Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman Duo
New Ground for Composing Form in Theatre
Workshops Dec 28 & 29, 2009 | Performance/Conversation January 2, 2010 - 8pm
Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman are composing and performing movement-based theatre artists, working together since 1991, who apply complex composed structures to ordinary daily human behavior. Notated movement scores often accompany their productions. In their collaborative work for theatre ‘natural-looking’ behavior is subjected to contortions, subversions and convolutions, letting ‘naturalism’ show its socially constructed face. They invent systems for organizing movement and speech in theatre, similarly to how new systems for organizing sound have been invented for composing music. Each theatre composition, utilizing a repertory of gestural-choreographic innovations invented by the duo, proposes a specific critical look at social life. These inventions include a technique for the orchestration of instantaneous shifts of time and place in complex patterns.
At IRT this winter, Fay and Glassman will be working on three techniques, and three new pieces, to be explored in two workshops and one night of performance/conversation. The first piece, Homeland, utilizes “cinematic” reverse movement in an elaborate solo rendering of a 15-minute event. In the second piece napse, the audible deep vocal sounds of a person become manifest as the physical environment in which he assumes he lives. The third piece is a new duet using two types of “counter-intuitive behavior” at the same time, in which the challenge is taken to use the movement and speech of one naturalistic scene as the sole live medium for another scene, without breaking the naturalistic frame of the first.
WORKSHOPS: New Ground for Composing Form in Theatre
Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman Duo, in residence at IRT
Monday, Dec. 28 and Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2009
6:00pm – 10:00pm both evenings at the IRT Theater
$60 per day, or $99 for both days, Tax-deductible
Sign up at Brown Paper Tickets
For information about Workshops and all questions contact:
JeffGlassman0@gmail.com (Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman)
If you would like to speak on the phone, please leave a number where you can be reached.
IRT Theater is located on the third floor of the old Archive Building in Greenwich Village, NYC. 154 Christopher St., buzzer 3B, info@irttheater.org
PERFORMANCE/CONVERSATION
Saturday, January 2, 2010 – 8:00pm at IRT Theater
Suggested donation $5 – $10
Purchase tickets at Brown Paper Tickets
ARTISTS’ STATEMENT
One of our interests is in laying new ground for form in theatre in a way that makes the term “theatre composition” meaningfully analogous to music composition. We invent techniques that make form manifest in the finished performance works. For example, in a workshop we might explain and demonstrate the possibilities of “pivoting” “pivot-montage” and “counter-intuitive behavior,” and show how the compositional twists of “3-D time and 1-D space” and the idea of “depth of a moment” create paradox through composing an otherwise missing dimension in performance. New techniques, the reasons for making them, their social ramifications, and what they contribute to experimentation in theatre are the subjects of our workshops.
The workshops will begin with focused warm-ups for 45 minutes, and progress to the introduction of concepts, followed by a selection of studies and experiments to be explored individually and in small groups under our direction. Participants will work to create short compositional studies in order to delve deeply into the implications of an idea and its context through actual experience with its challenges and promises. We will move back and forth between explanations of concepts and practical work on studies and experiments. Outcomes from each day’s work will be observed, discussed, and extended through suggestions, in order to distill the ideas’ implications for form and performance in theatre. Relevant significant short readings will be handed out and used for background reference.
A partial list of formal concepts and techniques for theatre that we have created, developed, and implemented in our work over the years, and that we will use in the workshops, follows:
“Movement objects:” treating fixed portions of staged action as moveable objects in space and time, allowing possibilities for their arrangement.
“Pivoting” and “pivot-montage:” We will teach a technique of gesture and composition we invented, based on what we call a “pivot” through which the illusion of instantaneous shifts of time and place of staged action can be created, and the organization of staged action into multiple and simultaneous time-place-framed events or “movement objects” can be composed in elaborate pivot-montage patterns.
”Rhythmic filtering:” when we align natural-looking behavior into (unnatural) rhythmic proportions. We will work with “rhythmic filtering” for theatre composition, including means for organizing a theatrical “scene” primarily through its rhythm.
“Counter-intuitive behavior:” behaving against the grain of the nervous system, learning to do what it’s built not to do by redistributing speech against gesture, and many related “counter-intuitive” behaviors for the purpose of theatrical illusion in newly invented laminations of theatre’s elements.
“Reverse movement:” the performance phenomena of moving (as if) against gravity and (therefore) against time, and the potential for creation of reverse theatre.
“3-D time and 1-D space:” where time on stage is given multiple axes, while space has only one, in order to stage action using patterns of multiple simultaneous time frames.
“Depth of a moment:” to create paradox through composing an otherwise missing dimension in performance.
Performing the impossible and the possible: the constraints of invention with an unmediated body.
Creating notation and making scored theatre compositions: what wouldn’t be thought without a score, and what shouldn’t be scored without a thought.
A display and explanation of numerous scores created for theatre compositions, and how to find a representation on paper for a performable idea.
ARTISTS
Together and individually, Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman have originated and performed movement-based theatre works for the past 40 years, as a duo for the past 20 years, in tours across the US, in Eastern and Western Europe, Mexico, Cuba and South Korea, in large and small theatres, colleges, cultural centers, and national and international mime and theatre festivals in the US and abroad including the Copenhagen International Theatre Festival, the Third International Festival of Mime in Mexico, the seminal First International Mime Institute and Festival, Viterbo College, WI (1974), and the historic Gathering of Alternative Theatres, St. Peter, MN (1981); formed companies such as the United Mime Workers experimental theatre collective (’71-86’); received Artist Fellowships for original movement-based theatre from the Illinois Arts Council, and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Choreography Fellowship for experimental movement theatre. As working artists they have contributed to and served the Illinois Arts Council, the Alliance for Cultural Democracy (ACD), the Network of Ensemble Theatres (NET), and the local Urbana, IL, City Arts Task Force. At times they are visiting faculty or guest artists at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA. They have been featured artists or artists-in-residence at the Columbia College Dance Center, MoMing Dance and Arts Center, and Links Hall, all in Chicago; Unit One at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Haja Center, Sungmisan Village Theatre, and the international Seoul Youth Creativity Summit and Festival all in Seoul, South Korea; New College in Sarasota FL; Bravehearts Theatre and with TAPIT/new works at the Overture Center in Madison WI; the Wagon Train Project in Lincoln, NE; Seven Stages Theatre in Atlanta GA; Legion Arts – CSPS in Cedar Falls, IA; the Network of Ensemble Theatres (NET) Gathering at Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in New Orleans, LA; and since 1999 they have taught and directed a student theatre ensemble doing original work at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Their history in New York City includes performances at Experimental Intermedia, the Dance Theatre Workshop, BACA Downtown, Roulette, and nearby upstate at the North American Cultural Lab (NaCL).