It's funny how some things just fall into place. My dear friends, Em and Christina, and I were discussing how cool it would be to start a women's theatre group here in Pittsburgh. We then thought--with all of our copious amounts of free time--that we could get something put together for women's history month. Needless to say, it was quickly becoming evident that this was not going to happen. But then we were guided toward the direction of Tressa, the managing director of No Name Players,who had been organizing this awesome SWAN Day event. I met with her in December, and she found us an 8 minute spot in the show. How cool was that?
Each piece for this year's celebration was going to be based on interviews Tressa had done with local women about being women. When we watched the interview footage, we had pages upon pages of notes. We talked for 2 1/2 hours about everything we found interesting. Trying to decide what to talk about in 8 minutes was going to be hard! But we decided to structure our piece in a way that no one else had done before for SWAN Day: a monologue performance piece written and performed by us in conjunction with visual artists who would create art based on our monologues. Sweet, huh? While initially we had envisioned the artists creating something in real time during the performances, they ended up creating an awesome animation that ran behind us based on our themes and prop.
Prop, you say? What kind of prop? As you may remember, I posted my monologue a while back. The monologue was about how terrified (and guilty because of it) I was to have a girl. Em's and Christina's monologues also touched upon different "flavors of guilt" associated with different stages of motherhood. Em's discussed the need to do everything "right" and "by the book" or else we'll all die from the unknowns (think hysterical, smothering mother). Christina's investigated the desire to break free and become her own women again--only to feel guilty about leaving her family to do so. So to tie all of our guilt together, we used a rope. A long long rope. It was tied, wrapped, unwrapped, bundled, stretched, pulled, wound, went over, went under, climbed through, stepped on, in circle, in cats cradle--it did a lot for showing how we all felt. And hence, the title of our piece was In Knots.
We got a lot of positive feedback on our piece, which was wonderful although unnecessary because I think that even if everyone had hated it, we had so much fun putting it together that it wouldn't have mattered. I swear--we would get together for an hour and half "rehearsal" and probably only rehearse for about 30 minutes of that time. We gelled and it all came together. The rest of the time was spent chatting, venting, crying, laughing, eating. I got to know two amazing women through this process, women who have already begun to share their motherhood experiences with me and guide me towards becoming the mom I hope I'll be. I'm forever grateful to them for such a wonderful experience.
Here's to getting our women's theatre group up and running, ladies!
