Ellen Lauren, Barney O’Hanlon, J.Ed Araiza, Leon Ingulsrud, Will Bond, and Akiko Aizawa in “Who Do You Think You Are?” in 2008. (Photo by Michael Brosilow)
The SITI Company’s Christmas Carol started as a joke and ended as a swan track.
Over the previous three a long time and greater than 40 productions, the venerable New York efficiency group has created dazzling theatre, starting from grand spectacles to solo exhibits. A good portion of it has been primarily based on collages of texts by and about vital Twentieth-century artists, from Virginia Woolf to John Cage. They have additionally spent severe time with the Greeks, collaborated on a number of tasks with playwright Charles Mee and dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke, and even dabbled in Shakespeare, Marivaux, and Noël Coward.
Despite this selection, few conversant in their physique of labor would guess that their last manufacturing could be an adaptation of the Dickens basic, a beloved vacation custom for some and theatrical wallpaper for others. Leave it to SITI to be stunning all the best way to the tip.
Yes, the tip: The SITI Company is closing up store. After three performances of A Christmas Carol at Bard College’s Fisher Center (Dec. 16-18), the corporate will stop to function as a theatre group or a middle for efficiency coaching.
The finish has been a very long time coming, in a couple of completely different senses. In the late summer season of 1992, a pair dozen theatre artists from the U.S. and Japan gathered on the campus of Skidmore College to think about a daring new experiment in worldwide theatre. Over the subsequent couple years, what started because the Saratoga International Theater Institute morphed into the SITI Company, co-founded by Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki and American director Anne Bogart and devoted to worldwide collaboration, superior theatre coaching, and ensemble-driven efficiency experiments. Nobody knew, not to mention deliberate for, how lengthy it might final. Bogart had half a dozen or so theatrical “essays” in thoughts. Suzuki made it clear that his involvement and assist would finish after a sure variety of years. But one thing took maintain for a core group of actors in these first 5 years, an invigorating (if usually exhausting) spirit of collaboration, a we’re-onto-something sense of risk, and a fierce dedication to seek out out collectively simply what they may do.
In the primary decade or so, Actors Theatre of Louisville hosted Bogart and firm on quite a few events; different improvement companions emerged: City Theatre in Pittsburgh, the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State, and later the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. They cast a longstanding relationship with playwright (and eventual firm member) Charles Mee. The curiosity in collaboration finally led them to crew up on tasks with different teams, equivalent to Martha Graham Dance Company (American Document), Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (A Rite), Bang on a Can and composer Julia Wolfe (Steel Hammer), visible artist Ann Hamilton (the theatre is a clean web page), and STREB Extreme Action (Falling & Loving).
“We didn’t just do theatre,” noticed firm member Barney O’Hanlon lately. “We were an acting ensemble that could fluidly and organically cross over into other disciplines. We did opera, dance, music, visual art, and theatre.”
Through ups and downs, some modifications in personnel within the early years, and a unbroken effort to achieve wider recognition and assist, the troupe caught collectively and created greater than 40 productions, most of them daring unique new works conceived and directed by Bogart and collectively created by the corporate by means of a collection of workshop rehearsals. Over time, their performances and the corporate itself got here to be marked by exactitude, bodily and mental rigor, and a steely tenacity.
For Ellen Lauren, founding member, affiliate creative director, and co-artistic director since 2013, “The history of the company is the history of our relationship to the written word. Our first three devised pieces—The Medium, Small Lives/Big Dreams, and Going, Going, Gone—each demanded our youth, our ferocity, and a specific strategy in relation to the written word.”
Making these items is how the corporate’s DNA was fashioned, and it’s a double helix primarily based on two radically completely different strains of actor coaching: the exactly structured bodily varieties pioneered by Tadashi Suzuki in Japan on the one hand, and the extra open and improvisational orientation of the Viewpoints, Bogart’s revision of a observe first articulated by Mary Overlie, on the opposite. The symbiosis of Suzuki and Viewpoints proved fruitful. It generated a basis and an evolving, extremely plastic vocabulary that served their work on collage performs primarily based on sampled texts, open-ended scripts equivalent to Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica and Hotel Cassiopeia, and basic texts equivalent to A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Three Sisters.
It additionally supplied the idea of a efficiency pedagogy they taught to others in numerous codecs and settings, short-term workshops whereas out on tour, college residencies, a conservatory program they ran out of their New York studio lately, and, most basically, an annual month-long summer season intensive carried out on the campus of Skidmore College from the start in 1992 till the pandemic pressured them to determine tips on how to conduct coaching in a digital atmosphere. Their deep and singular dedication to coaching and the synergy of the Suzuki and Viewpoints work got here to outline their identification, mission, and aesthetic, in addition to offering a measure of organizational stability over time as tasks of various styles and sizes got here and went.
By the time COVID shut down all theatre in March 2020, plans have been already underneath technique to sundown the corporate as a efficiency group and coaching middle, the results of a painstaking and tough course of that started across the time of their twenty fifth anniversary in 2017. By then, the funding local weather had change into much less and fewer hospitable. The long-term effort to seek out an institutional host to supply a safer base of operations discovered solely intermittent success. Touring was an increasing number of problematic. In an organization predicated on an athletic type of appearing, no one was getting any youthful. Some firm members had competing priorities, together with Bogart, who made it identified that she deliberate to step away from her function within the subsequent few years.
All these components made it clear that the corporate wanted a brand new organizational mannequin with the intention to proceed. A gamut of prospects have been thought of. As govt director Michelle Preston described it, “We looked at merging with other companies with their own pedagogies to create a center for American theatre training. We looked at moving out of New York City. We looked at launching a capital campaign to raise money for a building. What became clear is that becoming an institution with a capital ‘I’ would de-prioritize the artists of the ensemble.”
The soul-searching was gut-wrenching, and never with out disagreement alongside the best way. Various firm members favored completely different situations at completely different instances. But given a call of this magnitude, consensus was important. Said founding member Kelly Maurer, “Every time we had a difficult discussion around, ‘Why don’t we try this? Maybe we’ll do it this way,’ nothing felt authentic. We are such an organic entity that if you take out one piece, it changes the whole.”
As the deliberative course of stretched right into a second yr, an increasing number of firm members got here to acknowledge that, as Preston put it, “SITI Company was this specific group of individual artists who came together to create work in a particular way, and it couldn’t be SITI Company without that group of artists. Once we got to that point the idea that we could operate in perpetuity was no longer on the table.” So within the fall of 2020, a legacy plan was formally introduced, by which the operation would transfer ahead by means of a last thirtieth anniversary season in 2022, then take a bow and make an exit.
Since that announcement, Michelle Preston and producing director Megan E. Carter have coordinated a meticulous and impressive effort to protect the corporate’s historical past and perpetuate its legacy.
“This is not a failure,” stated Preston. “This is not a matter of financial mismanagement. The company’s decision to go out on their own terms is a noble and courageous act.”
In June, at a plenary session of the TCG convention titled “The Medium is the Message: A Legacy Conversation with SITI Company,” SITI board chair Jessica Hanna launched the group with this evaluation: “I have watched them change the ecosystem of the American theatre. One does not need to have seen their work to have been changed by them. The effect of what they do and what they make reverberates throughout the world.”
Indeed, by any measure, the achievement of the SITI Company has been radical—by way of the originality of their productions, the affect of their educating, and their sheer longevity as an experimental ensemble. The key to their survival, stated Maurer, comes down to 1 phrase.
“Company—you make choices for the company. That has always been a red ribbon that runs through the choices that we make and how we do what we do. First and foremost, you take care of the company, artistically, spiritually, when you can, financially. Company first—that’s the promise this group of people made to each other.”
That promise has required loads of sacrifice alongside the best way. As co-artistic director Leon Ingulsrud stated throughout that TCG plenary, “Having a company like ours, a group like this staying together for 30 years, is hard. It’s not normal. Systems are not set up to support this. We’ve had to fight against a lot to do it.”
They have realized classes alongside the best way which are value sharing. To facilitate that sharing, a vestige of the corporate will live on as SITI, Inc., a small group to be headed up by Brad Carlin, SITI’s former affiliate managing director. SITI, Inc. will function a clearinghouse of details about the corporate and its historical past, future Suzuki and Viewpoints coaching alternatives, and networking for a number of the tons of of SITI alumni who need to keep in contact.
“We have a core alumni group of 200-plus people who have been influenced by SITI and are committed to the work and determined to keep moving it forward,” Bogart advised me. “That is our true legacy.”
Members of the corporate additionally contributed writing to a retrospective quantity titled The SITI Company: This Is Not A Handbook, a commemorative assortment of anecdotes, recollections, and reflections edited by Carter and geared toward capturing the person voices of the group.
Artists and students who want to examine the corporate’s work sooner or later can have entry to 2 archives. SITI, Inc. will keep an internet digital archive of manufacturing images, video excerpts, playbills, scripts, and ephemera. A extra intensive bodily archive of manufacturing books, organizational data, and different supplies will likely be housed on the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, additionally house to the Wexner Center for the Arts, the place numerous SITI productions have been incubated. Another vital a part of the legacy plan is the awarding of $180,000 in transition grants to members of the corporate and employees to facilitate their shift into the subsequent stage of their careers.
The centerpiece of the ultimate yr has been a flurry of productions, most of them revivals of earlier SITI items and one model new creation. To have fun the lengthy trajectory of their physique of labor, they reached all the best way again to their roots and 1993 to revive their first devised piece, The Medium, a theatrical meditation on how expertise mediates actuality, primarily based on the considering and writing of Marshall McLuhan. The piece loved an intensive tour over the course of 2022, together with stops at a number of the performing arts facilities that had been mainstays of previous excursions (City Theatre in Pittsburgh, the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, BAM in Brooklyn, and the Krannert Center at University of Illinois). There have been plans to revisit and revise their work on Mee’s Under Construction at La MaMa within the fall, however scheduling issues put the kibosh on that, in order that they made a hasty pivot and returned to 2 well-honed, earlier tasks primarily based on Orson Welles radio performs, Radio Macbeth and War of the Worlds: The Radio Play.
In 1999-2000, the corporate collaborated with playwright Naomi Iizuka on an epic play about Orson Welles, however ended up having extra success with a aspect undertaking conceived by long-term firm sound designer Darron West and first directed by him and Bogart in 1999 as a part of a fundraising occasion in on the West Bank Café in New York. Using solely Howard Koch’s adaptation of the well-known H.G. Wells novel, SITI’s War of the Worlds: The Radio Play depicted Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air on a 1938 soundstage performing what famously proved to be a terrifying Halloween hoax. The tight vest-pocket manufacturing grew to become one in every of SITI’s most continuously revived and broadly traveled exhibits. In one other full-circle second, the present’s final stand passed off as a part of their thirtieth anniversary gala, proper again on the West Bank the place it started.
-
Will Bond in “Bob” in 1998. (Photo by Shehab Hossain) -
Ellen Lauren in “Room” in 2000. (Photo by Chassi Annexy) -
Danyon Davis, Akiko Aizawa, Ellen Lauren, Will Bond, and Leon Ingulsrud in “bobrauschenbergamerica” in 2002. (Photo by Michael Brosilow) -
“Radio Macbeth” in 2007. (Photo by Michael Brosilow) -
Eric Berryman, Stephen Duff Webber, Gian – Murray Gianino, Patrice Johnson Chevannes , Akiko Aizawa, and Barney O’Hanlon in “Steel Hammer,” a co-production with Bang on a Can All Stars in 2015. (Photo by Richard Termine) -
Ellen Lauren and Will Bond in “Chess Match No. 5” in 2017. (Photo by Maria Baranova) -
Gian – Murray Gianino and Akiko Aizawa in “Hanjo” in 2017. (Photo by Julie Lemberger) -
Roshni Shukla, Akiko Aizawa, Stephen Duff Webber, Barney O’Hanlon, J.Ed Araiza, Samuel Stricklen, Leon Ingulsrud, and Gian-Murray Gianino in “The Bacchae” in 2018. (Photo by Craig Schwartz) -
Will Bond in “A Christmas Carol” in 2022.
The SITI Company’s last manufacturing, nonetheless, will likely be one which’s by no means been seen earlier than. A Christmas Carol is the brainchild of West, who traces the undertaking’s origins again to green-room conversations at Williams College when firm members joked about how odd it might be for SITI to stage the ever present vacation basic. “A few years later,” West recalled, “we started getting serious about it.” After numerous variations, together with Orson Welles’s 1938 one-hour radio adaptation, West stepped ahead to create a brand new Carol. He knew the story inside and outside from the numerous regional theatre variations he had designed, and from his private custom of studying the guide yearly at Christmas.
“I wanted to make a Christmas Carol that didn’t have Tiny Tim at the end saying, ‘God bless us, everyone,’” West stated. “I wanted it to be about what Dickens was writing about: workhouses, poor children living on the streets as urchins, social injustice. What happens if you do not help fellow human beings in need? That’s what always really got to me about the book.”
Gideon Lester, creative director of the Fisher Center at Bard, dedicated to the undertaking earlier than the script was even completed, maybe realizing what a full-circle second it might characterize for at the very least one firm member. Anne Bogart started directing performs as an undergraduate at Bard within the Seventies, doing Grotowski workout routines and mash-ups of Ionesco along with her friends. Now she is again within the Hudson River Valley co-directing the SITI Christmas Carol with West. But it received’t be your grandfather’s Carol. “What everyone agreed on,” Bogart advised me, “is that we wanted to feature Dickens’s beautiful language, and not spend the whole time dragging figgy puddings and plastic turkeys on and off the stage. Darron’s adaptation makes that possible.”
In the function of Scrooge, founding firm member Will Bond leads a solid of 10 that features seven different firm members and two associates. “It is a profound story of redemption,” stated West, who can be offering sound design. “I wish it could really happen. The idea of this man late in life repenting and seeing his life anew is something that I would wish to be able to do myself.”
No doubt, the three performances of A Christmas Carol at Bard will likely be imbued with a way of finality, most particularly for members of the corporate, a lot of whom face unsure futures, and, much less overtly, for a neighborhood of former college students, associates, board members, and supporters who’ve adopted their work with admiration over time.
The finish has been a very long time coming. All this yr, however particularly the summer season and fall, have been an emotional gauntlet of “last times.” One of these got here in October, when the corporate gathered of their studio at 520 Eighth Ave. for a last run-through of the revived Radio Macbeth earlier than going into tech for his or her quick run at NYU’s Skirball Center.
As they all the time do, they educated earlier than rehearsing the play, and by the point they received to the open Viewpoints improvisation that normally ends these periods, everyone current was conscious that this was the final time they’d work as an organization on this studio, the incubator of so many tasks, the ground on which they stomped for years, their working house for greater than half of the corporate’s existence. Anne Bogart sat on a tall stool off to the aspect giving consideration as solely she will. Darron West cued up some music. The actors started to maneuver in regards to the room, stopping and beginning, rushing up and slowing down, monitoring one another with the uncanny sixth sense that comes from a long time of being collectively.
Eventually, one spoke a line from a previous manufacturing, and different actors adopted swimsuit, talking different traces from many, many different performs they’d created over time. It was half elegy, half testomony to a outstanding physique of labor, and to the dedication to firm that had made the work potential. When the music stopped and West referred to as, “And scene,” the actors stood nonetheless. No one may communicate. There have been sobs however largely silence. “Somehow all of our work together was evoked by this one Viewpoints session,” Bogart recalled. “It was a profound moment. Sacred, really.”
The stillness lasted for a very long time, after which, earlier than issues may get maudlin or self-indulgent, stage supervisor Ellen Lavaia stated, “Let’s take a nice, long break.” They did, after which they got here again and received on with the work of the day. For the SITI Company, there has all the time been extra work to do.
Scott T. Cummings (he/him) teaches and directs performs within the Theatre Department at Boston College. He is the creator of Remaking American Theater: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company (2006), and, extra lately, The Theatre of Les Waters: More Like the Weather (2022).
Related