Curious at the MCA

About the Residency

The residency pivots on three core ideas Magnus is investigating to write and create the new play:

1. The ambiguity of the moment of a given action.

Jenny is asking how we see a rehearsed scene from the play the actors are preparing for, i.e. if a "real" interaction can be seen between characters.

To reveal that shifting between two realities, she takes her ensemble through an intensive compositional experimentation. The experimentation draws in part from visceral, physical gestures new to the ensemble and that they are learning from Diego Piñon. The butoh of Piñon resonates for theater artists by employing history and story, props and habitual actions to create a personal narrative. He arrived at this signature technique from 25 years of research in Mexican energetic traditions, Japanese Butoh, ritual dance, modern dance, and contemporary theatre. By training with Piñon, Magnus widens the experimentation by having the ensemble go outside their well-coursed text centeredness.

2. The notion of ensemble.

Specifically looking ahead from the vantage of twenty-two years co-leading the Curious Theatre Branch, Jenny asks how aging and generational differences work for and against cohesion in any group.

She is responding to MCA's invitation to create a new work in the space by devising new writing processes for the ensemble as a way of excavating those attitudes and opinions. Though the finished Untitled Curious Show will be fully scripted, Magnus is expressly using the MCA residency to investigate the ensemble's experience of Curious Theatre, have them newly express it physically from the training with Piñon, and integrate that kind of widely divergent point of view into her written characters.

The ensemble members' encounter with Piñon has limitless possibilities for discovery, revelations, and breakthroughs. The total group's age range is fifteen to seventy, and very few individuals' backgrounds include butoh or other dance forms. Serendipitously, for the past three years, Piñon has focused his butoh training on the peoples of his ancestral lands of Tlalpujahua in Michoacan. A large number of his current students are women, elderly, and have no formal training in movement or theater.

3. The way attention is directed in a theatrical context.

MCA's unique space becomes central for this phase in Jenny's investigation. She is drawn to the size of the MCA stage and how an audience is cued, or not, as to what the hierarchy of performative and narrative significance is.

For this investigation she is composing movement scores that directly emanate from working in the MCA space. Microphones will be hung on the stage and a DJ sound mixer will work off an algorithm of sound levels. The resulting shifting hierarchies of sound will allow different aspects of narratives to come to the forefront at different times. To this sound environment she has people move around the stage, adding a complex visual environment with its own logic. Jenny is attempting the movement scores on the group before and after training in Piñon's butoh technique, as well as later in the residency on the actors she casts for the play.

Support for the Curious Theatre Branch Development Residency is provided by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.