|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
| History Member Bios Note from the Artistic Director | ||||||
|
Note from the Artistic Director
Since moving to New York in 1996, I have found myself working with remarkable people, people I knew I would continue to work with. I began meeting with these people weekly, with the idea of beginning to create an ensemble, a company of improvisational performers and thinking collaborators. Each time I direct a show for a particular company or producer I see that what I long to do in the theatre is have continuity, build something, work with actors who trust me and whom I trust because we share a history and a common way of working. I am convinced there is power in an ensemble that surpasses the power of personality and even the power of a single remarkable production. An ensemble stands for faith in the art itself; it can be a living example of devotion to theatre, of the development of certain principles, a place to experiment, to risk, to fail. A place where actors and designers and directors can look to an outcome beyond opening night, where one production's shortcomings can feed the success of the next production, where the local community can come and be influenced by the work of our theatre community and vice versa. It should also have diverse members contributing, diverse in background: ethnic, educational, life experience, art experience.What are other things this company would share? An integration of movement and dance as an inevitable part of theatre. Improvisation/spontaneous theatre as a constant rehearsal tool and a way to keep actors performing between scripted projects. A devotion to new writing and writers for the theatre both within and outside the group. An involvement in good literature-writing for the stage and potentially for the stage. And a philosophy of discovery. Peter Brook, the famous director, talks about this. A theatrical production is created through a strange and often treacherous journey. The journey takes place primarily with director and actors in the room together, not primarily in the actors fulfilling what the director has composed in private. This may be what I am most devoted to. It is a messy and often insecure process. A director can and must conjure up vision upon vision, but ultimately the ensemble itself must make the play live. The production we eventually show to an audience will happily be one I never could have imagined. Theatre has to be born alive and continue to live for the run of the production. The act of entering a space to sit in the dark or the light and watch people move and talk, for no gain but to listen and understand, something holy must take place, connections must be made, hilarity, insight, recognition, catharsis perhaps. No small thing. And it is public. It is not as secure and private as reading a book, it is delightful in a different way, public in a way the TV is not, live and fallible in a way the movies are not. Dangerous in that these are human beings—every night human beings moving and speaking from their souls. If it is made right, something genuine is bound to happen. Something hair raising. The history of this emerging group goes back at least five years, beginning in large part with Danila Korogodsky and I. Danila is a Russian set designer who has designed sets for the Lyric Opera, is currently designing a Kurt Weil opera for the Spoletto opera festival and is head of the Design department at The University of California at Long Beach. He and I have worked on eight shows together in the past five years. We always seem to have a set budget of under 500 dollars compared to the $50,000 or so of his current opera. Still, he loves our work together and keeps agreeing to do crazy shows in crazy spaces for crazily small sums of money. "It is a family," he says of a potential theatre company. "Yes that would be nice." For me that family can be no insular club, but rather an ongoing relationship with the actors, designers who have discovered me, whom I have discovered. Yes we share a common ideal, a seriousness about theatre, a sense of adventure and this extends outward to include the audience as well, an irreplaceable ingredient in live theatre.
Shira Piven |
||
|
SITE MAP © 2002 Water Theatre Company, Inc. |
|||