10,000 Arts, Minnesota’s Creative Quarterly, is published jointly by The Rake and mnartists.org to provide an outlet for new arts voices and to raise the level of arts criticism in the region. Covering visual, performance, new media and literary arts, 10,000 Arts includes excerpts from mnartists.org content, original interviews and features surveying current arts offerings and an “Art Market” sampling of easy-to-acquire art.

Circulation of the quarterly is 70,000, including 60,000 distributed with The Rake and an additional 10,000 distributed through art centers in the Twin Cities and select outstate markets.

10,000 Arts serves as a portal to the mnartists.org site and expands on the arts and culture coverage of The Rake. It can also be accessed through rakemag.com and twinciteisfinearts.org.

Mnartists.org is a project of the McKnight Foundation and Walker Art Center. The Rake is a monthly feature magazine with an additional Web platform.

Feature Story
Theater in Motion
Christy DeSmith

In this lead article for the new issue of 10,000 Arts, critic Christy DeSmith offers an appreciation and short history of "movement theater," a burgeoning performance genre combining elements of dance, clowning, and traditional theater.

In accordance with standards for staging cosmic spectacles, (however low-budget), the cast of A Gift for Planet BX63 appeared in glittering, metallic costume. But Off-Leash Area, an inventive, burgeoning troupe based in Minneapolis, had injected its intergalactic show—think The Little Prince—with another, rather unexpected feature: zero gravity. Rendered as a six-foot cube, simply constructed from plywood, mirrors, and Plexiglas, this tiny onstage world was a place in which the performer, Jennifer Ilse, could wall-dance. By balancing on her hands and kicking off the cube’s various surfaces—even its ceiling—Ilse created the illusion of floating in space.

Her performance mixed dance, mime, and traditional text-based theater, not to mention gymnastics and contortionism. In all, it was an extraordinary demonstration of “movement theater,” a performance genre increasingly popular in the Twin Cities. It is, in essence, an approach that requires a heightened use of gesture and body language, as well as an awareness of the spatial relationships among the actors, the audience, and the performance space. In simple terms, it’s theater that has been choreographed. And as a matter of fact, there’s a permeable boundary between “movement theater” (or “physical theater,” as it’s often called) and “dance theater.” Both communicate with motion more than words. The difference between them lies in the varying measure of each ingredient.

When it comes to distinguishing theater from other entertainments, especially film, immediacy and common experience are, perhaps, its supreme virtues. Theater is unique in the way it unfolds in real time at a common point shared between artists and audience, thus imbuing the live performances with a sense of connectedness that film and literature simply cannot possess. But there’s another distinction less often discussed: A theater audience observes the action through a window more sweeping and panoramic in scope than that offered by film.

Exposure to cinema has caused many theatergoers, including this one, to tire of dialogue-heavy theatrical realism. Filmmakers have the luxury of using close-up shots when they wish to emulate the intimacy of real life, person-to-person conversation. In a playhouse (or for that matter, an ancient amphitheater) it’s difficult for the audience to see the teardrop streaking an actor’s cheek—that tear is simply too remote. Theater must provide something altogether different. Since the scale is so much larger, a performer’s broad, gestural movements will register far better than, say, the nuance of his facial expressions, especially in larger venues. The performer better communicates with thrashes and wails—and, come to think of it, the Greek chorus often functioned in this style, too.

In short, with movement theater, character is rendered physically, not emotionally. Locally, well-known examples include Steven Epp’s portrayal of Tartuffe in Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s now-classic production of Molière’s play: Epp crouched in the shadows as would a predator, before leaping forth to center stage. He didn’t walk so much as slither. On the other hand, in Or The White Whale, last spring’s adaptation of Moby Dick, director Jon Ferguson called for a lack of movement—stillness in an otherwise kinetic universe—to illustrate the alienation of Ishmael. In both instances, actors and directors worked to distill from complex characters their most basic, core elements. But, in translating those elements into evocative physical presences onstage, they offered more powerful understandings of these characters.

What’s more, movement theater tends not to be burdened by the formalities some folks perceive in much of the performing arts. Chalk it up to the pervasive influence of clowning and circus arts, but movement theater practitioners, to their credit, do not shy away from silliness, even if their subject matter is solemn, be it war (Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, Live Action Set, 2005), the great American novel (Or The White Whale), or feigned piety (Tartuffe). That may be, in part, because the practice of such intense, often athletic physicality requires of the actors a certain youthful vigor. The resulting aesthetic is light and playful; it has a hand-made quality; it’s full of action, and a pleasure to behold.

Many of the Twin Cities’ current crop of movement theater practitioners are linked, in some way, to Theatre de la Jeune Lune. It was this company that, in 1979, imported a European style of theatrical clowning to our city. These were the very methods that the founding artistic directors—Barbra Berlovitz, Vincent Gracieux, Robert Rosen, and Dominique Serrand—learned from their Parisian teacher, the legendary Jacques Lecoq. (The most famous graduates of the École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq are the founders of the enormously popular Cirque du Soleil.) The curriculum includes work in miming, masks, improvisation, studying the dynamics between performer and stage, and something called “finding your inner clown.”

Lecoq’s teaching also emphasized a collaborative approach to creating new theatrical works, a tradition still deeply rooted in the movement theater community. This is, perhaps, the most important factor in the recent explosion of the form. From the very start, a student or apprentice of movement theater functions as an integral part of his or her ensemble. At the time of graduation, the student has already helped write, choreograph, and perform several original works. In other words, this newly minted performer is no stranger to the entire artistic process, and is therefore better prepared to strike out on his own, and, along the way, to pass these traditions along to other collaborators.

In 1985, Theatre de la Jeune Lune settled permanently in Minneapolis. As the company grew, so, too, did an inner circle of artists who studied and subscribed to this form of theater. Local clown Luverne Seifert was a company member between 1994 and ’99. (These days, Seifert regularly appears with Ten Thousand Things and Frank Theaters.) Joel Sass, the Jungle Theater’s associate artistic director, was a Jeune Lune company member during the early ’90s. Puppeteer Michael Sommers (who founded Open Eye Figure Theatre in 2000) has been a frequent collaborator. Emerging performers like Lisa Rafaela Clair (who studied clowning with the esteemed Pierre Byland at the Burlesk Center in Switzerland) and Katie Kauffman (a graduate of the California-based Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre) came to Minneapolis to study and intern with Jeune Lune. Capping off this by no means exhaustive list is freelance director Jon Ferguson—in my opinion, the most exciting movement theater artist in town. And he has said he was drawn to Minneapolis, at least in part, because of the mood set by Jeune Lune. (Full disclosure: I worked for several years at Jeune Lune in an administrative capacity.)

Over the years, other movement theater companies have sprung up. Outstanding midsized companies like Ten Thousand Things and Frank Theaters frequently incorporate movement theater. Bedlam Theatre, founded in 1993, practices its own homegrown approach to creating playful, collaboratively created spectacles, relying heavily on the tenets of movement theater. Paul Herwig, who is the co-artistic director of the nine-year-old Off-Leash Area, is also a graduate of Lecoq’s school; his wife and co-director, the aforementioned Jennifer Ilse, is a veteran of ballet and contemporary dance. Like Off-Leash, the delightful Live Action Set, founded in 2003, is peopled by both dancers and movement theater artists. And with any luck, a tiny troupe called 3 Sticks will soon rise to prominence as well. Founded in 2005 by students from the London International School of Performing Arts (a two-year program based on the teachings of Lecoq), 3 Sticks already has two outstanding Minnesota Fringe shows to its credit (2005’s Borderlines). Artistic director Jason Bohon recently announced a slate of upcoming shows; look for their take on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds later this year. And, of course, as these artists continue to practice their craft, thereby hooking a new generation of performers, the list of must-see movement theater will continue to grow.

Feature Story
Another Green World: new landscape art in Minnesota
Ann Klefstad

This conversation with new landscape artists appears in our quarterly digest of writing from mnartists.org, "10,000 arts," produced in collaboration with the Rake. Pick one up at Rake racks now!

Landscape has always been one of the strongest currents in the Minnesota art world. Now, new ways of perceiving and portraying landscape tie artists here to a global groundswell of art about the complex relationship of nature and culture.

Recently, I sat down with a group of artists from around the state to discuss their work: photographer Chris Faust, painter Theresa Handy, sculptor Karl Unnasch, multimedia artist Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, and painter/sculptor Gregory Euclide (our cover artist)—plus curator Theresa Downing, whose fascinating show, Environments of Invention at the Minnesota Museum of American Art was the topic that opened things up. As Downing said, “The theme of the show was looking at the difference between raw experience of the natural world and our perception of it though the screen of our eyes, our minds, our emotions.”

Each artist had a different tale of the origins of their insight into the natural world; Gregory Euclide’s involved becoming saturated in it. “Being a kid wandering through fields was important. … experiences like falling in the snow and staying there for three hours and letting snow fall on you and just looking at the sky … Here I am thirteen years old and laying down in a river and letting the water flow over me for hours—if anyone saw me they’d think, you know … ” and he casts his eyes up.

Chris Faust noted that when he was young, “the outdoors was where your real life was.” He loved maps, and was fascinated by the split between their flat symbols and the look and feel of the places they represented.

The sculptor Karl Unnasch spoke of how and why he came to use landscape in his sculptures: “I’m interested in—for lack of a better term, I’ll say ‘innocence,’ the thirteen-year-old’s stigmata. For myself, growing up in the country, being out in nature was the basis of that transition; it wasn’t smoking my first cigarette, it was catching my first trout.”

It became clear that the losses, memories, and entropy associated with the natural world were factors in most of these artists’ work. As Euclide described his childhood experiments, he spoke of a longing for an experience that would not fade, a desire for presence. “The growth and decay that I saw in the landscape was mirrored in my mind as experience and memory.”

Faust remarked, “Nature is continually trying to increase entropy, and humans are trying to decrease it. That’s why we paint the house, right? Nature is trying to erode the house, we’re trying to scrape and prime … Nature will always win.”

How do these artists view their relation to the traditions of landscape painting and photography? Is this relation ironic, transformed? Euclide noted, “I don’t consider myself a landscape painter, even thought that’s what I do.” For him, work becomes experience. “I’ll pile up sheets of paper, do a painting on one, then spray water on it. I think of it as a natural process, a temporal image, the landscape washed away by water, I’ll start painting on the next piece, these planes of paper mimic planes of experience in time, they get painted on the front and on the back to mimic the experience of walking through landscape. For myself, it’s a kind of longing, because I’m not in nature anymore, I’m in the city.”

Like the rest of us, most of these artists are urbanites, though they may have memories of idyllic days in nature. Though painter Theresa Handy didn’t grow up in the country, she noted that “maybe my work talks about that sort of longing [for it]. And my work is a metaphor as well. Lately I’ve been making small works fastened together. They’re photographs that I paint on, editing out a lot of things in the photo. They feel like flashes of a memory of a place, a happening, a time … that editing mimics our inability to remember all the details.”

Of course, it is possible to see the urban environment as simply another sort of landscape. For Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, this became clear when she was living in Los Angeles, which “was very different from the landscape I grew up in, but it was also similar, quite flat. I guess when I got addicted to landscape was in parking ramps, and also on LA freeways, because you’re up above.”

As the discussion ranged over a number of themes and topics, there was often an undercurrent of landscape as something that we want to see but that is difficult to grasp. Chris Faust talked about a rural ecology project that he’s part of, which is trying to devise ways of easing the relationship between farmland and wild land: “We’re looking at this point where farmland and nature meet, looking at what farmers would call ‘chaos’. The natural landscape looks messy to them. The Conservation District is trying to convince farmers to do different landscape practices. They’ll be asked to put in a buffer zone to filter field chemicals, but we have to order it somehow. You can’t just plant a bunch of stuff, there has to be some rhyme or reason to it—otherwise the farmers won’t do it.” He noted that even for him, shooting pictures of these junctures is difficult: “It’s very odd-looking, I really have to sit down and look at it for a while. [The project landscape architect] talks about this messiness, and how it’s innate in every human to try to order landscape. I find that when I’m out in natural landscape, I need to find some sort of thing that compositionally ties it all together.”

Karl Unnasch agreed with this compulsion to order the world. “I bet it’s hard to find a piece of ground that’s unaffected,” he said, “that’s not somehow urbanized.” Gregory Euclide dreamily added, “You know what the most beautiful spaces I find are? Freeway ramps. I think that those are so beautiful, because they’re left alone.”

In response, Faust reported that someone was saying to him while driving that “MNDoT oughta come in here and clear some of this stuff out!” and he disagreed—it was nature working. Karl laughed, and said that “people feel safer when all those trees are doing exactly what’s expected--No weeds! now there’s another conceptual word, what’s a weed and what’s not?” to which Faust replied, “There are no weeds in nature, just like there’s no ‘natural disaster’, only human disasters. Nature doesn’t care.”

But is there always a distinction between the human and the natural?
Theresa Handy points out the possibility that the human alteration of the world is as natural as any other part of it. Her work is becoming more urban; she’s looking more at her immediate surroundings, skies, birds, telephone wires. And Gregory Euclide told this story: “About six months ago I buried some paper. Later I used that paper covered with dirt, sprayed it with water, made shelves on the torn paper that caught the dirt and water, that became a three-dimensional construction that came out over the floor. I was interested in making the process mimic what the work represented, so the process and content were the same. There was decay on the paper, and where it came out from the wall I planted seeds that grew. The aesthetic parts were not my doing but created by growth and decay.”

The need to understand the disorderly order of nature, to gain a viewpoint beyond the human, is familiar to these artists. Theresa Downing described Google Earth, the online database of satellite images of the whole globe, as tremendously influential:
“I often sit and think about how I look to someone outside our atmosphere. For me it was hypnotic to go on Google Earth the first time and think about how we see ourselves and how others see us. It’s changing so rapidly.”

For her, landscape art is this kind of mediation, and both meaning and chance,--which can include random techniques like tearing, seized compositions, as well as accident and decay-- inform the work of the artists present,.

Karl Unnasch’s tableaus often include road-killed animals and found artifacts; he said that the bases of his landscapes are “actual animals, not taxidermied . . . because I’m not interested in taxidermy, the craft of it . . . . I want to know just enough to bring it off, to keep innocence, openness.” His work is formed half by himself and half by the ravages of time and decay on the animal corpses and reclaimed objects that make up his sculptures.

That willingness to both see and to un-see—that is, to erase assumptions-- is part of this new genre as well. Chris Faust said, “I’m interested in a continuum of landscape. I want to draw a line on a map and shoot photos along that line, to unlearn assumptions about the land, to find out what it really is.”

But there’s an equal desire not to represent landscape but to become it, to have art be the processes that create the natural world. “I couldn’t just depict the experience of being in nature,” said Gregory Euclide. “I had to redo the process of growth and decay. The process of viewing it, then, becomes the equal of making the piece.” Two-dimensional painting that only depicts the world comes up short for him.

For all their new ideas, these landscape artists still owe much to the past, of course: a longing for communion with the natural world, respect for perception, commitment to the wisdom of the senses. But there’s much that’s new here too. The landscape in these artworks is cut across by human markings, literally broken into pieces, or torn, or part of a body that was once living. Their works convey difficult beauties and tough-minded pleasure as well as the very processes of the living world to which we are bound. Romantic and scientific, earthy and philosophical, these artists are giving us the world that we need as well as the one we deserve.