new play
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2012 has been a year of fragmentation, as I rearranged my life with a new job and new theatrical communities. I’ve realized, too, that my artistic work has been in fragments lately: Since February, Megan Cohen and I have been putting together our “Build Your Own Helen Play Kit,” made of fragments of identity, narrative,…
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Megan and I are pulling together found text for the incarnation of Helen we’ve come to call “The Face,” who speaks only in language handed down to her through the ages from epic poetry to contemporary academia. This poem is a contender for one of these found text Odes. Helen of Troy by Sara Teasdale,…
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Megan and I have been diving deep into researching the iconic Helen of Troy, the figure we immediately think of when we hear that famous line, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” We’ve been reading Homer, Marlowe, Goethe, Poe, Tennyson, and yes, Wikipedia. We’ve also discovered some wonderful modern poetry by Sara Teasdale and…
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For the last five weeks, I’ve been working with The Collaboratory to devise a new physical theatre piece based on Federico García Lorca’s poem-play, Yerma. We’ve been experimenting as much with our process as with the piece itself, reinventing how we work together virtually every time we walk into the rehearsal room. The Collaboratory (Emlyn…
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SHHHHH. DON’T TELL. For me, one of the most exciting things about working on Dirty Laundry with The Collaboratory is the opportunity to learn a new set of tools. My work as a director and playwright has been heavily text-focused, and I am eager to study the language of movement with my collaborators. At the…
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I’ve been doing some image research, looking at neo-classical representations of Helen, and today I came across this: “According to the Roman author Pliny, the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis could not find a woman beautiful enough to represent Helen of Troy, the archetype of the feminine beauty, so he picked the best features of five virgins to compose…
AMY CLARE TASKER 