GERTRUDE AND ALICE (INTERVIEW WITH DESIGNER SHERRI HAY)

GAND

E A BUDDIES IN BAD

R L TIMES THEATRE

T  I  UNTIL OCTOBER 7TH

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One of the many astonishing things about the current remount of Anna Chatterton's and Evalyn Parry's Gertrude and Alice, is the set design by Sherri Hay (interview below). A recurring playful quality during the performances seems, in part, motivated by the amazing kinetic nature of sophisticated yet childlike geometric-like structures sprinkled throughout the space for the performers to simultaneously address, utilize, and inhabit. Like pick up stix set carefully and starkly in a salon and ready to be dealt with. And there are sands, like time moving through an hourglass, falling from these elegant arrangements, gesturing toward the kind of modernist literature Stein embarked upon as a form of words/sand/paint - what have you - falling from the hands of artists in unexpected and startling ways. A kind of defamiliarization that illuminates a familiar object though an air or mystery and altered form. Like Dali's concisely 'real' approach to surrealism (e.g. The Persistence of Memory) and Picasso's objectifying approach to cubism (e.g. Les Demoisells d'Avignon)

Elegant costumes by Ming Wong add to and contrast with the overriding sense of playfulness and act as  stabilizing elements for the serious commentary and the necessary laughter that rings throughout. 

photo by Jeremy Mimnagh - costumes by Ming Wong

Karin Randoja's varied and articulate direction, aided by a wonderful, almost silent film-cum-slapstick sound design by Aleda Deroche, gives the production (and the performers) a bounce and swing that has both Gertrude and Alice fully inhabiting the shapes and sounds that surround them for a fleeting, breakneck 75 minute tragicomic romp through the lives of these iconic lesbians. 

The playful quality that permeates is in sharp and effective contrast to the darker shadowy moments, again aided by the overall design, that give a layer of mystery to the production and the characters. The script, although marked by a sense of whimsy-cum-wistful sentiment, also possesses a speculative and serious testament to the ways in which Stein and Toklas have been positioned over the past century. This dramaturgical mixture does tend to fall short within the complex areas regarding the much debated work that has been done on race politics and ethnicity in some of Stein's writing (e.g. 'Melanctha' from 'Three Lives'). Toklas, at one point in the play, attempts to address some of this, but only skims the surface through a brief defence within the realm of Jewish identity and survival during the holocaust. This element is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the overall performance text, and renders the experience of 'Gertrude and Alice' simultaneously playful, serious, and potentially reductive. An elaborate and beautifully designed addendum to the program, referred to frequently throughout the performance, does include valuable information regarding these issues, providing a much needed reference for further information beyond the scope of the generally playful and evocative onstage performance text.

Stein and Toklas inhabit a particular place in the history of twentieth century art, sexuality, and politics as they mix and conflict. This production is welcome food for thought (with a wonderful touch of culinary delight from Alice) as two powerful women (as characters and performers) take the stage and make the most of each and every moment. 

Chatterton has an impeccable sense of timing and breakneck chatter broken by frequent remorse tinged with jealousy, while Parry brings Stein to life with a demonstrative power and strength that is effectively intervened upon by the lighter moments where she is clearly asking the audience, through her performance, to decide for themselves how seriously to take Stein's words regarding the monumental issues that early twentieth century art, literature, and the complex horror of two world wars began to address. 

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INTERVIEW WITH SHERRI HAY 

I think Stein says that performance makes people nervous, and that is because time is somehow out of joint. This was very interesting to me. set designer for Gertrude and Alice - Sherri Hay

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DB What was your first introduction to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and what has your aesthetic (if any) relationship/response been to their presence in the art (and literary) world, and to Stein's work specifically?

    SH I didn’t know very much about those two as people before doing this play, beyond perhaps that photo
of them in their salon surrounded by so many paintings that they had collected. I had a passing acquaintance
with Stein’s poetry, but no real response to them as art collectors. 

When I started making moving sculpture and was thinking of objects as performers, a friend mentioned
Gertrude’s lecture in which she talks about plays as landscape. In that work, I think Stein says that performance makes people nervous, and that is because time is somehow out of joint. This was very interesting to me.

We humans are historical creatures, moving from event to event, constantly and anxiously waiting for things to happen. And so in theatre and in life we don’t spend much time in what is actually going on right now, in what I imagine Stein means by the continuous present. 

Perhaps Gertrude’s notion of play as a landscape releases us from this kind of narrative thinking. Landscape, maybe, is a kind of all-things-at-once kind of seeing, whereas narrative thinking is one thing after another. I like to imagine what time might be like as a tree or a rock, presence without the anguish of historicity. This idea of play 
as landscape has helped me think about objects as performers in my own work.

Evalyn Parry as Gertrude Stein 

DB I have always been fascinated by Picasso's portrait of Stein and how he explained to her that if it doesn't look like her at first glance, it will eventually. How do you respond to this idea of the image portraying something or someone in a way that is not immediately recognizable? For example, is cubism a kind of defamiliarizing aesthetic form that portrays subjects in perhaps deceptive and/or transformative ways?

 Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein

SH Defamiliarizing is a good word for what I imagine the cubists were trying to do. I think and hope that it was transformative more than deceptive. I imagine that in that new age of the photograph, the cubists wanted to
make their paintings more real than a mechanical reproduction. Didn’t the cubists say they were trying to see
from all sides at once?

I don’t know if Gertrude Stein called herself a cubist though she certainly felt some affinity for cubism. Her words have the same disjointed relationship to one another, and perhaps take some time to make sense of, like Picasso is said to have said about his portrait of Stein. 

But a lot of this play is about how current Stein’s thinking is. Gertrude says ‘everywhere and nowhere’  in
reference to her work, which seems to me to be beyond cubism’s merely faceted way of seeing, much more
virtual in the way we now understand the word. And her continuous present is a steady stream rather than the mechanical ticking of Braque or Picasso. 

Anna Chatterton as Alice B. Toklas

DB In Evalyn's piece about your new design she speaks of Picasso's work, and the ways in which you have referenced some specific pieces in the set as a kind of moving sculptural image that the actors respond to. Can you describe this a little, and how you created it as part of the set, and how it works throughout the play?

SH I used as referent a set of drawings made by Picasso they call ‘Constellation drawings’. I’m not sure if it
was he who called them that or if they got called that after. There are a lot of dots and the dots are connected by lines.  The drawings do kind of look like constellations, to me they also look like musical scores.  

A SELECTION FROM PICASSO'S CONSTELLATION DRAWINGS

For the set, I wanted to give the characters an abstract three dimensional space to inhabit, one in which the
whole space was charged with movement and shape. And so that the characters weren’t existing in any
historical place or time. 

SET DESIGN BY SHERRI HAY

So then there are objects hanging and resting throughout the space, bright gestural lines and dots on a black background, maybe it is kind of a three dimensional drawing. The objects move and change and they do so using sand. They are suspended in the air and counterbalanced with bags of sand that slowly empty onto the stage. As the sand empties from the bags the objects move up or down and change shape. These gestural objects become something like a door or a painting for a time and then lose their referent again once they are no longer used as such by the characters. 

DB Could you describe any influences on your work in the theatre? When I think of sculptural moving sets I immediately think of the original designs for Sunday In The Park With George. Or early 20th century work (e.g. Matisse' backdrops etc.)

Matisse’s paper cut-out designs for Léonide Massine’s Rouge et Noir

SH I do love those Matisse backdrops. But I wasn’t familiar with the design for Sunday in the Park with George though, until just now. I had a look on YouTube, it looks magical and beautiful, thanks for that. And it's designer Tony Straiges, whose work [with Sondheim's Sunday In the Park with George] looks to have been influenced by the moving sets of the mid 1800’s, which have also been very important to me.

set design for Sunday In The Park With George

In that era of theatre they even had panorama type sets that the audience would pay to sit and watch move and change, sometimes without actors in it at all. I think Daguerre, an early photographic pioneer made sets like
these. In any case, there was a kind of nascent cinematic thinking in that era just before cinema was invented
that involved movement and light. It was very beautiful, very pure. And a lot like Stein’s thinking of a play as a landscape. 

I worked with the Independent Aunties [Theatre Company - Anna Chatterton, Karin Randoja, Evalyn Parry] in 2006 on Clean Irene and Dirty Maxine. They are a very collaborative group, very generously making the thing the best it can be. I think they asked me to do this design because they felt that a visual artist would bring something to a play that is in some ways about visual art. 

From the beginning, one of the things the Aunties were clear about was that the play ought to be in the continuous present. As this is something I’ve been thinking about in my sculptural work, I was really interested to be a part of this.

The technical challenges have been engineering ones. Each of the moving objects are counterbalanced by two bags of sand that slowly release sand onto the stage, change the weight differential, and so the object moves and changes. The timing depends on the flow and the weight of sand that is released in time. This has involved a lot of math, and a lot of trial and error. 

And though the objects behave fairly predictably, they don’t behave like cues that someone operates behind the scenes. In a way the objects have a life of their own, and on a timeline that is parallel to, not dependent on, the timeline of the actors. So the actors have to interact with the objects in ways that are not entirely predictable. This has been an interesting creative challenge, I think, for all of us.

GERTRUDE 

AND 

ALICE 

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RUNNING AT BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE UNTIL OCTOBER 7TH