Voice and Vision - The Envision Retreat

The ENVISION program harkens back to Voice & Vision’s highly successful early Retreats at Smith College in 1991, ’92, and ’93. During those three years, woman theater artists of all ages, backgrounds, cultures, aesthetic and sexual orientations were given the opportunity to explore and develop their work free from the pressures of city living and commercial production, with an artistic team brought together exclusively to serve them. It was a very successful recipe: within a short span of time, an incredible volume of truly excellent work was created and went on to fuller productions at larger theaters nationwide.

Each year the ENVISION selected artists develop six new theater projects in a creative and supportive environment free from immediate commercial pressures. while in residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Retreat participants are part of a collaborative and dynamic artistic atmosphere where they can focus on further developing and performing their projects. The 2005 ENVISION participants were selected from over 100 applicants, producing an exciting and diverse range of projects. Each select group of artists shares meals and constructive discourse throughout the fifteen-day Retreat.

Rehearsal for Rachel Dickstein's Innocents, later produced by
Ripe Time at the Ohio Theater in NYC. Photo Jenny Levison.

The Blithedale Romance adapted & directed by Sarah Stern.
The Blithedale Romance is a site-specific performance piece adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel about a failed 1850’s Utopian community, based on the real-life Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Two complex female protagonists form the heart of this story: the forward-thinking and passionate Zenobia, and the ghostly and delicate Priscilla, a woman with ties to occult-mesmerism. Joining them is the narrator Coverdale, a fledgling poet, and Hollingworth, a self-righteous philanthropist. Feminism, prisoner reform, the birth of a new society – all are subsumed to emotion, attraction and jealousy as ties between these four turn tangled and tragic.

Broken Dolls created & performed by actress Dawn Akemi Saito, actress Elizabeth Hess & director June Prager
A work of dramatic fiction based on factual accounts of women as victims of wartime rape and human trafficking, Broken Dolls utilizes Butoh-influenced movement and extended voice techniques to explore trauma. Saito and Hess portray two women who are raped, one during war and the other when sold as a sex slave. Recollection and reenactment approach compulsion, revealing a multiplicity of unexpected responses. The women become both comforter and tormentor to each other as they strive to prevent and then relieve the deadening of the soul.

Good Heif by Maggie Smith, directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde
A peculiar and riotously funny fable set in a hot, dry landscape where life consists of “diggin’, hurtin’, feelin’, not feelin’, prayin’, drinkin’, eatin’, sleepin’….” Lad lives with Ma and Pa, digging during the day and sleeping on the floor at night. Terrified and confused by the signs of his impending manhood, he asks questions. Ma, Pa and their neighbors respond with useless remedies and outsized alarm; and when growing up starts to draw him toward “what’s over thar,” beyond anything he knows or has even dreamed of, alarm accelerates to brutality. In an imagined world of rural simplicity, against a backdrop of entrenched fear and immobility, Smith has found a way to talk about the danger of ignorance, the necessity of change, and how community and propriety hold fear in place and keep societies, even the smallest ones, in check.

In The Middle, Somewhat Aggravated created & performed by choreographer/dancer Sahar Javedani, with music direction & vocals by Kate Conklin
In the Middle, somewhat aggravated is an evening length dance theater work investigating Javedani’s personal assimilation of two cultures, Iran and America. Incorporating the music, art and mythology of pre- and post-Islamic Revolution Iran into her movement, text and song, she asks: “What elements of my heritage and cultural upbringing do I embrace? What are the values I uphold and those I have left behind? Where is my allegiance?” Referencing some of Iran’s greatest artistic exports – from the music of Googoosh and Delkash to the rock band 127; from 16th Century Babur miniature paintings to contemporary visual artists Shirin Neshat and Marjane Satrapi – Javedani spikes pain with satire, sensitivity with fearlessness.

Lush Valley created & directed by Kristin Marting, with video by James Scruggs & music by composer Todd Griffin
Lush Valley is an emotion-driven hybrid performance which, through dance, text, movement, live music and video, examines the “American Dream” that shapes all of our ideas, hopes and fears. Using her signature directorial/choreographic form – inspired by the work of French theorist Francois Del Sarte, whose stylized approach to acting was the basis for melodrama, and by Eastern performance traditions like Katakali and Kabuki – Marting’s starting point is a vivid dream of her own filled with brutality, sexism, mythologizing and magic that she finds simultaneously horrifying and attractive.

Seven by Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith & Susan Yankowitz, directed by Gerda Stevenson
Seven award-winning playwrights have joined together to create Seven, a collaborative work based upon personal interviews and oral histories of seven extraordinary women whose life work benefits the citizens of their diverse cultures: Russia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Guatemala and Cambodia. Each of the writers is responsible for a monologue about one of these women. The individual narratives are interwoven, forming a documentary theatre piece dramatizing the struggles, courageous journeys and achievements of these remarkable people who are quietly (and not so quietly) changing our world. The playwrights have pledged to give half their royalties to Vital Voices Global Partnership, an NGO that invests in emerging women leaders.

Hoodoo Love by Katori Hall
Hoodoo Love is a mystical, mythic play exploring themes of African-American spirituality through long-held rituals and almost forgotten magic. Written in Black Mid-Southern dialect, this play follows the journey of Toulou, who escapes from the cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta to the Memphis streets in search of her dreams. Hall was a Cherry Lane Mentor Project 2006 Finalist with mentor Lynn Nottage, a semi-finalist in the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference 2006, and a 2005 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Lorraine Hansberry Award Winner.

Little Tales of Misogyny by Elizabeth Meriwether
Meriwether explores the world of the infamous and controversial lesbian mystery writer, Patricia Highsmith. Little Tales of Misogyny is both an adaptation of Highsmith's book of short stories by the same name and an exploration of the life of a woman who wrote from the point of view of a misogynist. Meriwether is the author of Heddatron, produced by Les Freres Corbusier at H.E.R.E., and Nicky Goes South, directed by Shira Milikowsky at the New York Fringe. Her play The Mistakes Madeline Made was produced by Naked Angels in April and is set for production by Yale Repertory Theatre in November 2006.

The Walls by Rivendell Theatre Ensemble
Commissioned by Rivendell Theater Ensemble in 2005, Chicago-based playwright Lisa Dillman, in collaboration with the Rivendell ensemble, creates a theatrical examination of women, madness and institutionalization throughout history. The award-winning Chicago-based Rivendell Theater Ensemble (Tara Mallen, Artistic Director) will premier the work as part of its 2007-2008 season.

A Slight Headache by Alyson Pou
Pou tells the story of an unusual mother, who gives birth from her forehead, and her daughter, who struggles with independence despite the fact that she is inextricably joined to her mother by their hair. Set in the late-1800s of freak shows and salons, the story introduces a world where medical practice is not yet a science, and imagination and invention rule the day. Pou¹s work has been presented at PS122, Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, and the Downtown Performance Festival.

Stanley by Lisa D'Amour
Stanley is a multi-media solo performance in which Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire serves as a launching point for a meditation on desire, power and regret as it plays out in the individual and the world at large. This work, a collaboration between Lisa D'Amour (Obie award-winner, Nita and Zita), Todd D'Amour, and videographer Tara Webb, was included in the HERE Resident Artists Program this season. It will be produced at HERE in November 2006.

Don't Stop by Molly Rice
Rice explores adolescent sexual politics and the effects of social programming on sexual identity. In the play, Don Juan is re-born as an adolescent girl and must negotiate the sex rules of high school and her own complicated identity as she wields her charisma on a disinterested peer. Rice has worked with Clubbed Thumb, Rude Mechanicals, and the Hangar Theater. Jackson Gay (The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow) directs.

1000 Marias by Maria Cangiano
This multi-media autobiographical performance piece explores identity, fragmentation and the search for a true self. It is the story of Maria's journey as an intellectual-cum-artist-cum freelance Spanish/Voice teacher (withoutlegal papers) surviving in New York City's cauldron of races, classes and cultures. Cangiano has performed dance at El Taller Latinoamericano, The New School, Bowery Poetry Club, Joe's Pub, Nuyorican Poets Café, and many others. She has sung with the Amato Opera, Vertical Opera Repertory, Teatro Signorelli in Cortona, Italy, and Regina Opera.

Writer-in Residence: Karen Hartman
Hartman will be attending the ENVISION Retreat as a writer-in-residence to work on her new play Goliath, which is set in an Israeli Settlement on the verge of a pullout from Palestinian territory. It invokes the biblical tale of a youth defeating a giant to ask an urgent contemporary question: how can people of unequal power make peace? Hartman¹s other work includes Going Gone (world premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, 2004); Motherbone, an opera composed by Grahm Reynolds (Loewe Award for New Music Theater, Salvage Vanguard Theater); Gum (produced by Women¹s Project & Productions, Center Stage, Magic Theater, P73 Productions); Girl Under Grain (Best Drama in New York Fringe, Drama League, P73 Productions); Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl (from Lewis Carroll, music by Gina Leishman AT&T Onstage Award, Dallas Theater Center); Leah's Train (workshop at Long Wharf Theatre); and Blessings and Curses (San Diego¹s Tommy Award for Dance and Patte Award for Theater, with Malashock Dance).

Song for New York by Ruth Maleczech and Mabou Mines
Song for New York is composed of five poems, written by female poets representing each of the five boroughs that make up New York City. This site-specific work is intended for performance in non-theatrical spaces throughout the five boroughs. Through Song for New York, Mabou Mines hopes to reflect the complexity of New York City and the diversity of expression that runs through the city. Maleczech is a founding, co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines, an avant-garde theater company, and is the recipient of multiple OBIE and Villager awards for her work as a director and actor.

Circus Amok
Circus Amok is an outdoor, one-ring, no-animal political circus theater company. Throughout ENVISION, founder/Artistic Director Jennifer Miller and the members of Circus Amok worked with core performers and musicians to develop its 2005 season show. The topics to be investigated will include the gentrification of NYC from its geological formation to the current era of big box stores, and how we got from there to here. For her work with Circus Amok, Miller was awarded a Bessie and an OBIE. She has toured her solo works in New York and abroad, receiving extensive recognition by the press and multiple foundations for the arts.

Kultur Kamp: Without You We’re Nothing by Nina Mankin
Think “Hedwig” meets “Betty” meets “Babes in Arms,” when Lötsa Pioof (Mankin) and Hildegarter (Taylor Mac), two German performance artists, team up with the American Billy (Rachelle Garniez) and decide they have something to offer “W”-era America by way of political performance. Kultur Kamp integrates the personal drama of the Kampers with musical parodies of American pop culture songs to investigate identity, activism, and sexual literary theory in modern America. Mankin’s work has been seen at the New York Theatre Workshop, Music-Theater Group and the American Repertory Theatre. She has been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Opera/Musical Theatre development grant and holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU.

The Fairy Queen by Myra Paci
Set during the turbulent days around 9/11, The Fairy Queen is a story about four women and their ever-changing capacities for love. Collectively, the women must sort through issues of mental instability, loneliness, cancer and forgotten love without succumbing to the fear around them and within themselves. Paci has written multiple screenplays, including Searching For Paradise (2002) starring Chris Noth, Mary Louise Wilson and Susan May Pratt, and Girls Night Out (1997) starring Rosario Dawson. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab as well as the Directors Lab. Paci received a five-week residency at the MacDowell Colony to write The Fairy Queen.

Like A Cow Or An Elephant by Kara Corthron
Like A Cow Or An Elephant examines the life of Kreena, a 20-something cafeteria janitor with an overbearing mother and a junkie brother. Overlooked and under-appreciated by her family, Kreena takes her life into her own hands after meeting a stranger named Michel and befriending a new co-worker. Corthron is a Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwriting Fellow at The Juilliard School and holds an MA from NYU. Like A Cow Or An Elephant was a finalist in the 2005 National Ten-Minute Play Contest and has received workshops at Juilliard and HERE Arts Center.

Stone Heart by Diane Glancy
Based on Glancy’s 2003 novel of the same title, Heart investigates the story of Sacajawea, the young Shoshoni woman who accompanied Lewis & Clark on their 1804-06 expedition to the Pacific Coast. Glancy examines this historic journey through the eyes of Sacajawea, a young Native American woman separated from her tribe and travelling with thirty strange men. Glancy is a professor of Native American Literature and Creative Writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has published an extensive list of novels, short stories, plays, poems, and essays, and is the recipient of the 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Naomi Hard, a member of the ENVISION acting company, asks questions in
rehearsal. Photo Jenny Levison.

Innocents by Rachel Dickstein
This Innovative and lyrical adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth incorporates the use of dance, music, and performance art. Rachel is Founding Artistic Director of Ripe Time Inc., a company advocating the merging of dance and theatre.

Orpheus by Kristin Marting and Stephanie Fleischmann
In this rock musical adaptation of the Greek tragedy Orpheus, Kristin & Co. make Hell a club… Literally. Complete with chanteuse owner Persephone, burlesque Sirens and the River Styx, this hybrid performance workshop recieved a full production in the fall of 2004 at HERE Arts Center.

Benefit of the Doubt by playwright Sheila Schwartz
Through the historical figures of Admiral Canaris (1887-1945), General Franco (1892-1975), and Harold (Kim) Philby (1912-1988), Sheila Schwartz challenges established concepts of loyalty, heroism and conflict, and ultimately asks the question, do good intentions deserve history’s benefit of the doubt? As an emerging playwright, Sheila presents her first major work, Benefit of the Doubt, a play rooted in her intensive academic study and research.

Lenin’s Shoe by playwright Saviana Stanescu
When Jasna, an illegal US resident becomes nanny to Vlad, the spoiled invalid teenage son of an international oil mogul, their lives intertwine into an unpredictable political web filled with airplane hijackers, high school dropouts, microfilm and many, many shoes. Saviana’s work has been presented in New York as well as internationally in Romania, Vienna and beyond.

My Israeli Play by playwright Zohar Tzur
Miriam Bloom, a young Israeli woman living in New York, struggles to establish her voice as a writer and realizes she cannot do so without dealing with her war-torn past. As a playwright, Zohar gracefully pulls from her own Israeli experience to intrigue and excite audiences around the world.

Rode Hard and Put Away Wet by Casey Wilson and June Raphael
This multi-media sketch comedy routine ties together extreme characters and themes—everything from Atkins to acting to Ambien. Inspiration for this piece comes from improvisation and personal life experiences.

Nina Mankin, Rachelle Garniez and Taylor Mac rehearse Kulture Kamp: Without You We're Nothing at the 2005 ENVISION Retreat. Photo Amanda Cooper.

The Iphigenia Project by Theodora Skipitares
King Agamemnon has agreed to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in order to secure a safe passage to Troy. Through the world of the gods and the shores of Troy and Aulis, this re-imagined tale unfolds with shadow puppetry, music by composer Arnold Dreyblatt, video projections, and text. Skipitares, renowned multi-media artist and theater director, is co-director of the Lab at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Anatomy 1968 by Karen Hartman
A young couple from Ohio attempts to honeymoon at the Hong Kong Hilton during the Vietnam War. This provocative, political and humorous new work explores issues of isolation and intimacy in the early days of a rocky marriage, in a world gone mad. Hartman is a recipient of the 2003 Daryl Roth Creative Spirits award, and she is a resident writer at New Dramatists.

Sit-in at the Five & Dime by composer Janice Lowe and librettist Margie Duffield
Set in 1959 Nashville, Tennessee, this highly-charged musical charts the lives of three students undergoing non-violence training for a civil rights sit-in. Lowe’s score fuses jazz, blues, and soul to tell their story as they wrestle with their own deep-seated demons and ultimately triumph over them.

Don’t Kiss Me, I’m in Training by Jenny Levison An extremely visual and imaginative play, Don’t Kiss Me, I’m in Training explores the lives of the French step-sisters who were also lovers, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. As French, Jewish, lesbian artists and writers, Levison’s play explores how the two women used the principles of the Surrealist Movement to cope with being imprisoned by Nazis during WWII.

Life is a Dream adapted by Jean Wagner In collaboration with dramaturg Wendy Weckwerth and translator Rick Davis
A Queen dies in childbirth. The stars say the child is a monster. If you were king, what would you do? Voice & Vision’s highly physical exploration of this classic “dream play” addresses this question and other such timely issues as: what is freedom and how should one use it? Jean Wagner has been the co-founder and Artistic Director of Voice &Vision since 1990. Wendy Weckworth is a doctoral candidate in dramaturgy at the Yale School of Drama. Rick Davis is Associate Dean and Artistic Director of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason University.

Three Sisters adapted by Paul Schmidt from Chekhov’s classic directed by Marya Mazor Schmidt’s adaptation takes place in a provincial town where three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, dream of moving back to Moscow. Featuring actresses Ruth Maleczech and Valda Setterfield, Mazor’s direction sheds new light on this classic play, which explores the gap between hope and fulfillment in the lives of these women. Marya Mazor is co-founder and Artistic Director of Voice & Vision.

IMMORTALITY (EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY) a solo show by Jennifer Gibbs
Gibbs channels the ferocious, seductive Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of America's most astounding and controversial 20th Century poets. The first woman to win the Pulitzer for poetry, Millay was the heroine of the Jazz Age, a sexual revolutionary known as much for being the center of Greenwich Village bohemia as for writing extraordinary poems. At the height of her morphine addiction, Millay must decide whether she can best serve her work by living, or by dying. Which choice guarantees immortality - continuing to write, or disappearing in a blaze of glory before she passes her peak? Between the moment she overfills her last syringe and the moment she brings the needle to her arm, this Millay stumbles into electric events from her past, as her life and the poems that consumed her life flash before her eyes. A sexy, witty and passionate take on how we keep going, and what we sacrifice to do it. Developed with director Daniela Varon.

Trick Saddle by Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers
This multi-media piece, combining video, dance, text, and music, examines the heroic myth of the American Cowboy from a feminist perspective, with video of an underwater cowboy ballet performed by the Penn State synchronized swimming team.

The Superstarlet S/Hero Show by writer-performer-twin sisters
Suzanne Y. Jones and Stephanie L. Jones
This unique, spoken-word/musical play about a photo librarian named Maryin (from Darien) and her alter-ego, SuperSoulSister, explores adoption, female empowerment and spirituality in contemporary times.

Alma by Maureen Brennan
A solo performance piece inspired by the Tennessee Williams short story, The Yellow Bird. Alma incorporates storytelling, dance, video and stylized vignettes to produce the quirky tale of a small-town preacher’s daughter whose process of self-discovery causes others to believe she is possessed by the devil.

Hairstory by Tish Benson
Benson’s feisty musical comedy delves into the love/hate relationship between a mother and daughter as expressed through the daughter’s beautiful but unruly “head fulla hair.”

R & J by Nina Shengold directed by Shelly Wyant
This retelling of Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET, newly adapted for a cast of five, will explore the themes of family, love, friendship and loyalty through time, space, masks, and music.