Take a trip down memory lane with the 5^th and final article.... Throughout July, 2014, five festival Dramaturgs revealed their conversations with company leaders of Raw Materials Programs, the works-in-progress series of the FURY Factory festival, which performed at San Francisco’s Project Artaud July 6-20, 2014. LMDA in partnership with foolsFURY—produced by LMDA Regional VP’s Nakissa Etemad & Scott Horstein—provided the festival match between dramaturgs & Raw Materials companies. In addition to these company profiles, Dramaturgs ran talkbacks at their Program’s second performance. For more info on the 2016 FURY Factory festival, tickets, and our current partnership, visit www.foolsfury.org 

Meet the Companies of Raw Materials Program 5

By Dramaturg Michael Moerman

Michael Moerman began his life in the theater as a freelance actor, dramaturg, and literary manager twenty years ago, after nearly thirty years of research and teaching as a Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. 

The Defenestrators (Blue Lake, CA): 

I spoke with the members of the clown duo The Defenestrators, Darci Fulcher and Emily June Newton, by phone and through email about their new clown comedy piece a Fenetre (The Window).

Michael: Did you intend “The Defenestrators” to evoke that word’s historic connotation of assassination?

Darci & Emily: Not at all! It’s just that we use a flexible window-frame through which things and people are thrown. But the piece is political: about fears of surveillance and terrorism. La Fenetre is a clown piece on an adult topic, that children can also enjoy.

Michael: How has it evolved?

Darci & Emily: We began working together during the final two years of our Dell'Arte MFA program. There were three of us initially, but Jerome Yorke left in April for a 6-month gig at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi. Reworking La Fenetre from three clowns to two was a major piece of work. […] We work from a combination of image and idea, and gravitate toward the images and shapes that hold the most “heat.” Then we keep pushing into those hot areas until the piece unfolds. No piece is ever finished! It is always a work-in-progress that changes after each rehearsal, and at every performance as it comes to life in front of an audience. 

Michael: What’s next for you? 

Darci & Emily: We hope to stay together as a company, but recognize the challenges of doing that while in different jobs, states, and even countries. We both want careers in theatre-making. [Darci] is most interested in ensemble work that uses music; [Emily] in more solo-based, cabaret pieces.

(In La Fenetre, Sanderson is employed as Aurora’s butler. Photo by Anthony Arnista.)

Deborah Slater Dance Theater (San Francisco):

Deborah Slater and I spoke on the phone, exchanged emails, and met for a long conversation in her studio. We discussed her upcoming pieces to be performed in excerpts at FURY Factory: Private Life / The Line of Beauty.

Michael: Why are you showing two pieces?

Deborah: Balance, relief, perhaps even sanity. In these final moments of Private Life, a war veteran realizes that his life becomes completely unraveled. He loses all hope. Line of Beauty, in contrast, was inspired by Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, which Kirkus Review calls “a luscious tribute to the joys of corporeality.” 

Michael: Was Private Life also inspired by a book?

Deborah: No. Like most of my work it comes out of my own private life. A dancer I admire was also a soldier, a dedicated patriotic warrior. I wanted to understand how this could be. Compassionate curiosity – and my own close brush with death – got me interested in PTSD. What happens when a person whose closest loyalties and very survival required him or her to commit morally repugnant acts, who has seen comrades blown up by seeming friends, is returned unprepared to the family, to the lover, to the anticipated sanctuary of home? How can we as a nation, as a culture, let that happen?

Michael: Do you want an audience to be able to say in words what a piece is about?

Deborah: If a piece works, there are layers of response. It has to be watched more than once. You can’t just “get it.” You have to sit there and let it unfold. Each time, you’ll see something you didn’t see before. So I spend a lot of time on the craft of it. I’m always trying to understand things. Dancing, like science, is the magic that explains things.

(Rogelio Lopez, Deborah Slater Dance Theater. Photo by Pak Han.)

foolsFURY (San Francisco):

Debórah Eliezer, Co-Artistic Director of foolsFURY, and I talked and exchanged emails before we met at the July 2 rehearsal of The Seeing Place, created by the foolsFURY ensemble and directed by Debórah. I also spoke with Lisa Drostova (dramaturg and performer) and other members of the ensemble.

Michael: Where does the title come from?     

Debórah: The Seeing Place is a translation of the Greek theatron, the place where people came together to experience sacrifices, dances, and theatrical performances. Our embodiment of the legend of Antigone is all of these: text, ritual, music, movement, stillness, sacrifice. 

Michael: How long have you been working on it?   

Lisa: This is the sixth iteration. The first was in May of last year. Each change responds to the place and the people. When we had a long narrow performance space, we walked along a large rolling spool. When there were many men in the cast, we concentrated on war, using Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit as a major text. An all-female cast refocused our concentration onto Antigone and Martha Mullins, and so introduced interviews, newspaper articles and tweets about Mullins into the text. Now that we again have men, Creon has re-emerged, and with him Brecht’s text, [a version of Antigone].

(Photo:  foolsFURY company members of The Seeing Place.)

Michael: The Antigone myth is so fecund and so timeless. What do you most want this audience to derive from this iteration?            

Debórah: To experience the parallels between Antigone and Martha Mullins in how they thought, what they did, and how their societies treated them. To think about the conflicts among personal morality, public law, justice, and punishment. To meditate on the relationship between destiny and personal choice. And to enjoy themselves.

Program 5 performed July 17 & 19, 2014 at Z Below, 470 Florida St., San Francisco.

The July 19th, 2014 performance included Talkbacks led by Dramaturg Michael Moerman. 

To read the additional four installments of 2014 Raw Materials articles by our Dramaturgs, visit foolsfury.org/fury/raw-materials/