Stage Whisper
Whisper in the Wings Episode 640
(upbeat music) - Welcome back in everyone to a fantastic new whisper in the wings. We are continuing our fabulous coverage of the Spark Theater Festival NYC with four more fabulous shows, four more fantastic artists. A reminder that the Spark Theater Festival NYC is happening now through September 29th at the Chain Theatre, and you can get your tickets and more information by visiting emergingartisttheatre.org. Joining us on today's show, we have Gabby Amorado, who's the writer and originator of Vincent the Musical. We have the choreographer Tina Berarian, who's talking to us about her show, Pray. We have the writer and director, Dan Brown, here to speak to us about his show, the Gritare Verde, and we have the choreographer Spencer Shroud and his show, Neural Choreography on Socio-Emotional Oscillations. As I mentioned, four fabulous shows, four great artists, so let's not waste any more time. Let us welcome in our guests, everyone welcome in to Whisper in the Wings from Stage Whisperer. - Thank you, thank you for having me. - Thank you. - It is wonderful to have all of you here. I can't wait to dive into your works. And so I wanna start by having you tell our listeners a little bit about what your show is about. So Gabby, let's start with you and your piece, Vincent the Musical. - Yeah, so Vincent the Musical follows Vinny, who is a middle schooler, recently diagnosed with ADHD, as he's learning to struggle and cope in a school and society that aren't built for his success. Throughout his journey, he finds his voice and his competence through the arts and with the help of a ghostly friend, Vincent Van Gogh, learns to embrace who he is. So yeah, our show is really about neurodiversity and embracing your identity and who you are. - I love that. What a relatable tale to you, I love it. Tina, let's come to you and your piece, Pray. Tell us a bit about that. - Sure, so the piece Pray is about a salt lake called Lake Arumia, which is located in Iran. It used to be world's second largest salt lake but due to water mismanagement and construction of non-standard dams, it has completely dried up over the past 20 years. And the solution that the region of Iran is suggesting is to pray. So that's the name of the show, Pray. But it's not just about water scarcity, there is so much history and also mythology behind that lake. So yeah, that's the significance of the lake. It's not just that it has dried up but it's also that it's an important place historically. - Fascinating. Wow, what a tale. Dan, tell us a bit about your piece, the Gritara Verde. - Well, first of all, thank you again for having me on. Let me be a part of this. The Gritara Verde is a short play. It's a one character play and it's about a woman who is on the short list for a long overdue promotion at her job. Her boss is stepping down but she's gonna be out of town for his retirement party. So she decides to send him an expensive gift to show that she's serious about the promotion and trying to win his favor. Unfortunately, through an internet mix up, she discovers that she very well may have sent her boss a grotesque sex toy instead of the bottle of wine she had meant to send him. And so that leads to a journey of self discovery and self reflection about her life that is a very interesting mix of comedy and drama. And as strange as the story sounds, I think it's something that's very relatable by everybody who sees it, it's a very every person kind of play. But I'm looking forward to being a part of this festival. - Wow, what a story there, that's great. Spencer, tell us about your piece, neuro-choreography on socio-emotional oscillations. - Yeah, so this work is a real time application of a collaborative study that I'm doing with Dr. Hakan Fisher at the Stockholm University who's a social neuroscientist. And he studies how we encode facial symmetries over time and he was able to essentially ascertain as we get older and our amygdala and our fear center as it degrades, we actually tend to see faces as more trustworthy. And I found that neuro-programming sort of leads to a seeing of greater universal trust right for a choreographic response. So me and my dancers have been working with the symmetries and social conversations that he worked with in his study. - That is fantastic. So as I keep mentioning listeners, the shows of this festival keep getting better and better. And this group is no exception to that. These are great, great works. And I want to dive a little bit more into them. And Dan, I want to come back to your piece. And I'd love to know what inspired you to pen this. - You know, that's a very good question. Well, the piece started out as a monologue and actually kind of comes full circle because I did it as part of a collection of pieces that I put together. I think it was last year in 2023, which actually took place at the chain theater and where this festival is taking place. But it started out as a monologue. And I just have been writing pieces of about work related stories and how much our jobs and take over our lives and just how the role that our career plays in our lives and how sometimes we have to be a bit compromising or swallow or hold our nose about some things that are important to us when it comes to our jobs and holding onto that paycheck and that job security. So that's really the crux of what this play is about. I mean, the actual stuff about the sex toy, it was just about this person trying to really do everything it can to win over, you know, to do something favorable at the job. And I just trying to think of what's the worst possible thing they could have done to kind of like shoot themselves in the foot and that's where that, you know, that premise came to be. But it's really about what I said about, you know, our priorities and how our lives can sort of be taken over by our careers and we kind of can become defined by our jobs. I love that. That's a great, great inspiration. Gabrielle, we want to come back to you as well and ask what inspired you to write your piece? - Yeah, a lot of my piece stems from my own personal lived experience. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 12 and I didn't have a lot of friends or family members who lived through that experience. And so kind of, I felt a little abnormal and oftentimes going through school, I didn't know why I struggled as much and why I stuck out kind of like a sore thumb. I didn't realize till later on that that affected me so much until I went to arts university for college and I kind of found my people and I found out I wasn't the only one that was kind of wired this way and there's beauty in being different and kind of embracing my neurodiversity. And so when I eventually got there, one of my assignments was actually to come up with two musical ideas and this was one of them. And I kind of always thought this was going to be a trash idea. I was like, okay, here I did my assignment, but I don't think that's going anywhere. And over time, I've realized how awesome it can be to develop this musical and how much it's kind of healed my inner child going through that experience and kind of pulling from my own life experience. And really just the theme of it is like everybody deserves to be seen valued and heard for who they are. And so I'm really excited to be telling this story and to for my 12 year old self and for all the 12 year olds out there that are going through that experience. - Yeah, I love that. Spencer, I wanna come back to you to kick off my next question. 'Cause I'm really curious to know you said that this is being produced side by side with a study I think I caught. So what has it been like developing the piece? - Well, it's been dynamic. I think because it's coming from both an empirical and a creative standpoint, we really get to sort of write our own rules. So it's really been developing both written and choreographic responses that are both analytical and poetic in their structure. And then also I do wanna speak a little bit about the inspiration behind it. In terms of like contemporary neuroscientific and psychological research, there is a problem of privatization of knowledge and it sort of these discoveries that being hidden behind like cryptic language and therefore being inaccessible. So the work that I'm trying to do with these choreographic or creative responses is to provide greater access to these novel discoveries about the way in which we function and just who we are as people. But yeah, it's been really lovely. Sort of just develop a new framework of composition. - Wow, wow, that's very cool. Tina, I wanna come back to you 'cause I'm really interested in this piece and this story. You know, what has it been like developing your piece and getting it up on its feet? - Well, so first I was inspired by, because I was working in a photo agency, which was giving us like firsthand images of the Middle East. And then that's how I learned how quickly this lake is drying up and what's just left of an assault. People used to go in that lake because it's assault lake, it was very therapeutic. So that's where the inspiration came from. And then I did more research and I learned that it was the birthplace of Zoroaster, which is for the religion of Zoroastrianism, which was one of the oldest religions in the world and was also the primary religion of Iran and like the Persian Empire before the Arab invasion. So that's where most of the Iranian culture comes from. And then I learned that it used to be the sacred waters of Anahita who was the goddess of water and she somehow impregnated the mother of Zoroaster in that lake and that is known as the birthplace of Zoroaster. So there's a lot of history behind it and the way that I developed the piece, we use a lot of praying rituals, develop a lot of praying rituals by ourselves, movement wise. So there is a lot of mythology, symbolism involved. - That is so cool, I love that, love that. Gabrielle, I'm gonna come back to you because you kind of mentioned how, you know, you have a personal tie to the story, you've experienced this. What is the message or thought you're hoping that audiences take away from your work? - Yeah, I think that's a big thing for my show as we've been developing it. It's ultimately, I've loved the writing process of it 'cause I've seen, you know, how I've been able to bring my own story into it and a story of many of my peers who have lived through the same experiences but the takeaways ultimately, like the main point of the show. And we're hoping that there's two different takeaways for those who are neurodiverse to be able to see representation on stage. The people to better understand what that looks like, living with an invisible disability can often be hard to kind of justify what's going on and why you work a certain way when people can't physically see it. So to be able to bring those more invisible things and make them physical on stage has been a really big part of our piece and being able to show representation for the neurodiverse community so that they can feel like they're seen and they're understood. And then the other part is for the people who love no care or just wanna learn more about what it is to be neurodiverse or if they love or care or somebody who is neurodiverse to kind of make a better community and make sure we all belong, it's we all have to understand one another. So to help people walk away with better knowledge of what ADHD is, what are the signs and the symptoms of somebody who lives in that body and how can you be an active member and making the world a easier place for them to navigate or a better place for them to exist in. So this kind of two takeaways for both sides of the spectrum, but ultimately the main takeaway is that we can be a better community if we all learn to embrace one another for who they are. - That is so fantastic, great, great idea. Tina, I'm gonna come back to you with your show 'cause I would love to know what this great, with the great origin and inspiration you have behind the show, what is the message or thought you hope people take away from it? - I personally usually don't like to tell my audience what or how to feel, but I would say for myself, this piece, I don't see it as just like something specific to a region or to a country, but I see it more globally. I feel like water, scarcity, water, the issue of water is really serious in the future for the earth. It's like global warming, it's real. It is said that in 20 years, at least in the Middle East, there won't be a clean water. So it's a real threat to humanity and yeah, I would say maybe that would be the only message. - I love that idea though, and I love the point you're making with your show. Dan, I wanna kick off my final question for this first part with you, and I would love to know, who are you hoping to have access to your piece? - I would say that my, I usually label my works as like the coming of middle age kind of thing, that, you know, telling stories of, you know, people who have sort of gotten through that first part of their lives and their careers and sort of have either dreams have come true or haven't come true and that sort of age group. But I would say this, I would let my, you know, people from as, you know, the teens all the way up to, you know, senior citizens, but just people who can come and really see the drama in the everyday, like I don't necessarily tell stories about people like falling out of planes or, you know, having some, you know, a gunfight or whatever like that, but, you know, just your career being on the line or your dreams being on the line or, you know, the everyday, the person that you loved or you thought you were gonna spend your whole rest of your life with and then that turns out not to be true, like this very everyday stuff that I think is just as dramatic. So I think that just, I try to appeal to, you know, everyday people, but I, again, I know it's a kind of a cliche thing, but I think this particular play can be accessible by a very wide spread audience of very different kinds of people. It'd be wonderful. What a great audience you're trying to attract fabulous. Spencer, bring us home on this. Who are you hoping have access to your work? - Well, I think ostensibly everyone, but I would hope that someone to sit in the audience and watch this piece that they would have just a general curiosity about the mind-body connection but also someone that holds the belief that dance is a form of research and is a form of analytical research and perceptual research. So coming in with that perspective, wouldn't you, great? (upbeat music) - Well, on the second part of our interviews, we love giving our listeners a chance to get to know our guests a little bit better. Pick your brains, if you will, and I wanna hop right to my favorite question to ask guests and I'm very excited to hear all of yours, which is what is your favorite theater memory? Yes, Gabrielle, please tell us yours. - Yeah, I think the one that sticks out the most to me is probably when I was around the age of 12 and I went to see Wicked for the first time. I was supposed to see it when I was younger, but I was afraid of the flying monkeys. It was a whole fair situation that they were gonna come to the audience and touch me. Turns out they didn't at the time and I missed out on Kristen Chenoweth, so I'll never forgive myself for that. But when I eventually did get to see it, I just remember seeing "Defying Gravity" and just the chills that it gave me right before intermission and just then being like, I want to do this in the future. This is where I'm meant to be and this is where I want to be and I still listen to that soundtrack in its entirety to this day. Like it's forever my favorite musical, but that's like the first moment for me where I was like theater can really just change people and the stories we tell can really impact people's lives and I think that story, even though it is kind of mystical and has all these other creatures and characters in it, has really evolved with the times to still stay relevant with topics that we're facing in today's world. And so I feel like for me, that was just my first theater moment and I will forever remember that. - I love that memory. Thank you for sharing that. Dan, I think I saw you. Yes, please share yours. - I'm going to tell you, but I'm going to sneak another one in. My first theater experience was in the 70, I'm giving my age away, but so Beatle Manie at the Winter Garden Theater. But anyway, the show I most memorable theater experience was seeing John C. Riley and Philip Seymour Hoffman in true West on stage and it was a, I saw it once, but each night I believe they switched roles, but in the night I saw it was the best acting I've ever in a room and experienced in my life. And it just showed me and it kind of fueled me as a writer that it doesn't always have to be a big spectacle. Like people telling story, a story on a stage can be just as captivating as a big spectacle. And also that I carry that memory with me till today. Just seeing amazing actors doing amazing work on a stage, captivating a whole room. - What a fabulous memory. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, please, Tina, tell us yours. - So I remember I was pretty young, small when, and I was mostly doing ballet at that time and then me and my family went to this show called Toronto Dance Theater. And it was a very contemporary, like they had a very contemporary dance show. And then it was then that show really inspired me to do contemporary dance because I was seeing like weird movements, movements that were not like ballet, that were not so restrictive and there were not so demanding on the body. I felt like the dancers, the dance was more of the service for the dancers and not reverse, which is in ballet, which, you know, the body in ballet, I feel like you have to be at service of ballet. So yeah, that if we were really resonated with me and it completely shifted my dance journey. - That is a fantastic memory. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Spencer, bring us home. What is your favorite theater memory? - Well, I think similar to Tina's response, it was when I was first reoriented or yeah, reoriented around contemporary ballet. I saw Boston Ballet do William Fourth Size in the middle, somewhat elevated. And just his work has such a level of rigor to it and detail to it that I realized can exist outside of ballet. And you can have a choreographic motif and you can aggregate it or grow it outward. And all of a sudden it's this all encompassing universe. And that led me to, you know, want to go to conservatory and then study dance theory and, you know, really get into the nitty gritty of it. But yeah. - That is also a fabulous memory. All of you, what great memories. Thank you so much for sharing those. Well, as we wrap things up, I would love to know if our listeners would like more information about your shows or about you, maybe they'd like to reach out to you. How can they do so? So Gabby, tell us about how we can get more information or contact Vincent, the musical. - Yeah. So first of all, we have a reading that's happening September 29th at 2 p.m. at the Chain Theatre and the Spark Theatre Festival that we have tickets in our bio and on our website, our website is vinythemusical.com. That's kind of our bigger place for photos, videos, content, events, information. You can contact us on there, but also follow us at Vincent_the, underscore musical on Instagram. We're way more active on Instagram with posting content. Up-to-date information, you'll get to meet the cast of our reading. The ticket link is in our bio. So the best place is either our website or our social media page to keep up-to-date with. The current reading, we have coming up the end of September or any future endeavors and readings and concerts. - Ulyss, do you know what about you and your show pray? - So our show is on September 27th, 7 p.m., and the best way to reach us would be probably my social media, Tina Berrien, or the dancers, and then right there, the ticket link is in the bio and also you can maybe go on Spark Theatre's website and then you can find the tickets there, yeah. - Dan, what about you and your show "The Gritara Verde"? - My show is September 21st at the Chain Theatre at 5 p.m. You can, I'll give you my social handles. Facebook is Facebook, Dan Brown Rockaway, R-O-C-K-A-W-A-Y. My Instagram is Dan_Brown_Rockaway, R-O-C-K-A-W-A-Y with an underscore after that. The ticket links are there as well as on the festival websites. I also want to give a shout out to the actress in my show, Molly Gazae, who's amazing. If you look her up, you can also get the ticket links there. But I also want to say that these other shows sound amazing and I'm gonna do my best to see them. What a great, thanks for putting me on a show. It's such amazing people. These other shows sound amazing and I'll do my best to see them as well. - And finally, Spencer, your show, neuro-choreography on socio-emotional oscillations. How can we get more information or contact that? - Yeah, so our show is September 28th at 5 p.m. at the Chain Theatre and with me as well, the best way to get tickets is on my personal Instagram, which is @spstroud. But I also have a website, spencer-stroud.com. And then we hopefully will have some up-and-coming residencies where we'll be able to form it into a full-length work to be an hour, so yeah. - Wonderful. Well, Gabby, Spencer, Dan, Tina, thank you all so much for taking the time, for speaking with me, for sharing these incredible works. Truly, you should be very proud of them. They're amazing. So thank you all so much for your time today. - Thank you. Thanks for your energy and your attitude. Thank you. You made us really feel welcome, thank you. - Thank you, thank you. - Thank you so much. - Thank you. My guests today have been four incredible artists who have some fabulous works that are part of the Spark Theatre Festival NYC. The festival is currently running now through September 29th at the Chain Theatre, and you can get tickets and more information by visiting emergingartisttheatre.org. We also have more information and contact information for each of our guests and their shows, which we'll be posting in our episode description, as well as on our social media posts. But hurry over to emergingartisttheatre.org now and get your tickets. There are a limited number of tickets for these performances, and you are not gonna wanna miss any of these shows. Again, they're all part of the Spark Theatre Festival NYC happening now through September 29th. And we wanna add for our American listeners that election day is November 5th. Make sure you are registered to vote. Have a plan to cast your ballot and do your democratic duty. You can find out how and where you can register to vote by visiting vote.gov. The future demands that we fight for it now. So until next time, I'm Andrew Cortez reminding you to... - Turn off your cell phones. - Unwrap your candies. - And keep talking about the theatre. - In a stage whisper. - Thank you. 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