Friday, June 26, 2015

Scenes from a common world

I am working with an international group of artists on a collaborative film project called "Laura, or Scenes from a Common World" that will be shot in Norway during July 2015.  More on this project as it develops.

From Square Top Theatre:

Now in production, our next original work explores the borderlands between film, theatre, dance, literature, and the contemporary fine arts. Laura combines visceral physicality, lyrical poetry, and evocative cinematography to explore one woman’s struggle to make herself at home in the world. Her struggle begins as a common one. A boy has left her. In losing him, she becomes less sure of the roles other people play in her self-creation. She seeks security in isolation only to find that landscape, community, and physical embodiment all ground who we are in ways she cannot escape. In this spare five-part drama, inspired by Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne myth, audiences see Laura seeking freedom by running away from the world, yet finding freedom, ultimately, in rootedness.
The project draws together artists from across the globe. Director Charles M Pepiton (USA/Washington), poet Damon Falke (USA/Norway), and artistWes Kline (USA/New York) previously collaborated on Square Top Theatre’s Now at the Uncertain Hour, a theatrical event for live performance, online streaming, and broadcast radio, which reached a combined live onsite/offsite audience of 46,053 in its premiere performance. For Laura, this team will be joined by printmaker Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton (USA/Washington), costume designer Leslie Stamoolis (USA/Washington), performer Alexandra Kazazou(Greece/Poland), and movement director Daniel Han (USA/Australia).
The film will be shot and the physical work will be composed in Tromsø, Norway, where the interaction of elements symbolically significant for the piece – water, fire, earth – are dramatized by the land itself. The resulting production will exist as a film, as a gallery installation, and as a live theatrical production built to tour. In Norway, Laura finds the “acres of redemption” she seeks. She discovers that she must create her life out of what the world gives her – a boy picking apricots, an old woman shaping a boat, a father, a river, a stone.