Capital Fringe: Polaroid Stories

— by Lauren R. Alexander —

After a wildly successful production of Naomi Iizuka’s Polaroid Stories at American University in November 2012, Blind Pug Arts Collective picked up the opportunity to remount this show at the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival.

Choosing to direct this show not once, but twice was no issue for Jonelle Walker, director of Polaroid Stories and co-founder of Blind Pug. The stories told throughout the rhythmic vignettes are both mythical (adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and realistic in scope – which is a very appealing subject and medium for Walker

“I knew and know young people with these stories, with these backgrounds, with illusions of grandeur while living on next to nothing. What I really like about Polaroid Stories, however, is that the illusions of grandeur are not simply a statement on indulgence and youth, but they are used as a coping mechanism. It is a play that uses myth medicinally. Remounting brings those stories to the wider, brighter Fringe audiences.”

Polaroid Stories follows ten street kids, hustlers, and thugs as they re-create their “fucked up” stories by the realm of self-fashioning and shape-shifting gods. The relationships of some characters are common: Echo and Narcissus, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Other stories are based on Dionysus, and Ariadne and Theseus.

The entire show has a beautiful underscore designed by Niusha Nawab. The songs and sounds he has chosen have clearly influenced the actors’ choices, and the actors’ choices have clearly influenced his design. As a part of the artistic collaboration, Nawab and Walker worked very closely to create a very specific environment and the songs were chosen “based purely on the feel of what that moment desired, like romance and longing [including some Elvis!]….the sounds were always changing based on what Jonelle was thinking as well as how the play moved.”

Are you ready to see what you get when you transform characters from Greek mythology into homeless drug addicts?

Presented as part of the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival, a program of the Washington, D.C. non-profit Capital Fringe.

 

— Lauren R. Alexander is a co-founder of Blind Pug Arts Collective and an Arts Administrator in Washington, DC. —
Part of Fringe Peeks, our “in their own words” series