Magic Meets Art in Unique Collaboration at UCCS

By T. D. Mobley-Martinez

In the half dark of the rehearsal hall, a young woman prances like a ballerina through the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater. A torn parachute spreads behind her from ceiling to floor like enormous detachable wings. She holds an umbrella high. She doesn’t say a word. She stares at a distant nothing. I feel like I’ve walked into a particularly lush Fellini film. Or, maybe, another man’s dream.

“At this stage, we’re working on the physical and physical life,” says Matthew Glassman, director of “The Chagall Tales.” He’s also a member of the world-renowned Double Edge Theater company, which is at the tail end of a three-week residence at UCCS. “Later we’ll focus on how to find real presence coming from within. What we’re connecting to is less the conventional notion of character and more the idea of archetype.”

The product of this unusual collaboration between a high-minded Massachusetts theater company and an advanced acting class premieres today and runs through Sunday.

The upshot of the company’s alt approach is there is no linear storyline in “The Chagall Tales,” although the company does pluck imagery from the famous Surrealist’s paintings and insert it into loose interpretations of the Arabian Nights. The dialogue could fit on a couple pages, and Glassman doesn’t talk to these 11 students about a character’s motivations, intentions, psychology or emotions. Not in a residency this short, he says.

Instead, the work — and to a large degree, Double Edge — is grounded in movement (sinuous, athletic), imagery (grand, magical) and a kind of old-fashioned theatrical beauty, too, however passe that is in contemporary art circles these days. 

Created by Stacy Klein in 1982, the company’s mission is to create a “‘living culture’ by developing the highest quality of original theatre performance, based on the long-term imaginative work of the actor and his/her interaction with the communities in which the work takes place, and by cultivating at its home in Ashfield, MA – the Farm – a permanent center of performance, training, research, and cultural exchange.” 

“Our days are split up between our own process, our research, training and performance,” says Glassman, who has lived at the Farm for 10 years. He’s co-director now. “It’s actor training and vocal training and dramaturgy. And it’s also devoted to our training programs (outside the Farm), which are year around. We share our methodology with artists all over the world.” Founder Klein nods like it’s an understatement when I comment that it must be a very demanding life. 

UCCS assistant professor Kevin Landis watches students in his advanced acting class as they dance, walk, jump and climb in rehearsal. He was in a similar Double Edge training program in 2003 at Brandeis University. He eventually wrote his dissertation on the company.

He laughs. “The work is never done,” he says of “Chagall” and just about every Double Edge work: Each is part of play cycle that can take four or five years before they move on. “Chagall,” their current cycle, won’t premiere until 2012.”They’ll be doing this right up to the performance.” 

Their work, Landis says, is not tied to distinct. Still, Glassman hopes you’ll have a sense of the stories and “the world of imagination in which they take place.” Landis leans back in his folding chair and sighs at the fluid gorgeous passing before his eyes.

“If you go in feeling the obligation to make sense of the work,” Landis says, “to correctly makes sense of the work completely, it doesn’t work. Double Edge allows you to dream.

“We’re not used to that. We always want to be handed our dreams.”

Issue Date: Thursday, November 18th 2010