By Maria Shaplin and Mary Tuomanen
On a chilly Sunday Night in late February, Applied Mechanics arrived at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland for a lovely weeklong residency to work on FEED. Our engagement included two performances, a guest teaching spot and a workshop, all of which were well attended by the hungry and inquisitive theater students. Michele Volansky, the department chair (Dramaturg extraordinaire and Playpenn Co-founder), was the consummate host. She leads a crack team of professors and practitioners, and overseers the student’s exposure to a broad range of plays and performance styles. This was many of the student’s first exposure to immersive theater. They really dug it.
A dramaturgy class created a sculpture about hoarding and #alternativefacts: a throne covered in trash, with two competing soundtracks of grotesque circus music.
A devised theatre class created three different cultures with their own constitutions: one dedicated to helpfulness, one dedicated to naps, and one that spoke only in Michael Jackson lyrics. The different cultures met each other and influenced each other, transforming their value systems and their languages as they learned from one another. Some countries were more porous than others, and some anti-assimilationist characters where left alone, speaking an outdated form of their language that was not longer spoken by anyone else.
Our last workshop brought us students from many disciplines, but especially from the sciences! It was very thrilling to have these new perspectives in the room as we used theatricality to manifest both the invisible and the impossible: systems of oppression, biological systems, and rewriting the rules of physics and fate to create moments of personal victory and power. We were reminded of how rich these workshops can be when not all the participants come from a performance background.
Michele also gave us the grand tour of her home: a modest Georgian mansion built in 1769 which has been restored to its original paint colors and furnished with super awesome period décor. It was gorgeous. We spent the week installing and rehearsing FEED, cooking delicious meals, dreaming up future projects and enjoying our short time away from Philly.
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