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Also this issue: Good Things,
Small Packages |
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July 25-31, 2002
cover story
Is it theater? Is it dance? Whatever you call it, Philly's unique brand of movement theater is making international news.
 Photo by: Michael T. Regan |
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Call them NewPigLong.
Or PigHeadParadise.
Or don’t combine them at all, because NewPigLong is not one entity, one methodology or even one genre. It’s three companies — New Paradise Laboratories, Pig Iron Theatre Co. and Headlong Dance Theater — that are making Philadelphia a nationally known center for a hybrid performance form that’s at the crest of the latest thinking in theater and movement art.
They've won multiple awards -- Obies, Bessies, Pews -- and attracted a growing fan base. They live, work and play together. And the success of NewPigLong has encouraged other young and innovative theater artists to create here, many of them moving to Philadelphia to do so.
This phenomenon is of more than just local importance. According to Mark Russell, executive director of New York's Performance Space 122 and a highly respected observer of the contemporary theater scene, NewPigLong and its ilk are making work that's worthy of national and even international notice.
Philadelphia's theater community has slowly been building a national rep over the last 10 years or so. But now we may be seeing the creation of an art form that's uniquely our own.
One thing's for sure -- NewPigLong couldn't have happened anywhere but here.
 aradise found: New Paradise's artistic director Whit MacLaughlin and company members (l-r) Jeb Kreager, Lee Ann Etzold, Mary McCool, Matt Saunders and Aaron Mumaw. Photo by: Michael T. Regan |
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NewPigLong’s constituents aren’t particularly fond of the nickname, which is the brainchild of Fringe Festival producing director Nick Stuccio. Pig Iron’s co-artistic director Dan Rothenberg quips that it “sounds like a strange Indonesian dish”; New Paradise’s artistic director Whit MacLaughlin coined the “PigHeadParadise” alternative.
But whatever their collective label, these three groups are individually making names for themselves.
This year MacLaughlin's work with New Paradise won both an Obie (the theater award administered by the Village Voice) and a $50,000 Pew Fellowship for the Arts.
Headlong, already the winner of a Bessie (the Oscar of the dance world), headlines this year's Fringe Festival; its piece, Britney's Inferno, was commissioned by the Fringe through a $51,000 grant from the Pew's Dance Advance program.
This week Pig Iron opens a remounting of Shut Eye, an extremely well-received show that debuted at last year's Fringe. The show was created in collaboration with legendary Open Theater director Joseph Chaikin. Last month's issue of American Theatre Magazine used Pig Iron's name in a cover teaser for an article on summer festivals -- prominently placing the company next to such well-known performers as the Wooster Group and Richard Foreman.
The latest good news: The company recently found out that Toni Morrison has selected it to run this year's Princeton Atelier. Each year since the Atelier began in 1994, Morrison chooses artists to lead a group of Princeton students in a collaborative project that results in a public performance or exhibition. The honor of leading the Atelier has previously been bestowed upon people like world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, filmmaker Louis Massiah, novelist A.S. Byatt and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. Pig Iron mounted a run of Shut Eye at Princeton last year and was encouraged by theater faculty and students to apply for the Atelier.
Pig Iron, New Paradise and Headlong all fall into what Performance Space 122's Russell has dubbed "performance theater." Russell cited Pig Iron and New Paradise in a recent Village Voice article about this still-developing genre. In an interview with City Paper, Russell defined his term as "a way of trying to capture a snapshot of what I feel is going on in theater at the moment. And I've been looking globally for the last 10 years at a lot of independent theater companies that are developing their own work. My thesis on this is that [these groups] are using a lot of what one might call performance art techniques, or experimental theater techniques, to develop their work. A lot of this [type of work] gets to the real core of theater. I mean, if you put the gun to my head, it's just all theater, you know? What makes it radical is that it's good theater.
"And why is it good theater, not good film or good dance?" Russell asks. "It's because it's dealing with the real presence of the actor, [and] the presence of a person in front of you telling a story, or doing an action, is the core of theater, and that's what moves it forward." Russell commends Philadelphia for its strong community of artists, adding that "if they were here in New York, they probably could not make this work, and it would not be as rich when they were finished with it."
He's not alone in feeling that something special is brewing in Philly. Cathy Edwards of Dance Theater Workshop in New York says she is interested in hosting a series spotlighting work out of Philadelphia because the performances are so consistently unique. "I just went to see the Moxie show a month or so ago," she says. "And it seemed like a really supportive and vibrant and connected community of artists." Speaking specifically of Headlong, with whom she's had a 10-year working relationship, Edwards notes, "They're bringing this quite developed and focused theatricality to a movement-based company, and I think that's rare even in New York."
The NewPigLongs (the PigHeadParadisos?) aren't the only groups involved in Philly's "performance theater" scene. Groups like Crescendo Theatre (a hybrid theater/music company) and Hotel Obligado (working in the commedia dell'arte tradition) have recently chosen to live and work here. The Arden recently hired Headlong's Nichole Canuso to choreograph one of its shows. Groups like Moxie, Paule Turner's Court, Mum Puppettheatre, Thaddeus Phillips and Mark Lord's Big House (plays & spectacles) are also a vibrant part of the physical theater/dance community. Well-established company Theatre Exile, which has explored physical theater in its work over the years, is now moving away from a traditional season of shows and toward a more collaborative, organic process, back to its roots. Exile's artistic director Joe Canuso (father of Nichole) says, "You sometimes fall into the pattern of doing a more traditional play that people recognize until you develop a name for yourself and people come out because they know the kind of work that you do. ... I think [now] we can take the time to work on pieces and use our name to pull people in." Canuso's next project will be a collaboration with Nichole, a physical piece based on Italian folktales (for which Nichole received a $10,000 Dance Advance grant).
Melissa Franklin, director of Pew Fellowships for the Arts, says Pew decided to offer grants in performance art this year because there has been so much of it popping up recently. (The category hadn't been considered in seven years.)
So why Philly? In a practical sense, it’s cheaper and easier to live here than in New York. Russell says there are fewer “distractions” here, and MacLaughlin says that he is amazed by the number of working actors there are in Philly, as compared to acting waiters in New York. There is also a strong community here, thanks in no small part to NewPigLong. Artists in different disciplines come together to share their crafts each summer at Dance Theater Camp, a program created by Headlong. (They changed it from Dance Camp to Dance Theater Camp when the proliferation of groups doing hybrid work became apparent.) The three groups use each other’s members in shows, and members of the three companies even live together. Some admit that the community is in danger of becoming too insular. (“It is a clique,” Headlong’s Andrew Simonet laughs. “It is. I’m sorry, that’s part of the way art works.”) But it’s also a great example for students in the city to see a group of artists working together and succeeding.
There are still steps to be taken before Philly becomes the place to do physical theater. There's no Ph.D. program in theater studies in town, which many argue would raise the level of the work here, and a lack of affordable venues for performers is a constant issue. And even though presenters in New York are clamoring for these groups and the companies have press-clipping files stuffed with raves from papers in several languages, locally they've got nowhere near the fame of more mainstream entertainments.
In the end, though, these artists who all chose to move to Philly (out of all three groups in NewPigLong, there are no native Philadelphians) are remarkably happy here. They enjoy Philly still being somewhat under the radar -- New Paradise company member Mary McCool likens this town to the "secret bat cave" where artists can hone their skills -- but they're trying to recruit more young artists to move here. Even funding, while still a tempestuous issue, is relatively good. For these artists, it's just a matter of overcoming Philly's reputation as a tryout town or a second-rate arts city. As Simonet puts it, borrowing an erstwhile ad slogan, for these performers "Philadelphia isn't as bad as Philadelphians say it is."
“I feel like we’re ambassadors of some sort,” says New Paradise member Lee Ann Etzold, who has performed with all three companies. “I’m satisfied that Philadelphia is represented in such different ways.”
What are those ways, exactly?
In the spirit of collaboration (which all three groups are founded on), let's start with the similarities. All three companies are obsessed with process. Through extensive research and months of working on the material, the act of creating the work becomes as central, in some ways, as the work itself. The pieces made by these groups are in constant flux, not in the sense that they're improvised or drastically changing, but in the sense that the conversation about the work never ends, which could lead to a change the night before a show opens, six weeks into a run or a tour or even years later when a piece is remounted. While it's very typical for a dance company like Headlong to create a piece and then make it part of a repertoire for future use, it's quite rare for a theater company to do the same.
Pig Iron and New Paradise also break away from tradition by not making the script, or the text, the most important aspect of a production. The physical embodiment of a character, of a scene, of a story is just as important as text in their shows. (And some don't have much: Members of Headlong, which once based a dance on Ulysses, joke that sometimes their dances have more text than one of New Paradise's plays). Both New Paradise and Pig Iron got their first big Philly breaks at the Philly Fringe Festival, and Nick Stuccio says to some extent this non-reliance on text is the reason why. "It's not about taking someone, a playwright, and paying homage to them in some way," Stuccio says. "[This work] is built in a different way, it's built collaboratively, through physical techniques. It's not about the cute quips and the language, it's about the body of work that goes on to get the performances very lively and interesting."
The other important similarity between all three groups is the type of performer they require: someone who can act and someone who can express himself or herself physically (or in Headlong's case, vice versa). These versatile performers are the heart of what has made this work successful locally and internationally, and it seems that once the basic boundary between actor and dancer is broken, the sky's the limit. Actors in New Paradise design sets for Pig Iron and Headlong; the members of the three groups break out of their companies and direct and produce other work with and for each other. The Arden's resident director and Fringe board member Aaron Posner has watched these groups grow from the beginning, and he is most intrigued by the artists themselves. "The conversations are fascinating," he says. "You have these new combinations of directors, actors, dancers. [Take New Paradise's] Lee Etzold -- what is she? Other than a phenomenon? [She's a] great model of this new kind of performer." The role of this new performer, says New Paradise member Matt Saunders (one of the aforementioned set designers, who's engaged to Headlong's Christy Lee), is to let go of the necessity to define an artist in one role. "As the lines start to get blurred, there's still this unnecessary obligation to label it one way or the other," he says. "But it's really about the gray areas."
For all that these groups share, however, their individual missions and styles of performance are quite distinct from one another.
Many Pig Iron company members trained at the École Internationale de Thé‰tre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Jacques Lecoq, who died in 1999, was a visionary teacher of physical theater, starting with his demonstrations in occupied France during World War II using movement, dance and mime to protest fascism. He founded his school in 1956 as a place to share the insights he gained on miming and commedia during his travels and studies in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Lecoq's vision of mime was not that of the street performer trapped in an imaginary box; he saw mime and clown work as a way of giving the expressions of the body as much dramatic importance as the expressions of the voice, or the text.
Pig Iron was founded in 1995 by artistic directors Dan Rothenberg, Dito van Reigersberg and Quinn Bauriedel, all graduates of Swarthmore College. Pig Iron's company consists of Emmanuelle Delpech, Geoff Sobelle, Cassandra Friend (all Lecoq-trained), Perry Fertig, James Sugg and Suli Holum. They've done a wide variety of work in their seven years. After traveling to the Edinburgh Fringe, they took the first Philly Fringe Festival by storm with the silent show Cafeteria, which follows the role of the communal dining room through three stages of life: kids in the school lunchroom, corporate suits in the staff cafeteria and an elderly couple in the dining hall of a retirement home. Pig Iron persuaded Stuccio to let them open in one of the biggest houses at the festival. Van Reigersberg remembers being called to take his place for the start of the show, only to end up waiting what seemed like an unusually long time. A stage manager informed him that the show was holding. The reason? "There was a line around the block," he says. "It was very exciting, it was very, like, ŒWe've arrived.'"
In 2001, Pig Iron created the disturbing Anodyne, performed on the first floor and basement of Smoke. On the first floor was an art gallery with photos apparently taken during the second World War, and an opening reception complete with wine and cheese. The audience then descended into the basement into the horrible world of the photos. It was only after leaving the show that the viewers learned that the whole art exhibit was a fake. This year the group worked with shadow puppets in creperie Beau Monde, and made just about everybody's top-10 lists for the season (and created a ton of Barrymore buzz) with the three-woman clown show Flop. Pig Iron is currently creating a cabaret piece centered on Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter, and it plans to remount the show that got them international raves, the World War I-based Gentlemen Volunteers.
Rothenberg notes the problem with defining a group doing such varied work. ("We're just trying to give theater a good name," he jokes, prompting van Reigersberg to break into Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" -- "We give theater a good name.") "Our way of pitching ourselves has been to please ourselves and to call ourselves a dance-clown-theater ensemble so that people look at it and go, ŒWell, I don't know what that is, but I know that might be something I would like,'" Rothenberg says.
Bauriedel says, "I like this term hybrid, that it's hybrid performance. It's like those cross-trainer shoes.... It's not a little moment of dance, a little moment of clown, a little moment of theater; it's kind of this intersection."
Pig Iron also loves to catch its audience off-guard. Says Rothenberg, "We love to say, ŒWell, we're doing a play and it's called Cafeteria,' and people come in and there's no words, and we didn't tell anybody there were no words and ... you can feel this tension after 30 minutes, like this ŒAre they ever going to speak? Nobody told me they weren't going to speak, what have I gotten into?'"
But it's not just theater traditionalists that Pig Iron is playing with. Shut Eye, with Joseph Chaikin's name associated with it, was sure to draw "the '60s, '70s, experimental theater crowd," as Rothenberg puts it. The show, however, starts off in a very traditional format, and, Rothenberg says, "You can hear people shifting [and saying] ŒWhere's the avant-garde characterization?' There are things which are a little like a sitcom and a little like a musical in it, which is sort of the last thing you'd expect from Joe Chaikin.
"I would say that a lot of the different work comes out of a dare," Rothenberg muses. "You know, wouldn't it be funny if we really did a play with no words, or if we really did a fake art opening."
"We also think about it like, ŒWhat's the last thing that people would expect for them to do?'" says Bauriedel. "We want people to say, ŒPig Iron's doing what? A shadow puppet play? In a restaurant?'"
New Paradise Laboratories has also been known to ruffle a few feathers in its audiences. Stuccio recalls getting into an argument with two Fringe-goers after they attended a New Paradise show. "They wanted their money back," Stuccio says. "They said to me, ŒThis is not a play. You told us this was a play and this is not a play.'" Stuccio did not refund the couple's money. MacLaughlin responds gallantly, by noting, "Think of the legions of people who have inspired ŒI want my money back.' It's really good company." MacLaughlin even seems to enjoy the spectrum of reactions he gets from his work with New Paradise. "One person comes up [after a show] with tears in their eyes and says, ŒI am so moved,'" he says. "And the next person says, ŒFuck you.' [Try] wrapping your brain around that."
MacLaughlin moved New Paradise to Philly in 1995 from Virginia, mainly for MacLaughlin to be with his now-wife, local actress Catharine Slusar. His company -- Etzold, McCool, Saunders, Jeb Kreager, Aaron Mumaw and Rene Hartl -- eventually all followed. MacLaughlin was a founding member of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, and he spent 17 years with the company.
New Paradise's work has more of a pop mentality than many of Pig Iron's productions, and the shows are often presented in trilogies: The Loverboy Chronicles consisted of odes to James Bond (Gold Russian Finger Love), the Beatles (the Obie-winning Fab 4 Reach the Pearly Gates) and Hugh Hefner (This Mansion Is a Hole). Their next show, debuting in November, Rrose Selavy Takes a Lover in Philadelphia (based on Marcel Duchamp's famous alter ego), kicks off a new trilogy. "I think our pieces are pretty allusive," MacLaughlin says. "And use popular culture as a starting point, much as the Greek dramatists did, [using] stories that in some way are meaningful already to everybody. It's not so much what the story is as how it's told."
New Paradise's pieces "require an almost meditative sort of attention during the performance, and then a good amount of time to sort of chew on the stuff and digest it afterward. The pieces are an hour long, but we hope to take up, like, six months of your time," MacLaughlin says, laughing.
"The trick," he says, "is to find the right piece whose story breaks open in a number of different ways, so there's a way of reflecting something back. ... It's kind of a postmodern strategy. But really, the audience doesn't need to pay much attention to that, because by the time they get to the piece it's like a homeopathic tincture -- it's been boiled and reduced and boiled and reduced, so all you have is the whiff of things left; you should see all those subtle aromas of all the things that went into the soup, they should remain in some small dose."
 'long form: (L-R) Headlong's Nichole Canuso, David Brick, Heather Murphy, Christy Lee and Andrew Simonet. Photo by: Christina M. Felice |
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As for Headlong, its founders, Amy Smith, David Brick and Andrew Simonet, met at Wesleyan and formed the group in 1993. The company now includes Lee, Nichole Canuso and Heather Murphy. Headlong is well-known in the New York dance scene as well as Philadelphia's, and, like New Paradise, it also has a definite eye for pop culture. Headlong's Bessie was for a show called St*r W*rs, and, on a recent visit to their offices at Lorin Lyle's dance space The Parlor, on Broad Street, the three founders were caught studying a copy of teenybopper choreographer Darrin Henson's instructional video Darrin's Dance Grooves. Of course, it was research for Britney's Inferno, in which the perky pop star meets Dante's vision of hell (Henson shows off the moves from Ms. Spears' song "(You Drive Me) Crazy").
While Headlong is first and foremost a dance company, Dance Theater Workshop's Cathy Edwards notes that "what's compelling and interesting about them is that they are creating this funny, non-esoteric blend of dance theater, and they're not an abstract modern dance company by any stretch. They make these brilliantly witty observations about contemporary life, through text and movement."
Simonet says the group first came to Philadelphia nearly by accident. While they were contemplating where to move, "Amy [Smith] and I were staying with a friend of mine who lived here in Philadelphia, and we went to a dance concert and we met some people in the dance community here and it just slowly grew on us, and out of nowhere, it went from not being on the list to being the winner."
Headlong sees their work differing from Pig Iron's and New Paradise's not necessarily in terms of genre, but more in terms of "intellectual and aesthetic philosophies," as Brick puts it.
In the end, it's all about performance. To Headlong, "performance isn't something that's part of your obligation, of your identity as the liberal, middle-class citizen [who] circles the date on the calendar and shows up," Simonet says. "It's something very different. It's something that's fun and in the moment, [somewhere on] the spectrum between risky and terrible to entertaining."
Headlong's Dance Theater Camp workshops offer an extremely focused look at the minute details of hybrid dance theater work. In Bauriedel's workshop last month, a group of 10 artists practiced mime techniques, but Bauriedel's careful critiques shunned any street-mime silliness. After a trio of performers parodied ballerinas in a sketch, Bauriedel cut through the onlookers' laughter to ask, "Can we do something incredibly funny or incredibly moving by taking it seriously?"
The essential reason that this work is being taken seriously outside of Philadelphia is that, ironically, for a long time this town was not taken seriously. “It’s the underdog phenomenon,” New Paradise’s Saunders says. “It’s a lot easier to be active when there’s less at stake.”
Simonet sees Philly as a good testing ground for experimental work. "Part of Philly's great, strange vibe is that people kind of take you at face value and say, ŒAll right, you're doing a weird dance-theater concert; I'll come see it.'"
Because it's had time to simmer, the work produced here speaks for itself as outsiders look in on our theater scene. "I feel like cities like San Francisco have this [attitude of] ŒWe're the amazing cities for art,' but it's actually really hard to start a dance company there," Simonet muses. "And Philadelphia has the sense of ŒOh yeah, we're this sucky backwater that no one cares about.' And it's actually really an incredible place, and that's part of the great thing, that the hype is not at all above the practice." Rothenberg says optimistically, "I think we're just on the verge of getting the word out to young artists to come to Philadelphia."
The encouraging vibe here is aided by funders like Pew (and, through Pew, Bill Bissell's Dance Advance grants) and the William Penn Foundation. Though there will always be complaints, the funding opportunities here, along with powerful presenters like the Fringe and the Painted Bride, are a huge drawing point for the city. "It's amazing, actually," Brick says. "We talk to our peers in other states, in other cities, from New York to Seattle, they just can't believe ... that we get [this] kind of institutional support, meager as it seems."
Performance Space 122's Russell muses that another selling point for Philly is "possibly that it's easier to support and rehearse and keep an ensemble focused in a city like Philadelphia than it is in some of these other cities where there's more distractions."
And the work that's incubated here is more than just good for Philadelphia; according to Russell, it could be important for the future of an art form.
"We need to get these folks funding and support and audiences now, 'cause they're gonna keep Philadelphia on the map, [and] they're gonna keep the U.S. on the map, artistically."
