How are we to recover from what divides us? How do we maintain hope in the face of catastrophe from climate crisis? Such questions are not new; in fact the clamor of them pounding for our attention has so dominated our conversation and full-throttled crashed into our current existential angst it’s almost deafening. However, Annalisa Dias of The Welders, with a handful of maker-friends, has created a shared experience that is both theatrical and anti-theatrical, provocative and yet gently uplifting, surprising but at the same time comforting.
The Welders is a DC playwrights collective which attracted attention immediately upon its founding by its non-traditional framework, offering an umbrella and support to a group of playwrights who made good on their promise to support each other through the process of writing and then producing each others’ plays. Even more eye-opening, at the end of three years, the whole collective rolls over to the next “generation” with a new group of writers, and the process is repeated. (They have just announced generation 3.0 members.)
The company promotes risk-taking and thereby truth-saying by its members. The design and commitment to the aptly-named Heartspace feels very authentic; its members have created not just a trans-disciplinary performance piece, but around it sponsored workshops, a community clothes drive, an urban-foraging hike, and an eco-celebratory puppet parade on the Anacostia River, all in one week.
I’ll admit I am sometimes leery of participatory theatre. One of my first experiences was attending a performance by a Spanish guerilla theatre company who collectively filed their teeth and herded an audience into a dark warehouse and then scared the bejesus out of us by a series of confrontations and (seemingly) mowing us down with what looked and sounded like buzz-saws.
This piece by The Welders was an immersive experiences of an entirely different kind, with lots of guidance for the audience and revealed a design process marked by earnest and gentle thoughtfulness. There were moments of delight and even enchantment, but the real gift in this work was creating the premise that they (the performers/characters) really needed us (the audience) to continue their work.
HEARTSPACE closes November 23, 2019. Details and tickets
First we were invited and walked “into the underground.” (Having just come up out of the a very literal underground from producing a 30th Anniversary work celebrating Vaclav Havel and his Velvet Revolution at Dupont Underground, I felt an immediate kinship and love for this – albeit smaller – alternative space.)
Last evening at Anacostia Playhouse, I immediately found oneself making a pilgrimage down a dark corridor corridor where driftwood and odd flotsam and jetsam from the Anacostia River glowed and seemed to float by.
Entering an open space, the audience was seated in a kind of anteroom for a prologue. In front of us a curtain of white filaments upon which were projected faces of a man and a woman. These were our leading characters, survivors “skyped in” from the future. They represented us or rather our descendants 49 generations ahead and they wanted to link us to the great task post-apocalyptic awakening and saving of the world. But first we were interviewed en masse by these giant “talking heads” to make sure we were the right ones.
[adsanity_rotating align=”aligncenter” time=”10″ group_id=”1455″ /]
Answering questions of precise date, time and place where we were, we then proceeded to give more complex answers in their investigation. (A few audience member had personal experiences with effect of climate change.) We also obliged their request to introduce us to each other. Their text incorporated both useful exposition and, thankfully, humor, so avoided over-earnestness.
Soon a puppet came out. This was, it turns out, “Lucy,” chosen to represent our first ancestor, whose bones were found in 1974. Turns out Lucy had some responses to being discovered, prodded, tested and “named.” Cecilia Cackley had created with a curiously shaped skull and a few bone shards a most emotive little creature.
Perhaps the least successful “scene” was when a couple of audience members were asked to work with the stringy curtain, mycelium, that somehow connected Lucy and us. Both the image of this “alta-verse” and the actual manipulation felt awkward, tangled, and a trace too obtuse.
But at every stage, invitations were extended, needed accommodations made; no one was coerced. Soon we were invited back into a womb-like chamber that resembled an ancient grotto with glowing cylinder pillars, referred to as “ribs,” that seemed to hold up the ceiling. There were chairs offered, but everyone in our audience of not quite 20 joined our guide, McQuown, on the floor.
Here any semblance of “performance” was abandoned. McQuown carried their iphone and began recording statements elicited from audience members. They prompted us with questions: What were our feelings about the climate crisis? What might the apocalypse/future look like? What would we need as survivors? What would we do? (“Dance!” said one man.)
There seemed to grow a consensus that the new society would be post-technology and post-industrialization, well all that is except the pesky iphone. (I was aware that people had moved from dire angst and statements like “I’ve decided not to have children” to much more upbeat dreams.
I also became aware by photos being snapped and the collective gathering in the shadows to hear us that we had become the participating performers, that in fact in real time we were creating an ad hoc community.
Only a handful of shows left of HEARTSPACE as performance. But if you feel you need to blow off the Congressional hearings or want to put out the fires of your own debilitating environmental angst, do try for one of the limited tickets. Space is limited but the experience is heart-warming and uplifting. There is also a public parade of puppets on the Anacostia River scheduled at 11 a.m. on Saturday and a culminating dance party.
Heartspace. Original concept by Annalisa Dias. Process design by Annalisa Dias and mia susan amir with contributions by Eric Schwartz. Director, lead producing playwright, and set designer Annalisa Dias. Associate director, dramaturg, and sound designer mia susan amir. Projections designer Katerina Pagsolingan. Lighting Designer Elliott Shugoll. Into the Underground installation designers Mel Harper, DeLesslin “Roo” George-Warren, and Nina Budabin McQuown. With mia susan amir, Nina Budabin McQuown, Annalisa Dias, DeLesslin “Roo” George-Warren, Melissa Strova Valencia, Kara Turner, and Puppeteer Cecilia Cackley. Production stage managed by Estrellita Starr Edwell. Dramaturgy intern Hannah Malina. Produced by The Welders Playwrights Collective at Anacostia Playhouse. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
You must be logged in to post a comment.