Techiti Tech

Oh my goodness The Keys Experiment opens at Artery 2010 in one week. Ah! Getting a bit nervous to say the least. Trying to keep cool about it. I had a good meeting today with Dixie Treichel at The Soap Factory working on the sound design. There were like a million people there working on their Artery pieces, which is great. There's this amazing energy in that space. Fiona MacNeill, the curator, says this year has an A List of artists, and she's not wrong. I'm honored to share the bill with the likes of Annie Rollins, Jaime Carrera, and Kats Kats D Fukasawa, who I met for the first time today, and many other very talented artists. I kind of think of Artery as the fringe alternative. Like the Fringe Festival, there's a sense of the eclectic, but I think audience members are more guaranteed to see some performance that is really pushing the boundaries in terms of form and content (I speak of my fellow artists, not myself- I obviously can't be the judge of whether what I'm doing is worth seeing or not).

I've decided, as I did when I did the show at the Red Eye, to err on the side of simplicity. I've decided against the video projection idea, even though I have images and archive footage to use, because I would rather spend my energy working on the movement and text, and choreographing the piece in the very unique space (I'm performing in the Video rooms toward the back of the gallery). Dixie brought me some sound mixes for one of the new scenes, which I'm really excited about although she hasn't quite finished with it yet. The new movement sequence is the largest new section, although there are also a few new monologues (one by a girlfriend of one of the Conscientious Objectors, and a couple of new Ancel Keys monologues). There are a couple of aspects of the space that are challenging- probably the main difficulty being that there are limited outlets and we can't hang the sound speakers. But I trust Dixie completely and I think she has the thing figured out (in all tech matters I must defer decisions to my collaborators who actually know what they are talking about). Another difficulty is finding the time to rehearse. While the nice thing about doing a one woman show is that I don't have to coordinate schedules with other actors, I have found it's stressful to coordinate rehearsal times with my team of artists helping me (director, choreographer, and sound designer) plus the Soap isn't always available, and often there is a lot of commotion going on.) I think we've nailed some times down to meet in there, though, so hopefully I'll feel a bit better once we hammer out the details of how I'm going to do this thing.

Soap, Camp and Bedlam

Well last week I kind of got back to the real world following my month-long hiatus during the World Cup. It's been a brutal wake up call to reality, but I managed to get some writing done and work on my show.

Here's a piece I wrote for MN Artists about The Mystery of Irma Vep. I decided that since I had the time, I wanted to instead of just writing a review go a little bit more in depth about the style of the piece. I look at the Camp Style, and how the play exemplifies the goofiness of the genre while at the same time offers layers of deeper meaning through its many literary and cultural references.

While I was working on the MN Artists piece, I was greatly saddened to learn that Bedlam has been given notice to move from their current space. The Star Tribune broke the story, and I then I spent last Thursday and Friday morning madly completing an article containing little bit of the backstory of Bedlam's history, and tried to write also about the situation right now. I'm really sad to be losing one of my favorite venues in town to see shows and hang out (I would argue the building has the best deck for having a drink in summer), but hopefully the theater itself will survive and keep its multifaceted programming.

In the meantime, work continues with my one-woman-show, the Keys Experiment, which I'll be performing at the Soap Factory on July 30. I'm very grateful for having had the experience workshopping the piece at Red Eye, and I've been working lately on adding a few scenes. I met with my sound designer Dixie Treichel on Saturday and she's concocting a new soundscape for a movement section I'm going to work on this week. Also, there's an article in Lavender Magazine about the show, written by John Townsend, which I really appreciate him writing.