When is Art Research - presentation by Ronnie Gilbert, folksinger-activist, playwright and actress

I'll start with the Winter Project.

The Winter Project was convened in 1976 by the director Joseph Chaikin who had a grant to gather a group of theater people - actors, musicians, a set designer, a dramaturg and some careful note-takers - for 2 to 3 months each year for the purpose of pure theatrical research.

For the first 2 years, TheWinter Project was not obligated to present performances for an audience. We were free to search and experiment without having to entertain - pure luxury. We created a long list of themes we wanted to explore.  

Our materials over the next 2 years were of course the basic ones of the creative process, our imaginations, our memories, dreams and fantasies. We brought in published material, I remember books and books of paintings, photographs. Everyone looked for material to spark improvisations. Some of us concentrated on spoken material, poems, such as the poems of Muriel Rukeyser. We told stories, some personal, others imagined, some borrowed from plays and looked for different kinds of tellings, alone or with others, with and without music. We had a group story-telling exercise we called "jamming", modeled on jazz improvisation.

We worked at creating exercises, some connected to technical questions, others that generated certain possibilities for improvisations. Building exercises was a big part of our inheritance from the Open Theater. One of Joe Chaikin's great talents was the ability to devise exercises that would stimulate the actor's imagination and at the same time open up a new perspective on gestural or vocal behavior. Often the exercises began as questions: What is the breath like? or How does the voice change?

Most of us had worked with Joe in the Open Theater. We shared a theatrical sensability, and a vocabulary for creating non-linear, collage-like theater. When we wanted words, we looked for ones that could find a place in that aesthetic. We explored the music of the voice, which was only occasionally about singing songs. The musicians, present at all our daily sessions, worked in like manner. Mostly, we asked questions, not to arrive at answers, but as a means of opening up deeper questions.

The third year of the grant required us to present to an audience, and by then most of us were pleased to be working toward a performable product. We were fortunate to be given the rehearsal space of the LaMama ETC Theater, where we ultimately playe. We worked 6 days a week from 11 to 5.

The theme we chose that year for our first piece was Love and Relationships. At first it was to be called Thought Music. But finally it was called Re-Arrangements. The title refers to the arrangements and rearrangements of attitudes, options, bodies and feelings that people make with themselves and each other around love and intimacy.

Mira Rafalowicz was a writer and translator who functioned as a dramaturg for Joe and the company. On the first day of work Joe and Mira gave us a series of lists Mira had compiled: two pages of characters the company might be interested in bringing to life, such as a Dreamer (one who can experience wonder); a released prisoner (inspired by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet; a junkie (different stages on the way to being high); a list of modes of behavior the group could explore; books and authors that might stimulate theatrical images; spaces to arrange and possible elements of the set. Much of the material had come from the explorations of the previous two years, such as the use of interviewing as a technique for developing text and images.

There were also two pages about what kinds of questions interviews might contain. The interviewing technique actually provided much of the content and a lot of the structure for many of the scenes in the final production. Twelve scenes took the form of interviews in which a series of questions were asked of a number of characters, for instance an Ecstatic Person, a Dreamer, a Reserved Person, a Laugher and a group of World Leaders.

In the middle of the piece, the core of the play, was a section titled love moments. This part of a review in the NYTimes described that section with reasonable accuracy:

It is a silent pantomime of three sets of lovers. Two are rigid at a breakfast table that revolves slowly; two are trying to make love on the floor but never quite match with elbows and noses and chins constantly getting in the way, and the third couple adopt various bereft and consolating postures. The characters and the scenes shift continuously; it is a lovely and subtle series of variations on love and what resists it.

In conventional theater, the set designer begins his work before rehearsals start, and the director and actors start rehearsals with a fairly fixed idea of what the stage will look and feel like. In the Winter Project it was just the opposite. Jun Maeda, the designer/builder, a Japanese who spoke only a few words of English, worked from our explorations and improvs. He functioned almost as if he were a member of the acting company, in other words as an improvisor, bringing in a variety materials for the company to play with, saying his favorite word over and over: Imagination, imagination. It sounded like both an explanation and a command.

In developing the interview scenes, the main problem that kept coming up was Who are the questioners? Actually it was one we'd worked on for awhile in the first two years without much success. Two people involved in an interrogation implies a story: who is the questioner, and what is the relationship to the questioned? But for our purpose there was no story, only the act, the condition, of being questioned. So, we struggled with trying to find a sort of common denominator interrogator: a cop? a teacher? a lawyer? Everything, though, suggested some sort of extraneous expectation between the two.

One day Maeda brought in with his collection of imagination playthings a large piece of light colored jersey material sewn into a long tube. He thought it might be useful for performers to make entrances through - a typical Maeda idea. Tina Shepard, who is small and quite athletic thought it was a fun idea so she crawled slowly into the tube. Playing inside the tube she pressed her face into the soft fabric and we saw the impression of a numinous face in the cloth, an intriguingly eery image. Joe asked Tina to begin interviewing Paul, our Reserved Person, from there. We were all stunned at the rightnous of it. The Bag, as it came to be called, was not human, was not anything, and yet it was something very theatrical to watch. And the questions the Bag asked took on a compelling resonance because of the distancing. The main focus was the interview.

For both Re-Arrangements and the following year's play, Tourists and Refugees Maeda supplied us with beautifully ephemeral set pieces, exactly in the mode of our transformation-based productions, a window that came and went, a door that unfolded into something else, a set of huge silken flags to be a moving backdrop to a moving action - all the result of having carefully and playfully researched each other's imaginations.

Re-Arrangements was a fairly gentle play. The next year we created a piece with the theme of home and homelessness, personal and global, people moving from place out of choice or compulsion. Hence, Tourists and Refugees. 

I felt the need of a little hard-core research for the Refugee part, so I sent to the U.N. for material on refugee problems, and I got back a long, long list of statistics: this group and that group of people left these places in 1970 and moved to those other countries; 1972, this other people left their country and went to that place, and so on, and on, an endless list - endless because one knew the list was still growing; it was still happening in the world. How do you put this kind of material onto a stage? And yet, we wanted it, it was so fundamental to what we were attempting to explore.

One day at rehearsal I just started reading it aloud, this boringly appalling list, going on and on. Gradually, I found my voice changing into something from an old memory, that loud, flat, nasal voice calling off the trains coming and going in the big train stations of my traveling youth. And we had it: a line of draped bodies with bundles and suitcases, moving moving, to the accompaniment of this completely indifferent boring voice and some matching instrumental music. There was Joe's questions: What's the breathing? What's the voice?

We composed a series of questions and interviewed several refugees, people who had escaped. We wanted to have some of their powerfully moving statements in the text of the play. But every time any of us spoke any of those lines, no matter how well, it was just an actor saying lines.

The solution was this: The actor found a vocalese to stand in for the refugee speaking in her own language, a non-verbal sound, a sighing, a kind of articulated breathing, keening or moaning, and another actor translated that into English for the audience. We had the pure text, and no one had to act it. Instead each actor had to explore for a vocal emblem for her or his quote. Joe had us work out our vocalizing with one or another of the instruments.

The refugee figure stood in front of a wall upstage with a suitcase or bundle, the Translator on a stool downstage. The circuit of verbal information went from refugee to translator to spectator. My particular vocalese was accompanied by a clarinet. My translator told the audience what I was saying:

She says, when you have to leave, take with you a warmsweater, a few small valuables for bribes, a few photographs.

Keep busy.

Don't pity yourself.

Laugh whenever possible.

Don't wait for God to change things.

I then spoke about researching Mother Jones for my play and read from my essay in my book Face to Face with the Most Dangerous Woman in America