Vincent's Yellow

Big Week

So. BIG WEEK. So big I couldn’t get around to posting on my usual Monday. We’ll pretend it was a holiday thing.

First and foremost, we had our fabulous Rooftop Fundraiser Extravaganza last Thursday! It went swimmingly! (And yes, that may be a pun about the presence of a hot tub on this particular rooftop)

Photography by Shannon O'Neil

Look at my beautiful cast and crew! And my beautiful roof! This is indeed the roof of the very building where Vincent’s Yellow will be happening, in the background there you have Millennium Park, and you can even see part of the Art Institute of Chicago (where Vincent’s paintings are). Because there are no photos elsewhere on the site of these two lovely ladies, I’d like to point out that on the far right is my wondrous choreographer, Katie Eberhardy, and on the left that beautiful blond, bespectacled woman in a blue dress is my co-director, co-producer, co-We’re-Going-To-Make-This-Happen, Amy Buckler. The only person missing is my lovely Stage Manager/Assistant-to-Everything, Shannon O’Neil, who was taking the photos that night.

There she is! Isn’t she perrty? She came all the way out from New York for the month of July just to help me. Also, to enjoy Chicago in the summer, which is certainly worthy of her time.

Photography by Shannon O'Neil

We also maybe had a little fun playing with my Van Gogh doll. His ear comes off!

Photography by Shannon O'Neil

See? I’m holding it! And look at me and my lovely family: awww…

Shannon has also been going around Chicago lately taking photos of the Van Gogh doll in different locations, and so far this one has turned out to be my favorite:

Photography by Shannon O'Neil

Isn’t this photo profound? There’s something really fascinating about representation here: self-representation, others seeing your self-representation, the other’s representation of you, and all of this in a photo, that creates another imaging of two images… This photo really expresses to me a lot about Vincent’s Yellow, how in questioning this icon, and this human, we question ourselves. Who is Vincent looking at? What are we really seeing? How would he look at us looking at him? That’s all I can think while looking at this photograph.

The other thing accomplished this past week was that we painted the space! Not only was this important to set the right tone for the performance (it must be a space that feels old, from another time), but suddenly I found myself with paint on my hands, and thinking of Vincent. It took about 35 man hours to finish the apartment off, luckily I had help. Also luckily, my co-director Amy spent the last year in a scenic paint shop. I won’t show you the finished product, but here were some of the early stages.

Photography by Shannon O'Neil

Hi Amy!

Photography by Shannon O'Neil

Hi apartment!

Okay, that’s all for this week, running off to do many more things (like get less bruised from dance rehearsal, or make some canvas stretchers, or finish off my map of the current locations of Vincent’s paintings)…

much love!

Tags: cast, Chicago, crew, ear, family, fundraiser, help, paint, party, representation, rooftop, scenic design, self-representation

Crescendo

At the end of his life, Vincent van Gogh painted seventy paintings in seventy days. That’s right. The daughter of the innkeeper in Auvers told us that his schedule was quite regular: he woke up bright and early and went out to paint, came back to the inn for lunch, spent the afternoon making the finishing touches on the same painting, had dinner, went back up to his room to write a letter and fell asleep. And these were not some slap-dash paintings.

Church at Auvers, 1890.

Mademoiselle Gachet in the Garden, 1890.

Tree trunks in the grass, 1890.

Vincent’s time in Auvers-sur-Oise was a period of most passionate productivity, it is one of the most incredible outpourings of all Art History. Were you trying to cure yourself with painting, Vincent, which you said calmed your mind? Or were you trying to prove something before you finally gave up on this world? I’m not sure I’ll ever have a satisfactory answer…

What I do know is that I unwittingly share this time with you. I am about to embark on a period of intense productivity myself – teaching theater to children all day and rehearsing at night – understanding my craft from every possible angle and, I’m sure, learning many new things. My choreographer said to me the other day, “so the whole play is like one big crescendo, right?” I agreed heartily with her. It is also what the making of this play will be from now until opening night.

Unwittingly, I arranged my rehearsal period to begin and end within the same dates as your seventy days. Your first letter from Auvers is dated May 20th, my first rehearsal, 120 years later, was May 22nd. And opening night is the anniversary of your death, when your soul finally left its body…

But my, how you linger in so many other forms. I never can get over how you keep popping up everywhere.

All my love to you today, readers. May you feel as cosmically entwined as I do, for as Vincent wrote July 10, 1888:

That rakes up the eternal question: is life visible to us in its entirety, or before we die do we know of only one hemisphere?

Painters — to speak only of them — being dead and buried, speak to a following generation or to several following generations through their works. Is that all, or is there more, even? In the life of the painter, death may perhaps not be the most difficult thing.

Tags: crescendo, death, intensity, life, painting, productivity, spirit, theatre

Beginnings & Paul Gauguin

Things are starting to really heat up now. Tomorrow we have our first fundraiser at The Spot, in Chicago ($5 trivia! 7pm!), which I am very excited about, and a more intense rehearsal schedule kicks in soon. It’s time to start blocking and really building this play. This is both thrilling and a little daunting. As I have said more than once to my cast, this play is complicated, and well, it’s true. I am trying to do a lot more than tell a story. But so be it! I embrace the huge challenge I’ve set for myself.

This past week I chose the instruments that will be thrown into our theatrical mix — a set of big, mystical-sounding chimes, a cajon (a wooden box-shaped drum) and a xylophone! I’m eagerly awaiting the latter two in the mail, and all this along with my guitar, the voices of my cast (not to mention our newest cast addition will be bringing in her viola!) will make our soundscape. It’s important to get the toys early so that you have plenty of time to play with them, you see… :)

Last week we also had a series of smaller rehearsals focusing on character work. This is particularly necessary since various members of the cast are playing ideas-made-human. They feel like flesh and blood, but their actions represent much larger movements of knowledge, myth, and history…  One thing this led to was my finally spending some time with Paul Gauguin.

Thanks to www.tate.org.uk

I know I have referred to Gauguin as an unreliable narrator, and while that’s true, that’s watering down my feelings towards him a good bit. I suppose every one needs a scape goat, and well… it’s possible he’s been mine.

The reasons that Gauguin drives me crazy are simple:

1) Vincent never physically harmed himself until he lived with Gauguin. Nor was he in an asylum before then. And while I’m aware that doesn’t prove he’s to blame, I do think things may have been quite different if some else had been in Gauguin’s place.

2) Gauguin’s accounts of his time with Vincent are inconsistent, full of myth and exaggeration, and essentially unreliable. This is also done with the desire of creating mystery, which bothers me as a researcher and someone dedicated to truth.

3) Gauguin and Vincent lived together for a measly nine weeks, and yet they are always hung side by side in museums, and basically are tied up in each other’s reputations forever.

4) Personal reasons: I don’t like his work, he’s pretty obviously self-involved, he slept around while he was married with five children (whom he left behind in Copenhagen, while he ran off to Tahiti), etc etc. I just don’t like him.

However, this past week an actor and I dug around in his childhood and early life, and I found numerous facts enlightening about him. One was that he was born in Paris, moved to Peru when he was three (his father died on the voyage), moved back to France at 7 years old. In Peru, he was raised in the house of upper-class, distant relatives. In Paris, he no longer had servants. He became a sailor at 17, and his mother died at 19. He continued sailing until he was 22.

There is dislocation and loss all over Gauguin’s biography. There is no doubt he had difficulty pinning down his own identity, and this is what led him to gain an interest in myth, in romanticizing his loss of self into mystery. It is also undoubtedly what led him towards egotism – after all he had little that was static and dependable in his life.

While I haven’t suddenly started admiring him, I do think I understand Gauguin a bit better now. Everyone comes from something and somewhere…

It’s time for me to climb into bed now, I got a busy week of fundraising, dancing, playing, singing and blocking ahead of me!

All my love, until next week…

Tags: character, dance, fundraising, Gauguin, history, instrument, music, myth, mythology, theater