DRAMATURGY
LET'S COLLABORATE
Writers and composers often hire me to give input on new plays and musicals at the development stage.
Are you looking to:
- Connect with the Right Creative Collaborators
- Receive Dramaturgical Feedback
- Receive Guidance About Opportunities and Residencies for Your Project
My services and a description of how I work with artists are listed below.
Services
How I Work with Artists
Playwright, Max Reuben emailed me a series of short scenes. There were no character delineations, just a dash at the beginning of each new line. The scenes weren’t connected to each other in any way, but I felt that some of them explored what was banal about the most important moments in life and some of them explored what was extraordinary about the most banal moments of life.
We approached the work in a variety of different ways first reordering scenes and discussing different ways to structure them. After getting in a room with actors to hear the writing out loud, I had the instinct they needed movement and music. We workshopped the scenes with choreographer Jennifer Jancuska and composer/sound designer Max Gordon. In some experiments, we played with the physical life of the scenes and transitions and in others, we just used the text as a starting point to explore the themes through music and movement. Powers choreographed by Jennifer was a result of this work.
At two different writers retreats we realized these simple open scenes changed drastically when brought to life by different actors. Through our collaboration, Max learned that his piece is about how random life is and that the concept of randomization wants to be present in both the form of the play and the content.
Our hope is to continue to develop the project in a way that would allow the scenes to progress in a random order at each performance and to assign the actors in a randomized way as well. The act of being open and not-knowing is allowing the play to slowly but surely become what it always wanted to be. |