Gumshoe: An Interview with NPL’s Artistic Director Whit MacLaughlin

GUMSHOE is the latest New Paradise Laboratories’ offering, running in conjunction with the Free Library of Philadelphia’s We the Detectives programming in the months of April into May. Here’s a little more about the project. To get tickets, click here. 

Where did the inspiration behind GUMSHOE come from?

Gumshoe is the result of a very fertile idea. The Rosenbach and the Free Library of Philadelphia have scheduled joint exhibitions of rare book materials drawn from their vast collections of early and late detective literature. These collections happen to include Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which has been accepted by many as the first detective story. And it was written by Poe IN PHILADELPHIA. When Poe was HAPPY! Yes, Poe was happy in Philadelphia. Figures.

Anyway, NPL was brought in to create a bridge between the two exhibits. Altogether, we came up with the moniker “We the Detectives” to cover the entire project, a concept springing from the fact that citizens, the “We the People” of the constitution, really must be detectives these days, to separate fact, from fiction, from falsehood.

We decided to highlight the building of the Free Library itself, along with the corridor along 20^th street between the two institutions, and the Rosenbach as a very august and eccentric Philly institution.

We decided to accomplish this by encouraging the audience to dive down deep into the FLP. The show that we are building is like a bobsled ride into the depths of a world-famous library. We call Gumshoe an immersive adventure in detection.

What significance does the library hold as the space for this event? What significance do libraries hold in general?

The library is the hero of the piece. As we started work, we fell in love. Every step we took through the highways and by-ways of the building, we felt new worlds being revealed. We want the audience to get to know the library in the same way; as a very challenging, very centered, very focused love affair with striking depth. It’s almost as if the library had a mind of its own.

We found in our research that attacks on libraries are the favored destructive tools of war. It’s almost as if there are more destroyed books in the history of the world as there are existing books. To destroy a culture, all you really have to do is destroy its libraries.

How is this piece consistent with NPL work from the past, and how is it a departure?

Those who like NPL’s work are going to love GUMSHOE. Those who don’t know our work, are going to be surprised at how accessible, stimulating, and whimsical it is.

Just so you know, the piece has a number of cool features: great smart-phone technology and great interactivity. It is like a secret undercover operation.

You’re going to see a lot of new NPL faces. We had a free and ongoing workshop program last summer called donut. We met a lot of these actors there.

What has it been like collaborating with Free Library of Philadelphia as part of their broader We are Detectives project for this?

The Free Library has had to be very open to new ideas, with GUMSHOE and We the Detectives. The show takes audience off-road into non-public spaces. You’ll see sections of the library you never thought existed. This is brave for the library. It’s like seeing the hidden rooms of Elvis’ house, or something.

What do you hope audiences take away from the experience?

An understanding of how to look out of the corner of their eyes to see that which is always there, but only rarely noticed. To take steps towards separating fact, from from fiction, from falsehood. To allow serendipity to flourish.

 

O Monsters

Interview with Whit MacLaughlin, Artistic Director of New Paradise Laboratories, on the creative process for newest work O Monsters

Photo credit: http://www.plate3photography.com

1) Where did the title O Monsters come from?  

We’ve been thinking about mutation and unprecedented life forms. Monstrosity. We’re wondering about a non-human point of view – what the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls ancestrality. He invites us to imagine the world as existing separate from our human understanding of it. What was the world before we were there to describe it? That’s the ancestral point of view – seeing the world as non-human. We are hunting for ways in this piece to remove human perspective from the mix.

So O Monsters involves a family that is recognizable, perhaps, but fundamentally – perhaps biologically – different from your family and mine.

Look at it this way: we are obsessed, as a habit, with our own human perspective, but do we really need to be so concerned about how we describe everything and what we think it is? Is there value in trying to shed our human perspective? Can we think about the world-in-itself, as it might exist apart from us? Is the world-in-itself understandable in a way that is alien to us?

These questions seem especially pertinent now that we, as a species, are imagining what things would be like if humans were extinct. What would the world without us be? Can we describe that which exists without us? It might be comforting, actually, to think ancestrally, imagining a universe before and after us. Maybe we’re not as important to the big picture as we want to imagine.

Is theatre about the non-human, the unthinkable, possible? That’s what we’re investigating here.  Horror-farce. Horror, is, when pure, what comes to us as unthinkable; it is the non-human – the unfathomable – leaking into this world. Farce is an amped up way of portraying ourselves. Horror-farce: funny and horrific. It is the comedy of being a monster without knowing it.

We are calling O Monsters “a performance of the non-human”. Weird fiction – H.P. Lovecraft – crossed with the nice family next door.

2) Can you describe a little bit the origins of the music and how it’s created?

We’ve been working with composer Bhob Rainey for several years now. He’s a brilliant and delightful fellow, with great taste, high intelligence, a bizarre sense of humor, and lots of rock and roll in his heart.

Together we have been pondering contingency – the way the world makes itself up as it goes along. Bhob has made great suggestions for how to deepen this investigation. He revs up his compositional process, and ours, by sonifying things; that is, he takes existing phenomena – things that happen rather spontaneously in the world – and mines them for the math at their core. He turns that math into music using a computer and a synthesizer.

For instance, he has sonified the near-misses of asteroids and the earth over the past 100 years, writing a piece called Canopy of Catastrophes that springs from the data of those almost collisions. We’re using it as structural inspiration for O Monsters. He has made music from the massive data output of the derivatives exchange, which, incidentally, is random. He has sonified the background data that flows constantly through every computer.

We’re treating Bhob’s music like spontaneous expressions of something in–the-world that can stimulate the creation of out-of-the-world stage action. There are large musical sections in O Monsters that sound different from anything we’ve ever heard.

We are also creating sound poetry under Bhob’s direction. It’s voiced, but non-pitched singing that preserves some of the qualities of speech along with a big dose of the non-human.

3) How do the music and performers play off/inform one another one another?

The music is other-worldly, but not conventional eerie “space-music” (though I sometimes imagine it’s emanating from a radio station broadcasting from the surface of Jupiter). We’ve experimented with it as a stimulus to stage action.

Ultimately though, we are exploring a form we haven’t quite named yet. Maybe “non-human performance”.

4) How did the idea of metamorphosis become central to O Monsters? And what makes a family good fodder to work with in this situation?

I find metamorphosis a beautiful and horrific thing. Total, seemingly unprecedented transformation. Happens all the time, but that doesn’t mitigate its strangeness.

Can a caterpillar really imagine, really visualize what’s going to happen to it? It doesn’t transform into a moth in a clean way. It turns first to goo inside the cocoon and then the goo turns into a moth. I doubt that it recognizes itself after the transformation. It’s a sure thing, for the most part, but entirely unanticipated. Like dying.

5) What is the world of O Monsters?  

It’s a delivery system for unexpected and unprecedented things. A Rube Goldberg machine with an otherworldly idea of causality. A place to explore pure chance.  A place where deeply weird and beautiful things can happen.

Support for the research and development of O Monsters has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Support for the development of O Monsters has been provided by the Independence Foundation New Theatre Works Initiative.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

“Life and Art in Process” by Anna Lamadrid

REPOST from UW School of Drama:

Anna Lamadrid is a third-year MFA candidate in the Professional Actor Training Program. She’s currently performing in Cold Empty Terrible, a devised piece directed by guest artist Whit MacLaughlin and created in collaboration with UW School of Drama MFA students. In this blog post, Anna reflects on the process of creating Cold Empty Terrible and what that experience has brought to the surface for her as an artist.

ANNA LAMADRID:

As I begin my final year at the University of Washington, and the more we dive into Cold Empty Terrible rehearsals, I can’t help but reflect on my experiences in the School of Drama and what those experiences have taught me.

I chose to come to grad school because I had a specific set of skills that I needed to sharpen – goals that I needed to check off: range in voice, coordination, Shakespeare mastery (ha!), IPA, and dialect mastery. The list goes on and on. Needless to say, it made for a very nerve-wrecking first year. Because I thought I knew what that mastery was supposed to look like, there was A LOT at stake, which meant there was A LOT of fear present.

There are countless of inspiring art quotes about “the unknown” – the fear of it and how we use it as artists. Here is one of my favorites:

“The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” ~Agnes de Mille

It is difficult for us as students to fully dive deep into the “unknown” because our goals coming into a program seems to be all about “knowing.” Despite the constant encouragement from our professors to let go and “live with the questions” we continue stubbornly to try to answer them all, to know it and get it right. I mean, why would I get into all this debt and not have ANY of the answers!? Am I right?!

Anna Lamadrid in rehearsal for Cold Empty Terrible

It is almost impossible to feel comfortable with the “unknown” when you have a vision of what something is supposed to look like. With most of our coursework, we can easily be seduced into checking off that mastery box for all of our classes. At the end of the day, I know that there will be a Linklater progression that I can “master.” With Suzuki, I know that there are positions and marches that I need to “get right.” Even with studio, there is a certain character arc (prescribed by the script) that I need to bring to life in order to tell the story. We focus on the certainty of the black and whites, when art lives in the complexity of the grays.

We focus on the certainty of the black and whites, when art lives in the complexity of the grays.

When there is a desired target, the process can become a burden – something I have to get through in order to get what I want. Nowadays, we are kind of wired that way. Everyone expects a polished product at the end…something they can sell. That kind of mindset is detrimental for an artist. We lose sight of why we came to the art form in the first place.

The rehearsal process with Whit, for me, has been about getting back to the art form. With no script, we get to come into rehearsal each time with a question. Something that we are curious about. Something about humanity that we want to illuminate. After each etude we get time to ruminate on what was learned from that exploration. We refine. We experiment. We make mistakes. We add things. We let things go. We change our minds. There is something very freeing about not knowing where all of this is heading. I have been able to finally do something that I think my professors have been ushering me to do for the last two years – resign myself to the process.

Everyone expects a polished product at the end…something they can sell. That kind of mindset is detrimental for an artist. We lose sight of why we came to the art form in the first place.

For me, releasing the anxiety of being “in process” and “not knowing” is the biggest unexpected lesson that I have learned in grad school, probably because it was never a goal. I wouldn’t even have realized that I was living in a “prison of perfection” striving to make art “the right way” until I gave myself the time to fail…and fail…and fail.

Anna Lamadrid (and company) in rehearsal for Cold Empty Terrible

As the “unknown” of beginning my life after grad school begins to rear its head, I can look back at this rehearsal process and say that just like Cold Empty Terrible…I have no idea what’s coming next…my life is “in process”…and I will continue to make art one way or another. With that, I will leave you with another quote:

“As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.” ~Calvin and Hobbes

Keep creating.

UW Drama Professional Acting Training Program – Class of 2015

COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE: Notes on the Process

Notes on the Process of Making Group-Generated Theatre

New Paradise Labs is currently in residence at University of Washington School of Drama. NPL Artistic Director, Whit MacLaughlin, has collaborated with a group of MFA graduate students to create COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE, a newly devised work inspired by a fragmented avant-garde play nestled inside Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.

Below, Whit reflects on his time in residence at UW School of Drama, the joys and challenges of making performance work from scratch, and the process of building COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE.

How does creating performance through a group-generated process benefit the PATPs as artists?

WM: These group-created pieces put actors closer to the driver’s seat of the generative process. By building a work for the stage from scratch, actors get to partake of an excitement that is really one of a kind. And they get the news, first hand, that a play is not a thing per se, it’s a road map, a series of thoughts and actions that lead to an outcome. That’s easy to forget in the day-in-day-out RE-creative process of conventional theatre practice.

As we practice it, devising also helps make connections between some of their various trainings. Our movement style helps actors connect the dots.

How do you and your collaborators create content from scratch? Where do you start?

WM: We start a number of ways in New Paradise Laboratories, but usually one feature of our practice involves visual art. We often choose paintings as starting points, because of the worlds they describe and depict. We identify artists, put a number of canvases up on their feet, set them into motion, and see what happens. We collage the results – looking for accidental connections between seemingly unrelated thoughts, and run from there.

I have an idea and I watch what comes up with that in mind. It’s amazing to me, still, that some sort of thought process and story starts to come into view from looking at a wide variety of very disparate material. We talk – a lot – and start to understand what we’re making.

What are some of the challenges of building theatre from the ground up?

WM: Anxiety can run rampant. Devising makes us all contemplate over and over that not-knowing is an important practice. One must practice uncertainty as a precursor to knowing. This brings me to a second challenge: creating from scratch takes time. You have to have time to move from not-knowing to coherence; which means that it’s a practice that requires extra resources of time and money.

What prompted your decision to focus on Treplev’s infamous, aborted play from The Seagull as inspiration for COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE?

WM: I’m a contrarian, to a certain degree, and I find Treplev’s suicide to be so wasteful, so I’m led to want to counteract the forces leading to it. I wanted to give his play a production that he might like. Most productions of THE SEAGULL start with the forgone conclusion that Treplev’s play is as ridiculous as his mother describes it. I think it’s actually pretty awesome. Making something of it is a quixotic venture, to be sure, but I also think it’s a work with a proto-avant garde sensibility. Almost all great things start out as experiments.

You utilized some of the same source material to create The Adults, your company’s most recent production in Philadelphia. What is the relationship of these two pieces? How are the themes of these works in conversation with each other?

WM: Mostly, I listened to the UW students talk, and their concerns seemed to jive with some of Chekhov’s concerns in his play. It tickled me to imagine two productions – one, THE ADULTS – researching the values of Chekhovianism, and the other – COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE – the values of “Treplevianism”.

How do you prompt designers to create concepts for material that hasn’t been built yet?

WM: It’s a weird process. But in some ways it’s akin to what the actors go through. I say, here are some ideas we are playing with. What would be a pedestal for these ideas? Not just a stand for a sculpture, but the most awesome frame you can imagine for a painting that’s just coming into being. For COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE, Julia Welch, the scenic designer, put forth probably 20 ideas before we came across the one that I thought might work.

And what does a costume designer do? I gave Maya Ogawasara about 5 directives and we just chose. In that case, she had a great deal of influence over the outcome of the piece. We chose three basic notions: a Chekhovian world, swim wear, and creatures from an unknowable future. In doing so, she helped conceive of the piece and “write” it.

How have you been influenced by your experience working with the PATPs on COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE? 

WM: I’ve been thinking a lot about what helps actors take the reins of their own careers. Traditionally, they have to accommodate many other peoples’ wishes and demands. How do they identify their own concerns? And work from them, building a career that has meaning and substance. The same sort of heft that I get as a producer/writer/director.

COLD EMPTY TERRIBLE
Premieres Wednesday, October 15, 2014 to Sunday, October 26, 2014
Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse
University of Washington School of Drama

Tickets and More Information: http://drama.washington.edu/events/2014-10-15/cold-empty-terrible

Notes on Visiting Eric Fischl’s Studio

Last week, the New Paradise Laboratories ensemble had the pleasure of touring Eric Fischl’s painting and sculpture studio, where he is working on a new series of canvasses to exhibit later this year.

Eric Fischl’s body of work has provided influential source material for NPL over the years; most recently a primary source of inspiration for The Adults.

We spoke at length about creative process, the importance of context and interpretability, and how we negotiate shifts in perspective within our work. Below, a few NPL company members reflect on the experience.

Sam Tower:

“Quoting his wife April, Fischl suggested that he believes ‘Great art is vulnerable enough to leave itself open to interpretation.’ At New Paradise, we are always contemplating how to provide an audience with enough footholds into the world of the piece while allowing space for generous interpretation of the abstract.

We are constantly recalibrating how much is enough – how many of our cards to show and when.

While regarding Fischl’s newest work, we spoke at length about the manipulation of time and space within our artistic mediums. He constructs a sense of surreal relativity in his work within very literal, figurative environments.

In our work for the stage, we manipulate perception in a similar way, by delivering a series of hyper-extended moments that reveal things, sometimes sociological, sometimes psychological, sometimes metaphysical. Through carefully constructed rhythms, we create an unpredictable environment, a world in which anything might happen.”

Kate Czajkowski:

“Fischl spoke with us about problems with painting as his career advances and his work evolves. There are tools he has used in the past to ‘finish’ a piece—flesh it out—a hanging balloon or the presence of a TV might serve to complete a visual moment. But at a certain point, the TV and the balloon don’t work anymore because they have been done—they become mere devices. This is a struggle I can relate to as a performer; the need to shed old standards and lean into unknown territory—making choices that are in concert with this moment rather than superimposed from the past.”

Kevin Meehan:

“What stuck with me from Fischl’s studio was the size of the pieces he was creating. They’re huge canvasses! Having seen his paintings only in art books my concept of their scale wasn’t clear. With Eric’s previous work, there is a voyeuristic experience with the content he explores – you peer in unacknowledged. I’m not sure if it’s because he’s exploring something different now, but being in the same room with these new paintings, I get the sense they’re watching me as well. They stare back.

I think that feeling resonates in my work with NPL because there is this odd event that often happens between characters – this thing where you’re knowingly observing someone as they consciously experience your watchful, indulgent eye. It makes for interestingly complex relationships.”

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The Adults will be presented in 2014 Fringe Festival, September 3-14. Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street, Philadelphia. Tickets on sale here.

The Adults has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, National Endowment for the Arts, Independence Foundation New Theatre Works Initiative, and the Wyncote Foundation. The Adults was developed, in part, with the support of The Orchard Project, a program of The Exchange (2013) and the White Pines Resident Ensemble Program (2013).

Photo Journalism by Kevin Meehan

“Some are action shots and some are from shooting within the piece and some are just people hanging around while we were working on stuff.”

Company Member, Kevin Meehan, documents the process of making The Adults in this photo journal.

 

 

 

 

The Adults swarm Swarthmore

New Paradise spent the month of June rehearsing The Adults at Swarthmore College as part of the Swarthmore Project in Theater. 

Objects in the room included, but were not limited to:

Adirondack chairs, limes, tequila, bikins, speedos, grapes, lettuce, wet hair, sliding glass doors, sundresses, suitcases, saliva, exercise balls, 40 shot glasses, camera flashes, broken sunglasses, urine-soaked shorts, road maps, sleeping bags, fishing poles, snorkels, a Matteo-sized door, sweaty hawaiian shirts, lighters, candelabras, super-soakers, floor lamps, brown bear fur, tennis racquets, reflections in glass, shadows on the wall, excruciating noise, excruciating silence, bags of trash, endless accumulation, nothingness.

And lots of coffee. Tons and tons of coffee.

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Observe The Adults in their Swarthmore habitat below.

Photos by Sam Tower, Assistant Director.

Julia Frey and Kate Czajkowski

 

 

Emilie Krause and Matteo Scammell

Kate Czajkowski

Matt Saunders and Matteo Scammell

Kate Czajkowski and Kevin Meehan

Julia Frey, Kate Czajkowski, and Matteo Scammell

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The Adults premieres in FringeArts, September 3-14. Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street, Philadelphia. Tickets on sale here.

The Adults has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, National Endowment for the Arts, Independence Foundation New Theatre Works Initiative, and the Wyncote Foundation. The Adults was developed, in part, with the support of The Orchard Project, a program of The Exchange (2013) and the White Pines Resident Ensemble Program (2013).

27 Redux: From Beyond the Starhole

New Paradise Labs recently re-staged 27, our dead-rockstar meditation on fame and the final frontier.

For an inside look into our redux production, Company Member Emilie Krause shares some thoughts from backstage. She’s included a few images below from her vantage point behind the quaking walls of the trashed rec-room.

 

“I spend the first half of 27 backstage. Sometimes I help move props around, on one occasion I stick my legs out of the window, but mostly I sit and watch. While Kurt climbs the walls and Amy drinks light out of a solo cup, I look on from the crash pad just outside of the window. I’m not quite sure if the company on stage can see me, I haven’t asked. This way I get to watch when they turn upstage. They turn away to prepare for the next moment, or to steal a little bit of privacy from the constant outside eye, but sometimes they are just lost in the story they’re making, it has shifted from the two dimensional performance space to a three dimensional reality where the life of the characters barrels on whether the audience can see it or not. This is one of my favorite parts of the show. It feels like they’re performing for me.”

– Emilie

Natural Beauty – Seattle, WA

During our residency at University of Washington, Company Member Julia Frey took a few shots of the beautiful nature surrounding the city of Seattle. Here’s a selection of favorites for your viewing pleasure.

 

 A day off in nature. A shot of “Deception Pass” –  about an hour outside of Seattle.

 

Company Members Emilie and Matteo at Gasworks Park. Catch the Space Needle in the distance…

There were flowers EVERYWHERE — we think we can still smell the lilac.

Images of Age – Seattle, WA

NPL just returned home from a residency in Seattle at University of Washington. We spent 2 weeks rehearsing The Adults on the UW campus. The NPL company members gathered some images and stories during our time there to share with you here on New Paradisian.

_________________________

IMAGES OF AGE, by Company Member Kevin Meehan

Cover art from ‘Images of Age’ by Michael L. Jacques

During our residency in Seattle we were asked to create some material that explored old age and what it would feel like to genuinely try to inhabit being a geriatric. As source material we referenced a book of illustrations entitled Images of Aging. The author/illustrator, Michael Jacques, had visited an assisted living facility and drew portraits of certain folks there, as well as recorded what he could of their personal stories —many of them sad and ending long before their lives. From these illustrations we would be sculpted into the portrait’s exact physical being by another company member. Using this shape in our minds and bodies we would write our own short narratives from which a physical piece would eventually emerge and will hopefully inform the show as a whole.

Below is the story I’ve written using the picture of Bernie on page 76 of Michael Jacques’ Images of Age.

“Bernie” by Michael L. Jacques

_________________________

There’s a fly in the room. I can hear it but I don’t know where it is. Better to leave it be I suppose. I guess I’ll open the window in case it wants to leave.

            This window is the darnedest thing.

            What time is it? Oh good —time for Wheel of Fortune. Where’s the clicker?

            Guess I’ll have a little lay down and watch.

            I’m running. I’m running like the wind. On the open road! I’m running.

            I’m running. I’m running. I’m running.

            I’m running. I’m running. I’m running.

            I’m running. I’m running. I’m running.

            I’m running. I’m running. I’m running.

            I’m running. I’m running. I’m running.

            I’m running. I’m running. I’m running.

 

            Oh. Hiya doing?

 

Image by Kate Czajkowski

The Adults will premiere in September 2014, presented by FringeArts. 

NPL’s The Adults has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. The Adults is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.