By Rebecca Wright
I am about to go into previews for St Joan at Quintessence, Maria is in tech for Richard III at People’s Light, Mary just had her first workshop for Machinal with EgoPo, Thomas is getting ready to load in Action is Primary with Meg Foley, Bayla is working her butt off at Camden Printworks, and Jess’s class just became the cover photo of the University of Chicago’s facebook page. Sometimes it feels like we’re all scattered to the winds, grinding our own grinds and jamming out on our own projects. But right now, even as we each plug away at our separate art labors, there is this other unifying truth: we’re revving up to make a new show together.
In May, we’ll have our first development session for a piece that will premiere at this year’s Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Although the May session will be the first time we get down to doing focused physical work on the piece that will be, we’ve actually been talking about this project for over a year, and working on it in small and large, tangential and direct ways for much of that time: from the play-dates at my newly purchased house where we made a mini orchestra in the illegally installed jacuzzi (since removed) to the Incubator residency at the University of the Arts where we experimented with depicting multiple coexistent time periods, to the Community Dinners where we prepare food for 100+ and invite everyone to come eat for free, the work on this piece has already begun.
Can you guess from the preceding paragraph what it’s about? To be honest, there’s lots we don’t yet know, but we do know that it has to do with smallness, with time passing and time capsules, and with food.
My favorite part about this stage in Applied Mechanics’s process is that everything starts feeling like it is speaking to the piece, and bits and bobs of art and writing and other media that resonate with the piece start popping up everywhere: Ali Smith’s Artful, where I found this sentences “[Books] are tangible pieces of time in our hands. We hold them for the time it takes to ream them and we move through them and measure time passing by how far through them we’ve got, what the page-edge correlation between the beginning and the end is. Also, they travel with us, they accompany us through from our pasts into our futures…”; my friend’s Instagram post of the Svalbard Seed Vault; to the tiny socks my infant child kicks off in every room of the house.
In about a month, I will gather all these scraps and snippets together, along with everyone else’s findings, and make a casebook of research for all of us to read and study in advance of our first development session. This session, which will take place for about a week in May, will be largely exploratory, using the gathered material as jumping off points for etudes, physical experiments, writing exercises, object-driven brainstorms. I’m eager for that week, and the second development session that will follow it in June.
Just a few days ago, we got the very exciting news that we’ve been awarded a residency at Celebration Barn Theater in Maine, and we’re excited to embark on the second stage of development in a supported retreat setting. During this residency, we will build on what we learn in May and create characters, outline, and script for our August rehearsals and our September performance.
But all that is miles away at present. For now, we’re just working, working and gathering, gathering. The art we make separately feeds the dreams of the art we’ll make together, the work we’re doing now shapes what we’ll bring to the table when next we meet. The seeds of the project take root in our imaginations. We water the soil so that they’ll grow. The present is vibrating with potential, with becoming. Applied Mechanics is revving up. Keep your eye out for the fruits in September.