Flux Theatre Ensemble

What is Flux Sunday?

So much to catch up on! Have Another last night (it went well), a shout out for Infectious Opportunity (go see the extension), an update on the quality discussion and more NET unpacking. But for now, a quick update on our last Flux Sunday!

BACK ON OUR FEET, BUT WOOZY
Thanks to Tiffany, we were back on our feet staging things. While everyone likes the ol' read around the table, there's a special alchemy when the right director and rights actors play for an hour and something alive breaks through. The flip side (or in honor of Bird House, the Lop Side) is things get messy, and that was definitely the case last Sunday, as we ran nearly half an hour over!
But good work was accomplished. We read more from Johnna Adams' Lickpittles, Buttonholores and Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens and David Ian lee's In The Year Of Nothing, or So Goes The Nation; both big cast beasts, one the rhyming hexameter play featured at last night's Have Another, and the other a gritty cinematic look (or so I think early on) at the trickle down of corruption.

HONEY ON THE HANDS
I then staged two new scenes from an old play of mine, Honey Fist. Finally finished after a year's hiatus, Ingrid Nordstrom and Candice Holdorf took turns as Gretyl Barnes, the kidnapped pop star maniuplating her hijackers in all sorts of surprising ways. My favorite part was Aaron Micheal Zook's portrayal of Sul - first time through, he played up what appears on the page like sarcasm, but in the run he played it sweet and sincere - and it landed just as I'd hoped.

PAINT ON THE FINGERS
Next up was Zack Calhoon's Paint, featuring the recently divorced couple Sarah and Ray trying to work through Ray's violence against her son, David. As Ray and Sarah, David Ian lee and Karen Sternberg (first timer!) really found both the attraction and ugliness in this relationship, and it was off set beautifully in the youthful rush of David (Brian Pracht) and his girlfriend's (Caitlian Kinsella) post coital laughter. The legacy of violence raises its head in this scene, as well, and the question of both couple's survival hangs in the air.

GREEN IN THE EYES
Then we returned to Mary Fengar Gael's Opaline, another play featured at last night's Have Another. And much like last night, this scene was playing like gangbusters. A line about a damned horse doctor stopped the scene as the room rocked with laughter, and Johnna's sudden seduction of Matthew Archambualt's Hargraves was a delight. More of this play, please!

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
We ended with the first scene from a new play by Aaron Michael Zook, whose We Are Burning was another Have Another. This scene, Graves and Worms and Epitaphs, started silly, turned a notch of darkness when Jane Taylor as Liz exploded against her ex-husband's door, and then turned very dark indeed as Mariam Habib as Josh told just how that ex-husband became a shut-in. A lovely way to end the day with a red sun setting of sorts.

We're back on our feet again, energized from this last Have Another...but more on that anon. Read the full story

UNPACKING NET, PART 2: DEFINING OUR AESTHETIC

One of the challenges of NET for Heather and I was talking about the work Flux does, aka, "The Elevator Speech". This is the phrase for that woefully inadequate yet necessary 30 second pitch about your company's work, a pitch useful primarily in elevators and, well, national conferences.

We're not there yet, so if you see us in the elevator, don't expect it.

But having to talk about the work we do to those who haven't seen it really helped articulate some hunches into thought. Also, at our last Flux retreat, we talked about the kind of work we're drawn to, and that conversation, along with the push of the NET summit, has led to this post.

I love Pandora's Music Genome Project; the idea that rather than music being identified solely by stodgy genre, it is rather composed of hundreds of interacting parts that together comprise the song's DNA. This approach allows songs to talk to each other across genre and discover surprising connections; it allows for complexities and fusions and restless boundaries; it allows music to be defined by the sum of all the myriad ways we can imagine talking about it.

You see where this is going. What follows is a rough guess at the aesthetic genome of Flux - the commonalities I see in the work we're doing - but it is very rough, and needs to be hacked at by all the Members and FOFs (or anyone reading this post for that matter).

Here we go:

1. NARRATIVE CATHARSIS: We are drawn to work that uses the imaginative empathy of character and the rising conflict of narrative to purge emotion.
Examples: Riding the Bull, Rattlers
In Practice: While we love to experiment with narrative structure, that experiment is never at the cost of the audience's bond of imaginative empathy with the characters, nor the integrity of those characters' journey through the story. But this leads into #2...

2. NEGATIVE CAPABILITY: This is Keats', talking about Shakespeare "I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Examples: Other Bodies, A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Practice: We are not drawn to plays with obvious morals or themes, nor where the actions of the characters are explained or explainable. This follows #1 because it serves as a necessary friction - we want the empathy and catharsis, but only if they lead away from certainty and into mystery.

3. TONAL DISSONANCE: In music, dissonance is considered an unstable chord, a tension that needs to move forward in order to resolve, and we create tonal dissonance in our work through juxtaposition of opposites - broadly comic moments following tragic scenes (Life Is a Dream), naturalism chased by expressionism (Pretty Theft) - often within the same moment ("So I made love to her" "What's wrong with me?" "And Ted here killed her").
In Practice: Along with #2, #3 keeps the impulse of #1 from becoming easy. This embrace of tonal dissonance is also the aspect of our work critics have the most difficult time with; I think perhaps because tonal dissonance is usually used to disengage an audience from narrative and character; with Flux, this dissonance is used to deepen and widen that engagement.

4. AUDIENCE INTIMACY: The fourth wall has been broken in 10 out of the 11 plays Flux has or will produced. In some cases, direct address is the primary motor of action. The bond of imaginative empathy, under duress from the necessary shocks of Negative Capability and Tonal Dissonance, is reaffirmed by the complicity of direct address.

5. EPIC SCOPE: None of the 11 plays have conformed to the three unities of time, place and action; when it comes to time, many leap rapidly through the years (The Lesser Seductions Of History, 8 Little Antichrists, J.B.); with place, several have so many locations a sense of traditional place is destroyed (Other Bodies, A Midsummer Night's Dream); and with action, not a single play follows only one plot (except maybe J.B.). Several have more than 5!
In Practice: Epic scope is one more way of fighting against tug of Narrative Catharsis to deepen and widen the impact of the play's action.

6. METAPHYSICAL REALISM: Flux creates worlds that embrace magical realism with a twist: it's not just the intrusion of something magical into an otherwise realistic world, but a metaphysical conflict incarnated into an otherwise realistic world.
Examples: Other Bodies, Angel Eaters Trilogy, Life Is A Dream
In Practice: These conflicts have included: the fluidity of identity, the question of free will, cosmology, the nature of time, divine justice and more. In Flux's work, those conflicts take human form as the hearts, bodies, wills and realities of our characters are transformed in otherwise realistic worlds.

7. BIG CHARACTERS: We like characters of size, with size defined as their capacity to change and be changed by the world of the play and their own actions.
Examples: Lyza, Bottom, Joann, Segismundo, Allegra, Terry, Martha

8. TRANSFORMATIVE STAGING: Because of the Epic Scope of the plays, (and perhaps a little because of the un-epic scope of our budget), our staging uses the complicity of the audience's imagination to create the world: with a word, a single prop, a sound cue, we create the vasty fields of France; and then use these same tools to mean both that thing and something new.
Examples: The poles in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the kisses in Pretty Theft, the sounds in Other Bodies
In Practice: When something is transformed by an audience's imagination into something else, it never fully loses its previous incarnation, and these layers of meaning can build into a potency of expression that is unique to theatre.

9. ROUGH MAGIC: Flux loves the rough magic of theatre! Crazy fight scenes (Rue), on stage magic (Angel Eaters Trilogy), dances (Pretty Theft), rodeo showdowns (Riding the Bull), music (A Midsummer Night's Dream), all those dirty tricks of show business that feel good.

SO! That's a start.

What do you see in our work that I'm missing here? And what is the DNA of your own work? And how do we cram all that into 30 sexy seconds? Read the full story

Thanks Gus for plugging my show, NeverCracked, in the previous post Out and About II. I just wanted to give all our followers the specifics so you can check out (what I think) is a really funny, provocative and topical piece of art. And Flux's own frequent collaborator, Asa Wember (Other Bodies, Angel Eaters Trilogy, upcoming Lesser Seductions of History) is doing the sound design!

A comedic double bill including Daniel MacIvor's award-winning NEVER SWIM ALONE, in which old buddies compete in fast-paced absurdist battles of wits, one-ups, and manliness. Also featuring the world premiere of CRACKED by acclaimed DC playwright Gwydion Suilebhan, a short solo play starring a woman, an audience, and an egg. Directed by Emerie SnyderProduced by The Intentional Theatre Group & Carissa Baker. Presented by The Midtown International Theater Festival.

Featuring Daniel Dugan, Candice Holdorf*, Grace Kiley* and Nick Lewis

Designed by Stacey Berman, Emerie Snyder, Keith A. Truax & Asa Wember

Performance Venue/Dates:

Workshop Theatre Co's Manstage, 312 W 36th St

Monday, July 13th - 8:30 pm

Wednesday, July 15th - 5:00 pm

Tuesday, July 21st - 8:30 pm

Saturday, July 25th - 5:00 pm

Friday, July 31st - 9:00 pm

Sunday, August 2nd - 8:00 pm

*AEA Members - Equity Approved Showcase

You can read a nice day by day write up of the National Summit for Ensemble theatres here. I should have another post myself soon Unpacking NET, but this weekend was crazy with Have Another rehearsals and Flux Sunday.
More on all of that soon! Read the full story

Congratulations to Erin Browne for making the shortlist of BBC's World Drama Competition with her play Trying...

...and to Corey Ann Haydu for the upcoming production of her play Runaway Love at The White Box Theatre Festival. Go see it!

Trying was developed at Flux Sunday, and Runaway Love was part of Poetic Larceny. We are thrilled to see these plays (and playwrights) getting attention - so congrats to Erin and Corey! Read the full story

As you may remember, Flux was thrilled to recently win the Independent Theatre Bloggers Association's Citation for Excellence in Off-Off-Broadway Theater. What you may not have known is the ITBA asked all the winners to create an acceptance video. Well, we may have jumped on that opportunity a wee bit faster than some of the Broadway winners, so as ITBA collects the videos, we thought we'd share ours with you.

But what kind of acceptance video to shoot? How to honor such an honor? We then remembered that our upcoming production of The Lesser Seductions of History is set in the 1960's, and realized the video could be an homage to an exceptional artist from that decade.

And once we got started, we realized we had a lot more people to thank than just the ITBA. So! In honor of the many people who have helped us get here, and in the spirit of Bob Dylan's iconic 1960's video, Subterranean Homesick Blues, and with great thanks to video artist Zack Robidas and Nick from The Majorleans, we give you our acceptance video!

(Lyrics are below, and you're going to need them)




The Lyrics
"Nicks in the studio
Mixing up the audio
Zacks on the pavement
Setting up the video
Cobos got the turpentine
Little Pond, Small Pond
Photos by Justin Hoch
Fat suit by Carickhoff
I.T.B.A.
We just want to say
Thank you lord
For this sweet award
Its the M to the FTA
Hooked up by the Choinoire
Koopmans got the ground hog
Hes gonna prank him
We got some good friends
Were gonna thank them.

Calebs got the Levengood
Pips got the grey hood
Powells got the duckwood
Todds got the shouldnt should
Jenns got an angry bone
Chainsaw went to paint a throne
Sassys got a fancy phone
Calls from the DaVonne
The Majorleans
Are on the scene
Mathers brought the ammo
Daileys and del Orto
PR by the Em O
Pretty by the Szymko
Cotton got the Wolf O
Cribbage with the Nappo
Andes is the leather man
And Jason brings the Monro(y)

Crommett, Glickfeld
Jane Taylors sure swell
Mitchell, Witherell,
Johnnas eating angels
Mooney, Kenny,
Two Becky Kellys
Robin Reigi
If we cant get TCG
Just Show To Go, You
And Riccio, ooh
Asa Wember,
Every Flux member
Loves every donor
On the train from Stages
With Sunday pages
Elise and Felicia
Jakes Satanachia

Ah Waller, Fuller,
Andy Fritsch, Clyde Fitch, Isaiah get hitched,
We transgress
Four flights to Access
Jessi, Jerry, Sandra,
Angela, Martha,
Messin with Misheshin
And they put you on the Davis Shipp,
The Majorleans
You know what I mean
Better google the larcenists,
Beware string conspiracies
Help Womens Project
Public and Perspect
Ackerman and Heitzman
Prachtys OK then
So better get ready
For the Lesser Seductions"

To all the people we missed in this thank you, THANK YOU. Read the full story

FLUXERS, OUT AND ABOUT

Lots to see and do while you wait for our next Have Another, or recover from it!

This week, check out my short play America, or God Shed His Grace On Thee at the U.S-ification of America Conference at Center Stage - I'm on the Thursday/Saturday 'Stripes' program. This event also features plays by Flux friends John Hurley and Nick Monroy, and a host of buds from Impetuous Theater Group. I'll be there tonight - see you there?

Opening next week is the long awaited Bird House, press photo above featuring Flux Members Christina Shipp and Cotton Wright (photo by Marcus Woolen). The play is written and directed by Flux friends Kate Marks and Heidi Handelsman respectively, and also features Flux friend Anthony Wills Jr. It's a can't miss!

Opening the week after is NeverCracked, a double bill of plays featuring Flux Member Candice Holdorf, presented by our friends at The Intentional Theatre Group at MITF. Check it!

And opening and closing next week is She Of The Voice, a Thinking Person's Theatre production at The Underground Zero Festival at ps122, featuring the work of Flux collaborators Becky Kelly (Rattlers, Pretty Theft) and Rebecca Marzalek-Kelly (Rue, Riding the Bull). That's right, two Becky Kellys working on the same project - look out. (also,

Any other Flux friends doing stuff we should know about? Post below! Read the full story