A visiting assistant professor of theater at Georgetown University, Power was conscripted by associate professor Derek Goldman, her colleague, who directed the play.
“I realized that it’s actually not that hard to make something that looks like something Rauschenberg has made,” Power says. “It’s assemblage, right? So, my goal was to make a set that looks like Rauschenberg could have designed it . . . everything onstage references one of his artworks.”
For example, the goat with a tire around its belly, based on Rauschenberg’s piece “Monogram,” was built in Power’s living room. She says she used “wood scraps, pillows, duct tape and an Ikea blanket that I took apart, because we didn’t have enough budget for yarn.”
“My cat got very attached to it, because it’s another animal and it’s quieter than the dog that I have,” Power says.
Throwing herself — literally — into Forum’s low budget/big ideas mind-set, Power even slipped a tire around her waist, its treads coated with paint, and rolled herself across the stage floor, trying to re-create Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print” piece.
“The whole process was very like Rauschenberg trying to make art, and we were doing that,” Power says.
After the show closes, the goat will go home to Power’s cat.
‘Collapsing Silence’
The most esoteric part of the Source Festival, running through July 3, has to be its so-called Artistic Blind Dates. Festival curators throw together people from different disciplines and charge them to devise pieces, 45 minutes or shorter, but give them no hint about what to create. One of the four Blind Date collaborations, “Collapsing Silence,” will be staged in Source’s upstairs rehearsal room June 17, 19, 25 and July 3. The piece explores how communication disintegrates after a disaster.
John Moletress, a founder (with actor Rick Hammerly) of the experimental Factory 449 theater collective, works primarily as a director, most recently on 449’s staging of “Magnificent Waste” by Caridad Svich. But as a sound designer, performer and the director of “Collapsing Silence,” he has had to let go of his most primal theatrical needs — to tell stories with beginnings, middles and endings.
Teamed with video artist, painter and performer David Carlson and choreographer/dancer Ilana Faye Silverstein, Moletress (pronounced mo-LEE-tress), has become conscious of how his narrative bent contrasts with Carlson’s and Silverstein’s more abstract, visual approaches.
“I kind of had to give up ideas of wanting to shape everything into a story,” Moletress says of their creative process. Letting go, he says, allowed “visual images that happen in the space to take on a story of their own, without trying to force them into one.”
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