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History
Wanderlust, 2004 (Wendy Remington & Chris VanDijk
as Anne and Jack) When Bryn
Manion and Wendy Remington founded their new theater company in January 2001, they
decided to call it "aisling," a Celtic word meaning dream or
vision. "Aisling" speaks to their Celtic heritage and the Irish
plays that form part of their repertoire, and it points to the dreamlike
quality of their work and theatrical method. This kind of theater emerges
from the collective psyche of an ensemble cast in a process of exploration
where everyone is both author and actor, and plot, structure, and character
remain in flux until a play begins to crystallize. Creating
"actor-centric" theater was not part of the program at the They
decided to develop their method and finance their projects by applying their
classical training to the works they knew best. In 1999, they formed the
precursor to Aisling and got grant funding to produce Shakespearean plays
outdoors under the auspices of the Free Shakespeare Project. For over two
years, the company devoted most of its energy to bringing free Shakespearean
plays to small towns throughout Most of
Aisling's Shakespearean productions were comedies, including Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing, but their
breakthrough production was the tragedy
Macbeth in the winter of 2002. Macbeth
succeeded because Bryn and Wendy applied the lessons learned from previous
productions. They abandoned the conventional "two two's" audition
format where each actor gets two minutes each for dramatic and comic
monologues. The Aisling auditions didn't depend on prepared text, lasted much
longer than two minutes, and required actors to participate in movement and
improvisation exercises. Also, in what has become
their established practice, Bryn and Wendy cast actors for Macbeth without assigning roles to
anyone. Macbeth also benefited from extended
rehearsal time. By a stroke of good luck they found inexpensive rehearsal
space in the basement of Trinity Lutheran church in In the
hours of rehearsal in the basement, they were able to work out a process that
drew on the creativity of the actors and flattened out the hierarchical
relations among writer, director, and cast. The process was grounded in the
Suzuki method, a rigorous voice and movement program that combines
traditional Japanese and Greek theater with martial arts and ballet. And it
included modern dance exercises, contact improvisation, and exercises
influenced by Tanya Kane-Parry and Ann Bogart. The intense physical activity
"prepares you for being imaginative. The body doesn't have time to
second guess itself." According to Bryn, it's like tapping into the
collective unconscious of the whole cast. They spent weeks
in the church basement, radically reinterpreting Macbeth. First they stripped the play down to its essential plot
points, and then using Macbeth's sleep deprivation as a starting point they
worked out ideas through improvisation and movement. The final script was
only 17 pages long. Like most of their subsequent work, Macbeth follows a strict narrative, but the relation of scenes and the
transitions among them depend on the logic of the subconscious. Although
they have continued to refine their method since the production of Macbeth, Bryn and Wendy knew they had
finally figured out how they wanted to work. While they do not use the method
for every production because it takes lot of resources and eight weeks of
rehearsal, they always use it to train and prepare for traditionally cast
productions. "The
process takes a lot out of you, but it's is so regenerative and creative, it
gives you a lot to carry you through for a long time. So you only need to do
it once a year or every 18 months." They continued
with the Free Shakespeare Project until 2003, when the logistics of producing
plays outdoors became too complicated. Also, for the first time the company
was beginning to produce original work in a serious way. After years of
adapting the classics, Bryn, now living in In 2003 Bryn
began work on what came to be a trilogy of plays called Force. Force had two
points of origin. One was Bryn's dreams of tornados, leading to her
fascination with the sudden violent transformative power of weather. The
other was the start of the war in What has
emerged after two years of rehearsals and workshop productions—now held at
the New York Irish Center in Long Island City—is a three-play meditation on
the nature of dream and the distortions of memory. Seven people, including a
cartographer, a war correspondent, and a visual artist ask themselves who
they are as they come up against forces beyond their control. And the members
of the audience ask themselves the same question when they come up against
the plays. The complete trilogy will be produced for the first time starting
in February at the Chocolate Factory theater in ~Brock
Pennington, 2006 A
History of Our Work to Date: 2007 Force*,
Spring The Chocolate Factory
Theatre, *Nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, 2007 2006 Playboy of the Western
World, Autumn The Imminent, Indeed (or Polly
Peachum’s Peculiar Penchant for Plosives), Summer Part of the at The Actor’s
Playhouse Convergence, Spring The 2005 And He Made a Her, Autumn A reading as part of THE
OFF PROJECT Produced by Peculiar
Works Project Version 10B, Autumn
Twelfth Night. Summer As part of the Play
Outside Festival in NYC Work/Dream, Spring A development workshop
sponsored by the Queens Council on the Arts and the New York City Department
of Cultural Affairs, The Undercroft, 2004 Force: Wanderlust, Autumn The Medicine Show Theater, Force: Threshold, Autumn
In Praise of Folly: The Don Quixote
Project, Summer Produced by Peculiar
Works Project Force: Wanderlust, Spring The Undercroft, 2003 Life’s a Dream, Fall The Undercroft, written
by Pedro Calderón de la Barca directed and adapted by
Wendy Remington design by Wendy
Remington and Stefano Brancato Love’s Labour’s Lost, Summer The Undercroft, written by William
Shakespeare directed and adapated
by Bryn Manion design by Wendy
Remington Imminent, Indeed, Winter The Undercroft, written and directed by
Bryn Manion design by Wendy
Remington and Bryn Manion 2002 Theatrigalia, Fall The Undercroft, Theatrigalia was an evening of
various assorted works of theater, music, art and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Summer The Undercroft, written by William
Shakespeare adapted by Bryn Manion,
Wendy Remington and Kathryn Hnatio directed by Kathryn
Hnatio design by Cheryl
McCarron Macbeth, Winter The Undercroft, written by William
Shakespeare directed and adapted by
Bryn Manion design by Bryn Manion
and ensemble 2001 A Few Hallelujahs, Fall written and directed by
Bryn Manion design by Wendy Remington Much The Undercroft, written by William
Shakespeare adapted by Bryn Manion,
Wendy Remington and Christopher Conant directed by Christopher
Conant, assisted by Kevin Myers design by Neil Koch and
Rachel Canning Love’s Labour’s Lost, Winter The Undercroft, International Talent
Network, written by William
Shakespeare directed and adapted by
Bryn Manion design by Wendy
Remington |
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