where moments can get broken down, examined, or exploded. This last realm is where movement has really come to serve this play, helping remove the audience from realism and the interrogation room, and throwing them into a character’s mind. We dive into Hannah’s memories, into Hank’s fantastical imagination of the world of spies, and into Vince and Pam’s remembrances of life in Russia.

On day two of rehearsal, we threw the actors into “spy training,” starting in Macy’s and ending outside of Millennium Park. One assignment was to follow an individual for 5 minutes, determining who they were and where they were going. It was intense and the stakes were high. After an hour, we re-convened in the rehearsal room at the [Chicago Cultural Center] and boiled down these experiences into specific movements. Each actor developed their own set of gestures, guided by the themes of suburbia, spy movies, and actions they performed in the training.

Once the gestures were set we developed them, adding in different music genres and allowing that music to affect the quality of the gesture. We tried them at varying levels of intensity and speed, 2% - 200%, and the actors conversed with each other using only the vocabulary of their gestures as language. Soon, we had a line of actors marching forward like a Russian army to the theme from Mission Impossible, performing over-the-top gestures out of suburban and spy contexts. It was absurd and interesting, silly and complex, and so clearly had come out of the minds of the characters of the play, and the actors in the room.

I hope you are able to join us on May 21st for the reading of our work-in-progress. Be prepared for reality to bust open, for memories to slow down and get picked apart, and for the past to invade the present.