Target Margin Theater (TMT): We’re so excited to have you in residence at Target Margin. Your theater making practice includes playwriting, directing, composing, curating, and performing, and your work centers the creation of object theater. Can you tell us how you got involved with this specific kind of practice and how your new project, Gestures, speaks to that journey?
Megan Murtha (MM): As someone raised Catholic, the importance and transformative quality of objects has pervaded my artistic work. In my earlier work, I filled the stage with a lot of props (I distinguish a “prop” as something an actor uses, as opposed to an “object” which becomes the focal point of the action that uses the actor, like a puppet). Fortunately, while studying playwriting at Brooklyn College, Mac Wellman saw my affinity for meaningful things on stage and so encouraged me to explore what object theater as an art form had to offer. How objects shapeshift their meaning through manipulation, context, curation, lighting, and by adding aural elements, is a continued fascination for me, and shifting focus to object theater as a poetic art form inspired me to begin composing music (which I did for the first time in 2015 for a set of cow bones).
What I’m excited about with this new project is that the objects we intend to use are primarily handmade ones, bringing back my experience creating visual art that features in my performance work. In an earlier show called Women of Saranac, I created sculptural assemblages inside of boxes in response to four incredible photographs of Victorian era women that I found in a junk shop in Saranac Lake. Similarly, my initial idea for Gestures was for it to be a small scale, table-top, cabaret style object performance, though when I went to visit the Guggenheim, I saw a motorized object piece by Jean Tinguely, White Moving Forms on Black Background, which inspired me to shift in scale and abstraction.
This piece was transformative for me in noticing how captivating and transcendent five minutes of objects engaged in slow motion can be and in wondering how that pace of movement might be set to music. Experiencing his piece I felt I was witnessing a comprehensive choreography of everything, which sounds absurdly grand, but it was the feeling I had at the time, a feeling of everything everywhere contained in this one piece that I was seeing all alone, a rare thing in a New York museum. Hopefully with Gestures, we can offer a similarly expansive yet individually immersive experience to those who come see what we’re working on.
TMT: You are working with TMT Associate Artist Claire Moodey in the creation of Gestures, composing choral music to work with handmade and ready made objects. What do you and Claire bring in to this particular collaboration?
MM: Since this piece is more abstract than my previous work–and the bodies of the performers in motion are equal players alongside the objects–this type of project invites a process of exploratory play to discover and test out ideas. I asked Claire, an expert at play, to help me direct this piece because she has a generous, open approach that guides explorations in rehearsal that set bodies and objects into motion and inspire the performers we are working with to generate ideas by experimenting independently as well as together.
This kind of process has been allowing us to see what is possible visually, and what meanings can be conjured emotionally and intellectually.
TMT: And why this particular juxtaposition of choral music and ready mades?
MM: Composing music has become more and more a central part of my creative practice, and the lovely group of women I often work with (i.e. Zoë Geltman, Maggie Robinson Katz, Katie Proulx, Emma Wiseman) have been encouraging me to do another show of just my music (which we did previously at Uncanny Valley in 2017). Meanwhile, I had that Tinguely experience.
Being invited to be in residence at TMT was perfect timing. While here, I am able to explore what happens when a collection of songs share a space to create a landscape where objects manifest into sculptural forms that also disassemble. How can I create a sustaining, immersive, abstract, visual experience within an atmospheric wash of singing voices?
TMT: Your project also explores the tensions between non-technologically mediated sounds and the aesthetics of digital technology. Can you speak a little bit more about that?
MM: In all of my work there is the element of unmediated presence and authenticity of sound. This keeps everything on stage alive, which is so important for puppets and objects that vulnerably toe that fragile line of existence. Having the performers voice everything live (text and song), allows that much more of their energy to transfer to the objects being manipulated. As I learned more about Tinguely’s metamechanical sculptures, and about his questions concerning the role of the artist, the viewer, and the artwork itself when generated by a robotic mechanism, I was led to reflect on our own times in a technological sense. While there is a general sense of the unmediated human element becoming less and less present in our daily interactions, it remains vital in theater. This is obvious, but not always upheld. Like a dance piece performed to pre-recorded audio, the movement and energy of a performance can be drained of life and result in an experience that is stilted. This problem of the artificial depleting the energy of the organic is something that interests me as someone who works with using organic energy to enliven the inanimate.
So, to transfer thinking about this problem to music composition, how do you keep the human voice present within the sound aesthetic of digital looping? How do you breathe life into the robotic? This question and tension is what makes beatboxing so mesmerizing and astonishing. Where does the human body still need breath, and how can the sound of that need for breath be incorporated into the piece as well? How do you embrace the limits of the machine of the human body and test those limits within the confines of the technologically mediated sound aesthetic that pervades our lives? If it is a question of endurance, the machine will always win, but if it is a question of nuance, of a breathed, shared experience in the face of automation, humans still have something.
TMT: Your latest work was We’re Imploding: A Toy Theatre Double-Feature, performed at The Tank last fall. Is Gestures an evolution, departure, or continuation from where folks may have last seen you and your work?
MM: Maybe all three(?)
Both plays in We’re Imploding were designed and engineered by my collaborator, Mark Fox, who utilized the puppetry form of toy theater, making all of the puppets and self-contained stages. These were intricately detailed sets and figures, with a wizardry of mechanics, and the show had a formal script that I wrote, along with music I composed. Every sound heard was anchored to an object or character on stage. The music compositions for Gestures are similar in nature to those heard in We’re Imploding, and are again sung by an all-female choir, though the songs in Gestures are less text-heavy, more atmospheric, and more contextually related to the objects, but not necessarily emanating from them.
The objects in Gestures are more abstract as well, and move within a continually changing play space (i.e. the floor, mid-air, sometimes on performer’s bodies, etc), rather than a self-contained one. It might, in that case, be considered an evolution of We’re Imploding, as the two plays (and respective toy theater stages) featured in that show were visual works of art in their own right that were set into motion by human manipulation and live sound. That spirit of unmediated sound and movement lives on in Gestures, but the departure comes from it being less driven by text, and more focused on movement and meaning-making by what is conjured for each audience member through curation and context.
TMT: What questions are driving your Target Margin Artist Residency?
MM:Can object theater opera be a thing?
Can a string figure be made on a large scale using human bodies instead of fingers?
How many uses do Chinese takeout chopsticks have?
How long can a sound be looped before the body can’t keep up?
Can paper beat robot?
Megan Murtha is a theater maker (playwright, director, composer, curator, performer) whose work has been performed at Classic Stage Company, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, The Bushwick Starr, Uncanny Valley, BAX, and inside a 1999 Cadillac DeVille. Her most recent show, We’re Imploding: A Toy Theatre Double-Feature, performed at The Tank (Fall 2018), was a continuation of her collaboration with visual artist Mark Fox. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, a Vermont Studio Center Fellow, and has been a Visiting Artist at Bucknell University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland where she led object theatre workshops. She teaches writing at New York University.