The Making of Dream Masons
World Premiere.
Salamanca Arts Centre and Ten Days on the Island.
Dream Masons transforms the facade of the iconic Salamanca Arts Centre into an awesome theatrical spectacle of grand proportions - a bold and imaginative exploration of human ingenuity and the capacity to survive against enormous odds.
*this page contains material and links regarding the making of Dream Masons, scroll down for blog entries by members of the creative team, and navigate the links below to video excerpts of the preparation for this major work*
last updated 23rd March 2007
view PDF credits: (1) (2)
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Blog entry by Co-director Jim Lasko: Late February 07.
I should put things in a bit of perspective. By any account this is a massive show. The stage is the façade of a building.
The entire bottom level will be covered by a scaffold which will be clad in sono-tube and painted to look like a pier. Indeed this building did at one time, in the mid-1800’s when it was first built, abut the ocean. The rest of the façade of the building will be activated by a series of ingeniously engineered climbing structures. There’s a ramp whose ends raise and lower independently and a few balconies, one of which both holds the choir and the six giant banners which drop at the top of each act. There is a rope ladder, a pivoting ladder system, and a clothes line that, in a moment of desperate need, will carry a woman from one window to the next. The gap between the buildings will be covered by a false wall which will collapse into a heap to reveal an intricate plumbing system. In the center, in front of the false wall, is a boat that will rise as a mythic flood overtakes the building.
For those off you who don’t know, Tasmania is an island off the southern tip of Australia. Hobart is its capital, constituting almost half the population of the entire island, sitting on the Southwestern coast of that island. As such it is about as close to the South Pole as one can get while still on land. When the British decided to ship their vagrants away, they took no half-hearted measures. This really is the other side of the world.
And not. I’m sitting on a park bench right now, across from the Salamanca Arts Center, where the performance will take place. I’m looking down a street lined with shops and restaurants on one side and a broad parkway braced by thick Oaks on the other. There are areas of this capital city that if you plugged your ears and looked about could easily be mistaken for Madison, Wisconsin. The Tasmanians were first convicts, then farmers and traders with a virtual monopoly on preserves, and now they boast one of Australia’s most popular tourist industries. Every Sunday this street is packed with booths and tents selling produce and fresh baked bread alongside tables of wood crafts and textiles.
Half the shops on this street are art galleries and the building on which this show will be performed is an arts center which, among other things, provides studios for some of the city’s burgeoning fine artists.
To wit, Dream Masons is employing dozens of local artists and performers as well as two teams of volunteer performers: a local gospel choir and an amateur dance troupe of middle aged women. The latter I saw perform, or rehearse, when I was here last. They’ve been performing together for three years under the direction of an inspired choreographer and one time ballet dancer from Melbourne. They combine mundane movement with modern steps and don’t shy from their sexuality and the whole thing is disarmingly engaging.
Ten Days on the Island is an national Australian arts festival that activates the whole of the island of Tasmania with cultural events. Music, dance, theater, and art installation will travel to several cities throughout Tasmania for a 10 day period, saturating it with culture. Events are imported from Melbourne and Sydney as well as the products of local Tasmanian artists. Dream Masons is the opening event for this festival. It is, by many accounts, one of the largest spectacle events produced in Australia for many a year. Larger events have taken place, I am assured, but it has been some time since something of this scale was created on Australian soil with (mostly) Australian talent. It is not only the talk of the town, but of national concern here. I am told it will be covered in all the national papers and attended by more than 10,000 people.
I am involved because of Jessica Wilson. Jessica is a free lance director making primarily puppet and object based theater throughout Australia. Her work is meticulously crafted worlds in miniature. She uses a variety of puppetry styles, including animation, to create humor and mystery. Jessica was a long time Artistic Director of Terrapin Theater, a puppet theater company housed in the Salamanca Arts Center.
When Jessica left Terrapin to pursue work on the mainland, one of the first things she did is win herself a grant to travel Europe and The States, visiting other makers of object and puppet theater. (If you are in the United States, this kind of grant would be entirely foreign to you. It supports the development of individual artists in an open-ended, non-doctrinal fashion.) One of Jessica’s stops along the way was Redmoon Theater. She had learned about us from some colleagues in New York. I got an email to which I made a non-committal but open invitation to observe whatever we were doing at the time. Jessica turned up at an exciting moment, during one of our larger events, and was impressed with what she saw.
She returned to Australia and sat down with Rosemary Miller, the Executive Director of the Salamanca Arts Center to conceive of a theatrical way to engage The Center’s 30th birthday. Along with Joey Ruigrok, I was written into a series of grants that would allow a site visit and further exploration of the idea.
Joey Ruigrok is an expatriated Dutch technical director and designer living in Sydney, Australia. He moved there for love and though the love dissipated, he never moved back. I met Joey in Chicago in 1995. We don’t remember each other from back then.
Joey was part of the team of people who mounted “Camel Gossip III” on Navy Pier. Second to none, Dogtroep’s “Camel Gossip III” was, because of its humor and magnificence, its wildness and ambition, and, of course, because of its timing in my life and in Redmoon’s, the most influential piece of theater I have ever seen. Brought by the International Theater Festival, Dogtroep was given a commission to create a site specific performance on The Skyline Stage. The moment of that piece that sticks out just now was when five wildly costumed women, each looking like the next, went into five small changing rooms. They sat down on small stools and started to laugh. As their laughter increased, the changing rooms were lifted off the ground, water pouring from below them. Their hysteria grew as they were elevated higher and higher and more and more water sprayed out from underneath them. There was an unrelenting shower from these five crazy little booths suspended 25 feet in the air. I don’t know when I realized they were peeing, and giggling at peeing, but that sealed it for me.
Jessica and Rosemary were awarded those initial grants and Joey, Jessica and I met in Tasmania January of 2006 for 3 weeks. During that time we conceived and laid down the initial designs for a massive spectacle that would take place on the façade of the Salamanca Arts Center. At the end of that time we met with Elizabeth Walsh, the Executive Director of the Ten Days on the Island Festival and convinced her that this was both a very exciting project and one that we could successfully mount. (The latter being the more difficult task of the two.) Ten Days on the Island bought in and together with the Arts Center, they’ve raised nearly $500,000 Australian dollars it will take to mount this show, thus making it one of the largest and most ambitious theater projects born in Australia in recent memory.
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Blog entry by Co-director Jim Lasko: Early March 07.
You’ll remember that a week ago, or so, the façade of the building looked like this:
Now it looks like this:
That’s a lot of work for a week.
Of course it’s not just a week. We’ve been planning this week for over a year. Last January, Joey and I began to work with the façade, imagining traffic patterns across and up and down it. With Jess chose locations for each performer. Isolate the Widow in a corner (e3). Place the sailor’s party in the middle of the building. Give The Settler a duplex (a2 and a3). The Landlord should be at the top in the center.
Simultaneously, we thought about how to bring the action out to the audience. How can we get stuff onto the façade? How can we break the plane of that wall? Balconies was an easy thought, but Joey wanted to make them fold out, or thrust toward the audience like a zoom. And then we wanted characters to criss-cross the wall. Once it was all filled in, there was a postcard sized space on the stage left side of the building which seemed to be calling out for banners, describing the action in titles and image.
You can’t see a lot of this yet. The landing ledge folds up into the building in d2. There’s a hitch point for a ladder up at b3 that you can’t see either. You also won’t see in this photograph the ladder that the Widow descends down, or the fact that the ramp, currently sitting on the pier, actually raises and lowers, each side independent of the other, allowing for zig-zagging over and around the false front on Kelly’s Lane (the empty space between the two buildings which will be covered over creating a single plane out of the front façade.
If you look hard enough you can see the fold out balcony. And you can easily see the pier we put in on Monday. It took a massive crane to raise those two crane arms sitting atop the scaffolding tower between the two buildings. That same crane lifted up the balcony at g3 h3, which will hold the fifteen person choir which will sing at least one of their three songs from there and from which will descend the 5, once 6, chapter title banners. You can see we’ve begun to replace some of the windows and doors with less obstructing frames.
You can’t yet see all we’ve done on the inside of the building. After 3 rehearsals with our professional actors we’ve developed some very solid characters. We began with a reading of the action plot. This is a 6 page document serves as our script. Here’s a chunk of that for those of you really looking for insight:
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90 |
92 |
The Sailors and girls are delighted. The Sailors rip off their clothes revealing skinny little bodies in togs. The girls are in bikinis. They have a detergent fight and then a foam party. |
2B, 2C + 2D |
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10 |
93 |
The Landlord sits tight in the room above. |
3C |
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5 |
94 |
The Boy, now dressed in a scuba diving outfit, plays at swimming in a window on the top floor. |
3F |
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15 |
95 |
The Fisherman bangs and tinkers behind the wall. Light streams out. |
2E higher |
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10 |
96 |
A banner is unfurled. (without ritual dance) |
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20 |
97 |
The Sailor and his pregnant girlfriend become concerned as the water continues to pour into their room. They yell and knock on the wall to demand that the neighbours deal with their own problem. They block the pipe and the water fills up faster in the Settlers room. |
2B + 2C
water fills back into 2A |
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30 |
98 |
The other sailors and girls leave the room across the horizontal ramp continuing to giggle and party in their swimsuits. |
From 2C to 2F |
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99 |
The boat continues to rise. |
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So those are action points 92 through 99, a random chunk from the third page. There are just over 150 total action points. The first column is an absurd estimation of the duration of the scene, the second is the action point number, the third is a description of the action. The fourth is the location of the action on the building. Missing are the columns for rigging equipment required; riggers required; characters required; and special technical needs required. Those are all currently empty because, excepting the ‘characters needed’, we don’t really have that information.
We could make some guesses as to rigging. Anytime anyone is leaning out a window they need to be on a fixed line. A fixed line is a line of fixed length which is attached to a harness on the performer on the one end and a secure point on the other. If someone is outside the façade on a balcony with railing, they also need a fixed line. Anyone moving outside the façade, on a ramp or ladder, they get a belayer, a moving line. Here the line is fixed to the harness on the one end, on the other it is brought to a rigger and put through a pulley system carried by the rigger in order to let out and take in line as needed. The belayer is, in turn, on a fixed line. There are three riggers on the show. Simon, the head rigger, started mid-week, and will be on full time through the remainder of the show. He’s handsome.
Our character work began with a read of the action outline, excerpted above, and some discussion about it. We then spent some time articulating and discussing a clear arch for each of the characters. The actors are all accustom to devising theater. Many are theater makers in their own rights, as directors and solo performers, but all have seemingly spent the majority of their careers in original productions. A couple have certificates from a school that was once in Sydney run by a certain John Bowlton. Mr. Bowlton was himself a LeCoq trained performer before he opened his own school at which were trained what by many accounts is a whole generation of physical performers and theater makers here in Australia. There’s a playwright, an artistic director, a few musicians, an ex-ballerina, and a partridge in a pear tree.
The actors are very versed in this kind of process and comfortable within the idiom and we had a great discussion about the script that mostly focused on creating clear arcs for each of the characters. The Sailor starts the show a blustery poser but things turn as his Girl gets pregnant, and he ends quite grounded, if not a bit downtrodden after his failure to save the boy. We marked through their plot points and then spent some time looking at their costumes. These costumes were designed by Tatjana Radisic in Chicago. Because we are working at such a distance, and because we will often see these characters in obstructed views, and sometimes in shadow, we focused on the silhouette they would cut more than usual. Each character, then, is a distinct shape and many of the costumes involve foam padding to distort the shape of the performer.
The performers were very excited about their costumes and they served as great inspiration for the next bit of time while we worked on the exaggerated physicality that would serve as the character’s foundation
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