Art Feeds the Soul

Contributed by Jeanne Travis

I was a stage manager long before I was a sound designer; a director and actor long before I was a stage manager and a flautist and composer before I can remember. I have been very fortunate enough to find or attract multifaceted people. I love to work with artists who are easily bored, take risks, make mistakes, collaborate, work hard and are generous.   

If I had known early on in my life what opportunities there were to fuse both music and theater into a career I wouldn’t have had to wage war with myself for the many years that I tried to pick one or the other. If you are born to be an artist you must pursue what you're wired to do. Living anything else is living a lie. Picking music over theater to me was like asking me which leg I could live without. I wish that I would have never tried to believe that I had to choose. Artists think on a level that cannot be measured. They invent, ponder, create, imagine, edit, summarize, synthesize, store and evaluate information with all fives senses. I once directed two horror Grand Guignol plays from their original 1890s texts. I felt amplified. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life” an actor told me in rehearsal. It was from this experience that I started to look at art from a completely new perspective which would eventually lead me to design. I also realized from this experience that the greatest reward an artist can ever hope for is to inspire others to create.

  “Most people live to create.  An artist creates
     in order to live, because art feeds the soul.”
                                                                   ~ My Mom

To me, creating art is like coming home. I like to be around my kind! I was so incredibly fortunate and humbled to accept the IT Award for sound design last year for Nat Cassidy’s The Temple, or Lebensraum. I just remember that I didn’t want to let anyone down; especially Nat. Everyone involved was so incredibly multi-talented. Above all, we were all amped and called to inspire one another and I have never felt so much support on a daily basis on a show before. I love independent theater. You meet the best people. I believe that in order to be successful artist you have to be a generous, kind, and wonderful person because from this centeredness flows a spring that the soul feeds on in order to create. Off and Off-Off-Broadway attracts like minded artists that thrive in this community.

I forget how extremely exposed sound is sometimes. It takes a fearless ambition to be a sound designer. To shout an idea, literally at high volume, takes guts. It is also a sound designer’s job to seduce you into a state of total unawareness that we are ever there. This allusion intrigues me and it challenges me. I have been very fortunate to work with playwrights who know how to wield sound design to their advantage. To be able to offer a playwright the assurance that their imagination should not be hindered by any limits in sound is the ultimate reason why I do what I do.

I have just started to play the flute again. I doubt that I will ever step foot into a costume ever again or have the strength to ever direct again. However, I am easily bored, I take risks, I make mistakes, I work hard and I'm generous. It's what I'm wired to do. Who knows what will happen next?
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Jeanne Travis is a composer, sound designer, stage manager and flautist. She composes daily and plays the flute at Judson Memorial Church. Sound Design credits include: Utility (The Amoralists Theater Company), The Temple, or Lebensraum (Tin Drum Productions), Woyzeck (No Win), Leave Me Green (Form Theatricals), Asymmetric (59E59), Frankenstein Upstairs, The Honeycomb Trilogy: Advance Man, Blast Radius, Sovereign (Gideon Productions), Rantoul and Die, Enter at Forrest Lawn (The Amoralists), Luft Gangster (Nylon Fusion). Stage Management credits include: Six Rounds of Vengeance, Untitled Vampire Cowboys Project, Alice in Slasherland (Vampire Cowboys), Final Analysis (Pershing Square Signature Center), Spectral Scriabin (Lincoln Center), Sir Patient Fancy, As You Like It, The Wonder (The Queen's Company). Special credits: Retro Productions Company Member since 2008. With Retro: The Tender Trap, The Desk Set, Holy Days, Dear Ruth, Benefactors, The Runner Stumbles, A Day in the Life of Joe Egg. Awards: WINNER 2015 New York Innovative Theater Award for Outstanding Sound Design: The Temple, or Lebensraum (Tin Drum Productions). Upcoming Projects: PSM: Thoa's Library (All For One) and SD: Universal Robots (Gideon Productions).

Finding the Right Steps

Contributed by Emily Edwards

Dance always improves a show. It doesn’t matter if it’s a full pas de deux or a simple grapevine of unadulterated glee. The amount of movement however, should always correspond with what the story needs. No more, no less.

I’ve been actively choreographing for the past eight years. With a background in ballet and modern and a fervent love for musicals; I’ve choreographed everything from a textbook production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, to a K-Pop dream sequence featuring comic book characters, to a 1940’s-era fight using a placenta as a weapon against easily horrified Nazis. With each new production, I realize how little I really know.

The first show I ever choreographed was Pippin. Not terribly daunting. Just following in the footsteps of some guy named Fosse. My goal for the show was to prove exactly how talented I was and how I could be just as good as Fosse. Somehow, I don’t think I managed it, but this mindset continued. Every time I was asked to do a new show or number, I was so grateful, then excited, and then needed to prove to everyone beyond a doubt that I was a valuable member of the creative process.

The result of this was a bunch of shows with lots of dancing. LOTS of dancing. So much dynamic movement everywhere, all the time. Then a couple of years ago I got into a heated argument with my musical director in the late hours of a tech rehearsal about whether or not the male lead should be dancing during his big solo. To me, his “big solo” meant that this was his time to shine in movement as well as song, and thereby win the audience’s hearts. The musical director’s counter argument was that he needed to be able to sing the song. Which, I totally get, but why not push it a bit? A comment from the musical director stayed with me: “They never do that on Broadway. They don’t have to sing and dance at the same time.” I disagreed, but let it go. The end result was that I cut out most of his movement and it was fine, except for my feelings being hurt. Nevertheless, I started paying closer attention to the movement in the shows I attended.

Many years have passed. A directing course I took stated that in order to clarify the story, only one person on stage should move at a time. This completely blew my mind! How does that even work?! Once again, I started studying performances and found it to be largely true. Shows with big name choreographers tended to be the shows I was least impressed with because I could tell that they were trying, much like I used to, to prove themselves. The story felt overwhelmed and muddled by the albeit beautiful dancing. I found myself becoming a believer in simplicity.

Emily Edwards (right) into the swing of things on Governors Island.  
Photo: Mike Cho

So I made a shift and started focusing on the story, more than my ego. The end result has been transforming. I don’t have to create the most complicated or difficult moves; I need to create movement that serves the story. I no longer get upset when a director tells me a number needs to be cut or simplified. Often I end up completely agreeing. Just because I can do a certain move, doesn’t mean I should. Oh sure, there’s still room for big production numbers with flips and kick-lines. (Who doesn’t enjoy a good kick-line?) But it doesn’t have to be about me “proving myself” anymore. If I do my job correctly, you should barely even notice I’m there.


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Emily Edwards is a choreographer, director, and performer who has worked in NYC for 13 years now. She loves the Indie theater community and has worked with Vampire Cowboys, Dysfunctional Theatre, DM Theatrics, The Brick, New Georges, The Flea, and Nosedive Productions to name a few. She is also the resident musical choreographer at NJIT/Rutgers. Emily can be found this summer teaching free swing dance lessons on Governors Island as part of the Dysfunctional Collective. http://emilyedwards.net/

Opening Doors

Contributed by Stephanie Willing

As a child I knew I wanted to be an actor, but not in an all-encompassing “This is my dream!” kind of way. I also wanted to be a marine biologist, a writer, an equestrian, a ballerina, and when I was very young, either a unicorn or a dinosaur--whichever happened first.

My early acting career was uneventful but satisfying. When I was handed my first script at Bible camp with highlighted lines, I was ecstatic. Later when I auditioned and won the part of the (I now realize) caricatured Jewish innkeeper’s wife in the Christmas play, I was triumphant. And when I played the Virgin Mary in sixth grade with a pillow tied under my robe with my father’s leather belt, I was happy. I dropped that baby weight with a slip of the belt loops, but I never dropped a line.

And then I stopped acting because I still wanted to be a dancer/writer/martial artist/
equestrian/ecologist. As the eldest of four in a household of specific and limited means, I was told, “Pick one.” I chose dance and stuck with it for the next twelve years, all the way through college, thanks to scholarships. Then, like many artistic and nerdy folks, I went to work for a couple years in a used bookstore, saving money and glorying in the dusty pages of potentiality. One day, while shelving a tray of battered romance novels, I knew in my bones what I had to do. Go to New York and be an actor/dancer/stage combatant!

While still in Texas searching Craigslist for jobs and auditions in NYC (I’d never heard of Actors Access or Backstage), I clicked on a “volunteers needed” ad for something called the IT Awards. I responded, emailed, confirmed. It seemed like a good place to begin my reconnaissance; I figured I could meet people, learn the names of the theater companies, and see what kind of work was being made. I found short-term housing in the Bronx, booked a one-way ticket, and flew to New York City. My first week in town I was an usher at the 2008 New York Innovative Theater Awards.

That was the year that the Vampire Cowboys swept with Fight Girl Battle World. I only saw screenshots of the cast and costumes, but I was in love. I was in awe. I said, “I need to know these people.” Again googling, I found The Saturday Night Saloon and signed up for the Rabid Vamps Fight Studio (the VC’s stage combat and choreography class). Through the Saloon, I met the folks behind Gideon Productions, Nosedive, and The Brick.

My first acting opportunity came through those connections, and I was cast in The Ninja Cherry Orchard with a huge bevy of actors that blew me away. Since then, almost entirely, every part I’ve played or production I’ve choreographed has come through a connection that began in 2008, even down to the man I married.



Stephanie Willing (left) performs with the Vampire Cowboys in the
Opening Number of the 2010 IT Awards

Just like my two years in the bookstore, I had found a group of passionate nerds who always had room for one more, and just like that, Indie Theater became home. I can directly trace my path in NYC theater from that single moment standing at the back of the auditorium at the IT Awards manning the doors. If you were there that night, you probably didn’t see me. You saw your friends, the wonderful people of our community that I had yet to meet. But when I held the door open for you to walk into the auditorium, I was also opening all the doors I’d walk through for the next eight years.
 

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Stephanie Willing is a dancer/actor/choreographer/stage combatant/voiceover artist, so the childhood dream is working out so far, but she’s still working on the marine biologist bit. She received a BA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University and studied Fight Choreography with Qui Nguyen of Vampire Cowboys. She is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing for Young People from Lesley University. Upcoming projects include fight directing for Flux Theater Ensemble’s production Rizing, opening May 2016. She will also be performing as Joan of Arc in MTWorks’s production of David Stallings’ Anais Nin Goes to Hell in October 2016.