©Martha Sherman
The name of her company is an anagram, and Yanira Castro’s expectation is that the work is not in her name only. Castro’s insistence on collaboration is central to everything she makes, and includes not only the performers, but every other element of performance: the design, sound, light, script. And the audience.
CAST/STAGE/AUTHOR is a trio of works that opened and ran simultaneously for two weeks in three New York performance spaces this month. Together, the works investigate the key elements that make up a performance. Yanira did extensive interviews and videos of fifteen performers; their words were transcribed into an enormous archive and a computer algorithm used the words to generate unique scripts for four randomly selected performers each night in CAST. AUTHOR was an installation in which audience members individually created scripts in dialogue with text from the archive, selected in a different algorithm; at the same time, on the walls outside the composing room, video scenes were affected by what was being co-authored inside the composing room. STAGE was a mysterious compilation of movement and images, also performed by four selected performers on a proscenium stage; the audience was seated in the balcony, removed to watch the spectacle from a distance.
I interviewed Yanira and some of her collaborators over several weeks, about the genesis, process and collaboration that it took to bring the three works to life. The CAST for these interviews was: Yanira Castro, choreographer; Kathy Couch, stage design; Stephan Moore, sound design; and Pamela Vail, performer and rehearsal director.
MS: Where did the original idea come from – and how did you come to this structure and these choices?
Yanira: I get ideas all the time, they perk up from a title, or an image emerges. The big questions in the trilogy evolved around one core question: Why are we in this room together? Performance is such an ancient form of being present together. While I was working on “Court/Garden” in 2014, I began to think about what a deliberate choice it was to CAST a show, making a choice about what a group represents, what their responsibility is. The AUTHOR question is also about who is responsible for a performance -- in the three scenes of “Court/Garden,” I went from being an unseen author, to being the visible manipulator, to entirely relinquishing authorship by the third act. And the question of where and how it all operates was the germ of the idea behind STAGE.
Stephan: Yanira returns to the same issues over and over again, and there’s always more to mine – the questions of portraiture or how is a person represented?, what are the expectations of all the members and elements of a performance? what does it mean to be in the audience and to perform for an audience? As the economics of performance get more difficult, the questions are more confrontational, even more important. And there is always more to explore.
MS: Why did you choose to open all three pieces simultaneously? What was it like to collaborate in developing three works at once?
Yanira: I originally thought doing all three would take me years, but the practical urgency moved everything quickly – presenters wanted them together. Brian (Rogers, Artistic Director of the Chocolate Factory) thought they needed to be connected to impact the audience, that it made more sense to happen concurrently. If I had created and presented them in a linear way, the time lapse between them would’ve changed the pieces and their connection to one another.
Kathy: It all started as a grand dream of Yanira’s, but I’ve worked with her for so long that I jumped right in. There was such a clear sense of the task – how to communicate the performance experience, what it meant to be “present.” Her launch was the extended interviews with the cast. My entry became the space where those interviews took place – and we ended up turning a bland, abandoned office into a magical place, inhabited and alive. The conference room itself became part of all three works, a connector, even as Yanira was talking to all three presenters in their own completely different spaces (CAST at the Chocolate Factory, AUTHOR at Invisible Dog, and STAGE at Abrons Arts Center.)
Pam: All I knew at the start was that the work would be a trilogy, starting with Yanira’s conversations with me and the other cast members; otherwise, it was pretty mysterious. She’s usually very clear in her vision, but she didn’t want to be prejudiced about what the outcome would be here – she was interested in being surprised herself. So it was a true collaboration, not “hers” but “ours.” And I was surprised at how we used the text, Stephan’s non-linear, non-narrative scripts. There was very little actual dancing – more a scored improvisation, so it was really different. And I had no idea about AUTHOR until after it opened, and I finally played the game that was the installation.
MS: You talk about the importance of Spectacle, and of mystery. How did those ideas inform the work?
Yanira: The idea of Spectacle really drove the creation of STAGE, which was the most challenging (and mysterious) of the three works. I am very image-based, and a stage is really the control of what an audience sees. I also wanted to explore what it’s like for the performer just before coming onto stage – what is the transformation that happens. I decided to use a proscenium stage (for the first time ever), and to keep the audience far away, to make it a very visual experience. It was the last piece we completed, and it kept evolving, including the set, the masks, the movement -- none of us really knew what it would be until it finally happened.
Kathy: There were many iterations of STAGE, even though the budget was quite limited. First, we thought we’d use flats to build a pre-show conference room or dismantle it on stage, which we did finally figure out. For those who didn’t see CAST and AUTHOR, the piece was entirely mysterious – where it was, wondering what they were seeing.
Stephan: STAGE felt like it was in creation all the time – we kept asking ourselves how to wake the audience to the theater itself. I decided to activate the Pit, because most of the time the musicians aren’t even seen. So I created instruments that were interesting to watch being played. I borrowed the design from Sarah Warren, who created the Steel Cello – sheet metal suspended, with bolted cymbals – it is huge and makes huge, shrill, unearthly sounds. I started building it before I knew what the piece was, but I knew I could trust the process, and the sound became an important part of the STAGE spectacle.
Photos:
Top: Cast in "STAGE" ©Maria Baranova.
Middle: Simon Courchel in "CAST" ©Brian Rogers.
Bottom: Stephan Moore in "STAGE" ©Maria Baranova.
The interviews are concluded in Dialogue Part II.
