Comments on Rehearsal Process of LifeSpeak

Jim Manganello has been observing the rehearsal process of the creation of Mordine & Co.'s newest work, LifeSpeak, over the past two months. The following are his personal thoughts on the process.

I came to Mordine & Company as a theater guy who doesn’t know fifth position from fourth or releve’ from tiptoes. Having been deeply effected by I Haven’t Gone There Yet at the Epiphany Church, I asked Shirley if I could be around for her next rehearsal process. Talking a couple times over the summer, before rehearsals began, I was delighted to learn about Shirley’s deeply theatrical sense. True theater consists of real bodies creating something in real time—bodies both on stage and in the audience—and the total production depends as much on the imagination of the spectator as on the behavior of the performer. I was even more delighted to hear that the new Mordine & Co. piece would be built around stories and storytelling. We theater folk are in the business of stories.



Stories do not pre-exist the telling of them. Events occur, but the stories that we make are something rather different than the event we describe. A story is an event in itself. It might be a method of coping, of making sense of a situation that’s otherwise destructive or merely disorganized. It might be a necessary lie that allows us to move forward. In our theatrical context, storytelling is a performance. And that performance does something, both for the dancer and for the audience. Shirley is encouraging her dancers to move their storytelling away from a mere imitation of the event they’re describing—a personal tragedy, a family drama, a camping trip gone awry—and towards a creative response to that isolated event. This is a shift that’s often forgotten in theater. Especially in the Western dramatic tradition, we too often ask how we can emulate events that occur outside the theater and too seldom consider what can only happen via performance, and therefore why theater’s necessary at all.



The risk of doing a piece about stories is that the dancers will start emulating, that they’ll demonstrate what happened in the extensional world rather than produce a really creative act. But Shirley has turned that temptation into a productive challenge: she has challenged her performers to consider some literal story and to trust that they can dance out of that, foregoing the literalness and allowing pure creativity to take over. The director in Shirley has an acute sense of when her dancers are trying to fulfill some preconceived image, when they’re “acting.” Just this morning, she told them to let the sensation of the story “drop in,” and then to dance out of that, to trust that from that story, they will be able to create beautiful movement in space. And in so doing, the audience won’t be asked to play a guessing game—“I wonder what story that Mark guy’s acting out?”—but rather engage in the act of storytelling itself, with all its tragic and comic capabilities.

-Jim Manganello