Lucy Cashion & Joe Taylor Interactive talk
International Conference "Theatre Between Tradition and Contemporaneity"
Theatre - Dance - Music - Visual & Multimedia Art - Arts Administration - Performing Arts Training - Stage Design & Technology
Lucy Cashion: theatre artist. Founder: Equally Represented Arts (Best Theatre – Alive Magazine). Select works: Trash Macbeth (St. Louis Theatre Circle Award: Best Director of a Drama, 2017); Oedipus Apparatus (St. Louis Theatre Circle Award Nomination: Best New Play). Select NYC credits: AK-47 Sing-Along by Samara Weiss (NYC International Fringe Award - "Excellence in Directing"); Snow Fleas (director) by Otso Huopaniemi. Accolades: one of ten ‘Rising Stars’ in the arts, St. Louis Post-Dispatch; one of ‘6 Theatre Workers You Should Know’, American Theatre. Professor: Saint Louis University; MFA: Columbia; training: l'École d'art dramatique Eva St-Paul, Paris; SITI Company.
Tradition and Iconoclasm in Theatre, or, Remaking European Classics in the Image of the American Millennial
Interactive talk with photo/video demonstrations by Lucy Cashion, M.F.A. - Artistic Director, founder of "Equally Represented Arts, Assistant Professor", Saint Louis University (Missouri, USA) and Joe Taylor - creative director, performer and composer (Missouri, USA).
PRESENTATION OVERVIEW
Joe Taylor is the creative director, songwriter, and frontman of Kid Scientist and has performed alongside international artists such as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Ben Kweller, and Ibiyinka Alao, the Nigerian Ambassador of Art. He has collaborated as a composer, music director, and actor with ERA and director Lucy Cashion on Faust: go down with all the re$t, Snow White, Oedipus Apparatus, Trash Macbeth, and Moscow!. In addition to composing music for and performing with Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, he has produced several immersive works of music and theatre, including Kid Scientist’s A Report from the Future. Joe holds a Bachelor of Arts from Washington University in St. Louis where he studied German language and literature and physics.
This is a presentation about adapting four traditional, European, literary works into experimental, avant-garde performance for midwestern American audiences. The presenters are the creators of these performances: Lucy Cashion, director and writer; and Joe Taylor, composer, performer, and writer.
In this presentation, we demonstrate our process of making new interpretations of old works: 1) first we examine the dramaturgy, structure, and history of a work; 2) then we discover our intuitive connections to the work; and 3) finally we recreate it for contemporary context based on our analytical and instinctual responses. The result is a production of an entirely new work of theatre. The four works from which we present examples are: FAUST (go down with all the re$t), adapted from Goethe’s Faust, Part One; Oedipus Apparatus, adapted from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; Snow White, adapted from the Grimm brothers’ Schneewittchen; and Trash Macbeth, adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Our versions of these works were all created and produced in St. Louis, Missouri within the last four years. Conceptually, they were all created between tradition and contemporaneity.
We spend ten minutes discussing each work, providing photos and videos of performances, and sections of script. We compare text from the original works with our own adaptations to show how the works are transformed by our process.
During the remaining fifteen minutes of our presentation, we engage in interactive discussion with the audience, answering any questions they might have, and/or providing additional examples of work. Between the ttwo of us, my collaborator and I are fluent in English, French, and German, in case that is helpful in facilitating discussion.
Organized by IUGTE in collaboration with "ArtUniverse" and New International Performing Arts Institute