Fathom

Amy Jensen is a storyteller. By which I mean I see her doing exactly the same sort of thing with her ancestral Danish stories as I’m doing with my ancestral Karuk ones. At its most basic state, traditional storytelling is sitting around the fireplace or kitchen table telling tales of yore. But Jensen isn’t just a storyteller – she’s also a dramaturg. And an artist who is both of those things will bring a whole portfolio of theatrical tools to the old stories augmenting them, making them come alive.

Jensen’s work-in-progress Fathom is her telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s Wild Swans. Like any good teller of folk-tales, she uses the story not as a literal script, but as a guideline to which she can bring herself into the story, and the story into herself. And she does this quite literally. She weaves Wild Swans together with her own experiences with loss and depression, and with beautiful oral imagery of a museum exhibit filled with all kinds of weights and measures. Her storytelling also incorporates the choreography and dance of Heather Heiner and the composition and percussion of Levy Lorenzo. But the crux of Fathom is the juxtaposition of Wild Swans with Jensen’s deeply personal experiences. At times, this crux threatens to overwhelm the dance and music, and it’s not until Jensen steps back, or else incorporates herself into the choreography, that those other elements are able to come to the fore.

On the other hand, Fathom is yearning to become an immersive piece of performance. From the dance and music, to Jensen’s evocative oral descriptions of the setting, to her and Heiner’s bringing suds in their hands to incorporate the sense of smell, this piece is bursting at the seams, ready to explode into a quietly passionate experience. But for this to happen, it seems to me that the choreography, music, and set will have to flourish in the same way the storytelling already is.

American Decameron

Practicing with the Kinect

On May 14^th, I participated as a storyteller and dramaturg in Phillip Baldwin’s American Decameron, held in The Tank on

W 45^th St.

The performance gave me an important insight into what the show really was, as well as confirming several ideas I’ve had floating around about collaborative storytelling.

Jose Ojeda ran music from his laptop at the foot of the stage

American Decameron was Phillip’s take on Boccaccio’s Decameron in which a group of young Florentines, men and women, flee the plague and tell each other stories in a remote villa. American Decameron only did minimal homage to Boccaccio’s poem. We crowd-sourced stories on themes that interest Phillip such as getting out of pink-collared jobs, sex, American society as a pyramid scheme, meeting attractive singles, and so on and so forth through a pair of blogs. He selected some of us to tell stories from the blogs while using a Kinect to VJ stock video and audio on a projection-wall behind us. During the course of the play, we stopped using the Kinect. As it turns out, it was only a distraction from out stories. I suppose it was similar to playing the piano while telling a story – your hands and body act separately from your mouth – but none of us had enough experience with the Kinect to play it while we told our stories. So about half-way through American Decameron became one person after another walking to the front of the stage and telling a story. That tells me that that is what it always was at its core, and the Kinect and the other toys that Phillip insisted on using were only fluff that got in the way of American Decameron being what it really was.

So American Decameron was about stories culled from our blogs, not about the Kinect. I’m not sure that crowd-sourcing through blogs is the best way to gather stories for a theatrical event. Blogs are a way to facilitate minimal communication. For example, I can talk to you through this blog when I choose. But I don’t know who I’m talking to, nor do I necessarily expect a response. I could very well be speaking into a vacuum. Because of my low expectations, you don’t have to respond. Were we speaking in person, I would know who my audience is, and I would expect and probably get a response. A real conversation could happen. These blogs are poor substitutes for conversation. They are helpful, in the case of this blog, when the potential interlocutors may be in the next state, the next time zone, or the next country. But in the case of American Decameron, all of the interlocutors shared a common geographic location at least once a week. The use of blogs and crowd-sourcing actually inhibited the creation of American Decameron.

Warming up with the Kinect and music

A better approach would have been that of classic devising, as I know it from Amy Jensen’s [here now then]. A small group of people meet in the evening and tell each other stories on the themes set out by the director. The director would then guide the ensemble through improvising on those stories to create a single show with a single spine. We would add in toys like the Kinect only if they actively contributed to the spine of the play. We would have known what we had before we were on stage. American Decameron has potential, but only if it ceases to be distracted by new technologies that only serve to cloud what it really is: a storytelling revue based on themes inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron.