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A Conversation With the Director and Designer NANCY KEYSTONE
January 2009
Nancy Keystone is the director, scenic designer, and playwright of Apollo, which she developed in collaboration with the Critical Mass Performance Group of which she is artistic director. She is known for directing and designing productions at a number of regional American theatres. She is also a visual artist. Her work as the director and designer of Apollo is discussed in Chapters 4, and 5. The following interview focuses on her evolution as a director who also designs her own work, the nature of her collaboration with actors, and her approach to gestural acting. Her work on Apollo can also be seen in the slide show and video on the CS website.
Stephanie Arnold: How did you find your focus as a director?
Nancy Keystone. In my late teens and early twenties, I was exposed to a lot of ideas about ensembles. Creating work over a long period of time with collaborators was very interesting to me. There was new work happening, reinterpretations of classic plays, being exposed to European theatre and non-Western theatre. All of that was converging at once. In the 80s, Peter Brook was still in the vanguard. Watching his production of Marat/Sade was hugely life changing, and talking about Grotowski and that sort of ensemble-oriented work got me really thinking about theatre in a different way. A company might generate its own material or work with existing texts but in a new way.
Stephanie Arnold. You are also known as a visual artist.
NK. I've always just done art, studying the history of art as well as a little bit of studio. I started to get into collage during an art study program abroad and it became a real balance to the theatre stuff, which is very social and intensive in terms of interaction with other people. The visual art is solitary and meditative. I really enjoy that balance.
Extract from Apollo Notebook, Nancy Keystone
Stephanie Arnold. How would you describe the way your work as a designer fits with your work as a director?
NK. Primarily I tend to conceptualize the work as a whole. I have never designed for anyone else; I have no desire to do that. There's a lot about the design process that I'm not very interested in. But I am very interested in conceptualizing my own work. I work closely with assistants, especially in larger theatres. Serious working drawings are required and I'm not much of a draftsperson so I hire somebody out of my fee (or sometimes they have assistant money) to do the drawings and to help me work out the details.
SA. Can you give a specific example of the way that thinking scenically or environmentally helps you to fulfill your vision as a director?
Extract from Apollo Notebook, Nancy Keystone
NK: One of the best quotes I ever heard about set design is that the design should be a muscle for the play. It's not decorative; it's not something just to look at. It should be interacting in a very visceral way with the actors and to help illuminate and also carry forth the action of the play. That gave me a great way to think about environment. I do think about it as an environment. I'm really influenced by installation artists like Ann Hamilton and [? 21:40 ?] and Illya Kabakov.
When I’m thinking about a play, metaphor is one of the key ways of developing the work. An example would be Part 2 of Apollo. When we first developed Part 2, we were dealing with a lot with history, with the Holocaust, with concentration camp victims, and crimes of the Third Reich. Approximately 20,000 people died in the V2 factory where some of the German engineers worked. This was the key ethical issue of the story. My first thought was could we have 20,000 of something onstage? What would that be?
Extract from Apollo Notebook, Nancy Keystone
And then, also, what's the main action of this piece? The main action is the search for the truth. When we started, there were two characters who were researchers, who were searchers. It felt to me like they were digging through archives, digging through the past. So I thought, what if we have a bunch of file boxes onstage, and the file boxes create the environment and everything comes out of the file boxes. That thought is what led to this design. The first time that we performed this part of the play was a workshop in a very small theater. We had 200 file boxes, and they really filled up the space. Justin Townsend, who is the lighting designer, is also a very close collaborator. He had the idea of creating a wall with these boxes at the front of the stage. The piece would start with this wall and the actors would then remove the boxes. We found that just thrilling to contemplate. The actors then become manipulators of the environment. That's how it started. I think now we have almost 3,000 file boxes. That's an example of how the conception of the set and the ideas of the piece intersect.
SA. How would you define the term "metaphor" from the director's perspective?
NK: To me, a metaphor is a poetic translation of an idea; translating the idea into an image essentially. For me, the theatre is all about poetry. Theatre works on a very high level of poetry, symbolism, metaphor. The more that aspect of things can be mined, the better and more powerful.
Extract from Apollo Notebook, Nancy Keystone
SA: Could you talk about the development of Apollo, the way the rehearsal process was collaborative with a shared responsibility for the work. I don't know if you apply that in every situation you go into; some performance situations are more hierarchical than others; certainly some are working on a more compressed timeline so a collaborative process becomes luxury. But you have a commitment to it. Why do you think the work should be created in this way and how does it operate?
NK: I don't know that it always should be. For me, this is how it has shaken out. I think thirteen brains in a room are stronger than one. The older I get, the more easily I am able to relinquish control. When I was young I controlled every breath the actors took. It was probably stifling for everybody. I've learned that a smart actor (and I try to surround myself with smart actors) intuitively can find an answer to something or find the right question about something. The more closely I listen to that, the closer we can get to good solutions to things. I find it fun also. For me, it's playing. When you're in a room of people that you enjoy and everybody understands what kind of playing can happen, it's thrilling and it's funny and it's very enlivening. This ensemble has gotten stronger and more adept at collaborating. The actors really create a lot of the material on their feet. I'll come in with a couple of ideas and maybe lead a couple of exercises or maybe have an image for something. That will be the jumping off point and a vocabulary might get created which the actors then start to shape and build upon. I can step back and say, maybe a little more here, a little less here, or try it this way. Some actors really want to be told what to do. They do not want to have to generate it on their own. They don't know how to do that. They don’t trust themselves. I don't come across conflict a lot. But I do try to read what's happening with an actor, if an actor needs more direction or is more comfortable in a more collaborative situation. Hopefully in casting a play I can find actors who enjoy working together.
SA: What do you look for in actors?
NK: When I say smart, I mean intuitively smart. Courage is number one. My husband says I am a brave actor's best friend and a scared actor's worst enemy. I think it's because I don't have a lot of patience or tolerance for someone who's not willing to just try, do it, play the game. If somebody's ready to jump off a cliff I will go all the way. If that person is standing ten feet back, it's very hard for me to engage. I'm not a hand-holder, and the actors that work with me know that.
Openness and flexibility; openness to me, openness to the process, openness to each other. A kind of discipline. Facility. I'm looking for actors who are facile, who can really just turn on a dime, try something new. They have to have the package; they have to be physically agile and have good vocals and speech, if not training then instinct, and be able to transform. These are things that can't necessarily be taught. That's what the talent is about. How somebody is able to look at words on a page and transform those words into a moving, breathing, active organism. I'm looking for all of that, and a good sense of humor.
I think somebody coming into one of our rehearsals would say, oh my god, they're just messing around; when are they going to get to work? So many of the ideas come out of that sense of messing around. There are many, many moments in the play, wonderful moments, that came out of giggling and laughing and joking, and somebody will do something and that's it! That's the solution.
SA: I see in your rehearsals an extraordinary amount of trust. We know what happens in rehearsals when the actors don't trust the director or don't trust each other. How do you build trust? For example, you did an improvisation of a slave auction. That could be an extremely difficult scene to play. How did people become comfortable enough to be open to doing that kind of work?
NK: I don't necessarily know how one creates trust. I think showing trust in another person helps. Having a clear vision, having some success helps. Every time we show the work, we get feedback. I think if the feedback were primarily negative, it would have a different effect on what we were doing.
I went into the work on Part 3 of Apollo pretty terrified on the whole issue of race. It's something that people don't really talk about or deal with. I knew that if we were going to do this work, we all had to talk about it. I gave everybody research and then we talked about it; that was very valuable as a jumping off point.
Extract from Apollo Notebook, Nancy Keystone
It was something more objective and outside of ourselves, but it became personal very quickly. In the Apollo conversations it really was primarily the African American actors explaining what it's like to be black in America. I think that black people know a lot more about white people than white people know about black people. There's no guarantee that people are going to take part in this conversation without freaking out or becoming angry. There were a lot of emotions shared, but it all felt grounded in the common experience of this work and the goal of the work.
SA: Gesture is an important part of the work that you're doing with the actors. The gestures repeat, they come back, they expand in terms of what they mean. Could you talk about your view of gestural theatre and how you build a vocabulary of gestures that is going to communicate the ideas of the piece?
NK: Theatre is a very physical medium. But most of the time what we see is people acting from the neck up. The body is forgotten. Actors, as living beings in front of a living audience, have great potential for physical expression. One of the goals of Apollo was to create a piece in which movement told as much of the story as anything else -- narrative, aesthetic, thematic information -- nonverbally. A life lived onstage is a full and extreme life. An actor will do extraordinary things as a character living the events of the play. When we are creating and developing the piece, what I do to prepare, since there's no script, is to write a foundation for the play through exercises. The exercises explore physical states and psychic states which we believe are at the core of the story we're trying to tell.
SA: What are some of the exercises?
NK: One of the most basic gestures and one of the first things that we worked on was this idea of yearning for something impossible. It became this reaching gesture that occurs repeatedly throughout the entire piece. I guided the actors through this exercise in which I had them talk to themselves, talk about all the things that oppress them in their lives, just them personally, everything, anything. These exercises can go on for a long time. Then they would do that, just a very simple activity. I love having actors move chairs while inhabiting or embodying an emotional state. So continuing to consider what’s oppressing you, move a chair from one side of the room to the other side of the room and then move it back. This went on for 45 minutes. Then they stopped and sat in their chairs, and I guided them through an imagery thing that related to that. Then we released all of that; they went into a place of release and liberation. Whatever that feeling was, we said that's what we want to have; that's what we're going for. From a standing position, focus on this thing that you desperately want and need. We do a lot of work on focus. Just feel that thing that you desperately are striving for, that you will never have. Let that fill your body and let that feeling take you, move your arm toward that. We came back to that several times. There's all this foundational work that happens early on. The later an actor comes in, the less in touch with that they can be. I think the institutional memory can help people to create the gesture internally.
SA: In staging the play, you use very simple, ordinary objects that become invested with a great deal of meaning. How are these props connected to the actors' gestures?
NK: I really love prosaic objects and I love how they can be transformed into poetry. I think the most basic light bulb, just the light bulb hanging in this space can have such a beautiful effect; it can just turn into something else. Everything should be able to transform and have as many lives or uses as possible. The more ways an object can transform, the more meaning it takes on as the play progresses. That's a strategy that we use.
What are the things we use? The pencils for instance became these totems of power and intellect and the rocket and science. Every time I introduce an object we spend a long time exploring the properties of that object. The cotton for instance - when I bring it in I just want people to deal with it as an object and see all the different things they can do with it, just to explore the properties of it and really feel like they understand it as a physical entity. What does cotton do? What can you make of it?
Extract from Apollo Notebook, Nancy Keystone
We do that with every object - the paper bags, the ropes…
For instance, the handkerchiefs are another object that comes up repeatedly. Although the handkerchiefs tend to mean the same thing, they come up in different contexts. I hope that every time those objects come up or a gesture, such as reaching, repeats, the audience can recall the history of that and then add to the experience so that there is a cumulative effect and resonance, and hopefully some sort of revelation. When you see this reach in Part 1, it's these engineers who want to go to the moon, who want to build a rocket. When you see the reach in Part 3, with African Americans, it's a whole other ball game. It makes the reach in Part 1 seem kind of silly: Oh, we've invested all of this energy into this aspiration - well, what's the aspiration? To build a rocket when you're talking about people who want basic justice and equality and freedom. I'm hoping that the audience understands that; I'm hoping that they are able to take that journey.
SA: How long have you been working on this piece now?
NK: I started in 2001. Seven and a half years.
SA: Why in present day America do we need to be hearing and seeing this story about the history of space exploration?
NK: It's the story of our country. It really speaks to the way our country does business and makes expedient decisions and weighs means versus ends. On an even bigger level, it's about the way we have chosen to ignore our own ideals and our own laws, or have been unable to live up to them. What are we willing to do in the name of national security, in the name of progress? What laws are we willing to break? What backs are we willing to step on? I would just like to see us as a country be more aware, more conscious of the decisions that we're making. And so I felt compelled to tell these stories.