#devised theater

We started rehearsal on a new moon in Aquarius, a time particularly good for setting intentions and manifesting the things we want. 

We began with a ritual, for which you will need pen and paper:

1. Get comfortable in your space - light a candle, grab a blanket, whatever you need to feel good where you are.

2. Conjure a connection - invoke whatever forces you wish in order to support you; they could be deities, the four elements, Audre Lorde, whoever you want. Think for a moment and mentally reach out, invite those beautiful forces in.

3. Grab pen and paper and write 2 lists - a list of things you desire, things you want to call in, and a list of things you want to let go of. Take as much time as you need. Whenever you can, think in the present - “I am” versus “I will”.

4. With your mic on or off as you desire, declare your desires - actively call them in. Read the list, lingering on things if that feels right to you, repeating something if you feel compelled to. 

5. Then, banish the things you want to let go of, actively sending them away. If the thing in question was once doing good but perhaps is no longer useful to you, you could say thank you before letting it go. If the thing in question is toxic or harmful, yeet it right out of your life with no hesitation.

2pm Performance today, at the Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul! IPHIGENIA & OTHER DAUGHTERS is getting people talking! Hope to see you there! Presented by Theatre Unbound and directed by Amber Bjork. 

I’ve been in the process of writing “the lost loser, a devised play” since my senior year of college. It began as a spark. A wild idea for my senior capstone. I knew I was going to work alone and I knew that I wanted it to come from the heart. At the same time, I stumbled upon the pixelwhip. This flow toy opened my eyes to even more possibilities in the realm of devising. “the lost loser,” as my capstone, became this exploration of heartbreak and anxious dreaming. I touched on the budding realizations of sexuality, the pain of misplaced attraction, and the roadblocks of self doubt. The end product became the groundwork of a bigger story I wanted to tell. I knew I wanted to pick it up again postgrad, after settling down in Chicago.

I quickly became wrapped up in my serving job, putting others plans before my own priorities, and just burying myself in other commitments. It got swept up in living life. Time passed, people moved on , I switched jobs. I thought there would be more time. Then, my world came crumbling down. I experience a string of unpleasant trauma and I didn’t know how to return back to the work that I just made time for. Picking up the pencil or turning on my pixelwhip was impossible. I was disconnected because I was afraid of artistically exploring what happened.

What followed was three years of coping through cannabis and disconnecting further from my artistic voice. When I did return back to performing, there was a barrier between me and the work. I fabricated how I felt during the worst parts of the pandemic instead of being honest, because I wasn’t ready. I missed out on opportunities of healing through my work because I didn’t want it to happen so publicly.

But now. Today. Things have shifted and pieces are coming back together at last. I feel like I’m ready to have conversations that need to be had. I’m going to try my best. I’m going to walk confidently through my healing.

Ivy, Art History, talks about the way women and mothers are depicted in media in "Young Mother Sewing"

I just started working on a devised theater piece and in the first rehearsal I went to, we had a visual prompt! We were discussing mother-daughter relationships in media and to get the ball rolling we looked at Young Mother Sewing by Mary Cassatt. We each went around and said words that we thought described this scene. A few of the many words we came up with were bright, intent, linen, curious,…

As a coven, we organically developed a tradition of citation - whenever we did a warm-up or referenced something that impacted one of us, we made sure to share where our knowledge came from with the rest of the group. We also took a lot of inspiration from music and bonded together over a collaborative playlist. 

While we did not share all of our inspirations (since there were so many!) with the audience, here is one example of how we invoked the various artists we were inspired by in the performance, from the Gesture & Music room:

This eve, we would like to call forth the strength and energy of those living, breathing bodies who have inspired our practice and its elements. May they grant us movement alongside our art and our practice and our coven. We call forth the energies of the great Buffy St. Marie, the astounding Florence Welch, the effervescent Kate Bush, the mystical Sharon Spence, and the ethereal FKA Twigs. May these witches grant us groundedness in our bodies, connectivity to our souls, and progression through our art.

In the Gesture and Music room, the coven members leading the space invoked musical and literary figures who served as inspirations for us in our process, the led the audience through a gesture and rhythm exercise.

First, they were invited to tap a rhythm on their bodies, playing with tempo, rhythm, and intensity. As they tapped, coven member Matthew Gover read a piece of text inspired by the coven’s incantation creation work. 

Then, coven member Nicole Bates started playing music on her guitar, introducing a new element to the space and inviting the audience to grow their gestures and respond to the music as well as the following prompts:

Gesture that softens and holds

Gesture that energizes and intensifies 

Gesture to smash the worry

In the Rage room, coven member Helen Rahman delivered a poem she wrote on the theme of Rage, and then the audience experienced a guided meditation about the nature of their rage, where they had a conversation with the rage that lives within them and perhaps understood it more deeply.

Once the audience felt more in touch with their rage, they were invited to respond to the following prompts in the chat while the coven members leading the room wrote them down to create three poppets for the final ritual:

What are you angry about right now? Who are you angry at right now?

What or who makes you angry from your past?

What invokes feelings of injustice and betrayal?

What systems do you want to burn to the ground?