[opening music]
[music]
[Julian Ritchert] My name is Julian Ritchert. I am part of an
Australian theatre group called
One Step At A Time Like This,
and we're here in Chicago
making our new work, Since I Suppose.
Since I Suppose is a walking-based work
where participants travel through the
city encountering the real-life
counterparts of the scenes that are in
the Shakespeare play.
That Shakespeare plays is Measure for Measure.
It's taking Shakespeare's Measure for Measure
as a sort of basis and laying it
out onto the streets in an experiential
sort of way.
[music]
What it is is an experience for the
participant because we feel that it's
full of meaning but exactly what that
meaning is is somewhat open to the
audience to discover for themselves.
[Suzanne Kursten] Measure for Measure is a city-based play
and our work has been very city-based:
facilitating experiences of cities, so it
was a really good match. It was going
to stretch our practice to the next stage
because we would have to deal with
institutions in the city:
religion, sex, law.
We're just inviting our audience into those
environments so that they can witness
those real worlds in relation to the
fictional world we're feeding them.
[Clair Korobacz] As a starting point, we have the audience
experience as a focus, and then we have a
pallet of things that we can use.
With this work, we're using film as one of the tools, we're
using the city as a set, if you'd like,
we're using live interactions, and we're
using audio as well. So, I would say the
work is a lot of things or it's
drawing on a lot of tools to create a
kind of experience for the audience.
[Paul Moir] Well, I describe what we do as...
I describe it as immersive theatre
The audience is in the center,
the show happens upon them,
they experience it firsthand.
When the audience arrives,
the device is already installed
for them on the app that we had made from Motorola.
On the device,
there's a player with could be 17 tracks,
and they get shown how to use that
device. And then, they get sent on their
way and told to play track one.
They could be following somebody on the
screen or they could be listening to some audio.
And then, when they get to the end of track one,
they'll be in a different situation, different place,
and then they'll be told various ways to play
track two.
Along the way, they'll
be watching film, they'll be listening to
audio, or they'll be doing both,
or they'll just be sitting in a
real-life situation contemplating
or taking in what's around them.
[Ritchert] We're trying to create an open field
around the things or the environment of
Measure for Measure in which the
participant is encouraged to follow
their own train of thought
much more so than ours.
In the play,
there is a relationship between power
and authority and sexuality, for those
who may not be familiar with it.
It's a play in which a newly appointed head of
the city is suddenly taken by a novice
nun, who comes to him to plead for her
brother's life. And suddenly, all that he
thought he was gets tipped on its head.
So, those things are clearly in the play
and clearly continued from Shakespeare's
time, probably before Shakespeare's time,
certainly now, they continue to have some
resonance.
[Korobacz] It's been wonderful being
able to generate this work in Chicago
because of the height and also the
monumental scale of these institutions
here. Probably not the sex industry, but
the other two.
[Kursten] It's easy for a body to be immersed in
the cityscape.
We were interested in the
kind of performance aspects that happen
inside of churches, in law courts,
in brothels, and to be able to play with
our audience being able to experience
those performances which we're not,
strictly speaking, generating.
[Korobacz] Already, the
architecture is just performing and
we're in a way just trying to focus the
audience's eye on to that performativeness.
We don't want to add, we're not adding
anything extra to the city. It's like
we're letting the city be.
[Brett Elliott] Chicago Shakespeare Theatre has been
developing Since I Suppose with One Step
At A Time Like This for just about two
years. I started with the project just
after their first visit, which was two
years ago this coming fall.
They came and did a workshop of what they were
thinking about this piece being, and then
over the course of two more development
workshops and now them being here for
the show, we're at a point which are
actually going to see it in full production.
[Ritchert] This door lines up, see that pole behind you?
That's very nice if you're just...
Then, you're going to be not quite center.
I think they're going to be there by the
time they come out.
You look fine!
Yeah, it needs...that's lower than that.
[Korobacz] We have tested this a number of times
here in Chicago. We've been lucky enough
to have a series of developments here in
the city and to trial it on trial audience members.
We've been given the luxury of
time which has been really amazing, and
for this work it really needs it.
[Heather Schmucker] The thing that's so unique about this
work is because the artists are
responding to site.
It is essential that
they be here on the ground. So, a lot of
our work has had to focus on having them
here in Chicago, being at the venues, and
doing the work on the ground because
it's impossible to develop this
kind of work from afar.
[Criss Henderson] Through the World Stage now,
we've had really the most
astonishing list of the world's great
theaters and theatre-makers play here on
our stage and here in Chicago.
We're always looking as we curate the
program for works that may stretch
the imagination, and I think this work
with One Step At A Time Like this is
really a great example of that.
While One Step was here with us back in 2011,
we spent a lot of time talking about
what they were looking to do, and as a theatre,
we felt a kinship.
There was really a resonance in terms of the
the newness of their form in terms of
the application of the technology and
the theater-making out on the street
and we casually spoke about what
would happen if we took that artistic
impulse of theirs and joined it in some
way with Shakespeare's artistic impulse.
[Ritchert] We started by going to the locations and
then looking at the Shakespeare text and
experiencing what worked and what didn't.
In this work, it's very difficult to sit
at home or in an office and work out how
it should be.
We often need to actually be there and say,
"Oh no, that's too long," or, "No, that isn't
quite fitting there," "Oh, this is great,
so let's take this from that section of
the play and move it here. And then, it'll
make sort of a sense in connection with
place." It's always in connection with
place and where the participant is
situated in that place.
[Kursten] We're definitely toying with the digital.
We like playing with machines
and we've been doing that for years.
But, we tend to work with
domestic technology because it's very
reliable, and we're very aware how by
wanting to work with machines or digital
technology, it can upset the audience's
experience rather than to enable it.
We don't want to spend too much time on
complex digital problems.
I think there's a spectrum of response to narrative and
people don't need as much narrative as
they used to, but we all know that now.
I suppose we've had
to shape it so that the people who need
more narrative components get them and
the people who like more liminal stuff
or they're really into the series of
experiences that we facilitate, they get
that and don't have to think about narrative.
That's what we find we need to do
with this piece,
especially as Measure for Measure is a little-known
Shakespeare play. It's not like
Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet, where you can assume
that people haven't got enough narrative handles.
[Ritchert] Yes, it's like we want to sort of see
there's a clear picture of that, read
"measure for measure," and then down.
See? We don't quite see
"measure for measure" because one of the...
[dialogue]
Yeah, yeah, the sweeping was beautiful.
[Cameraman] Slow is okay.
[Ritchert] Good, because one of the ideas
is that this is like the credits of the
show, and when you come by and you sort
of roll the credits a little.
[Korobacz] With the audio components in this work,
we're trying to create a kind of
ambience or an internal kind of
soundscape, if you'd like.
When the audience is listening to
some of the Shakespearean monologues in
work, it's like they're listening inside
the head of the characters.
It's very intimate rather than performative.
[dialogue]
[Moir] The challenges of the whole show are that
it's a highly timed show, so people
following the films, they need to be
within five meters radius or ten meter
radius or yard radius of where the
character is in the field, so they might
get lost!
So, how fast do you need to walk for the
average audience to be right on time
with you?
I think we've got that
finely tuned at the moment, so one thing that can go
wrong is the audience and where you want
them to be.
[Elliott] Since I Suppose has
challenged me creatively because it's
taken everything that I know about
making theatre and producing theater and
said, "forget it," because it's completely
different from anything I've ever worked on.
And I think to some degree, that's true
of most of the organization here at
Chicago Shakespeare. We get very used to
working with inside of the theater walls
and controlling everything and we have
so little control on this piece and
thinking about how we communicate or how
departments work together on this is
just so very different because it's
A) Still in development and B) It's just
something that's never been done.
[Korobacz] It's not just on a stage
where we can kind of go,
"Yeah, just move a little more to the left
and we'll add a bit of this color to
your costume!" We can't do that, and so
one of the challenges for us is that we
have to continually
trial the work on trial audience members
and also on each other.
And at a certain point,
we have trialed it so many times on
each other that we become a bit immune
[laughter]
to what it actually is.
So, it means that we're just continually
having to bring the audience in
and test and test and
test until we feel like with we've
landed where we want to land.
[dialogue]
[Henderson] The greatest challenge has been keeping
everybody focused on the storytelling.
Not that this is a literal telling in any way of Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure, but at the heart
of it, what we want to to make sure is that
the center of the piece in addition to a
a wild one-of-a-kind experience,
we want to make sure that there is that
that core: that essence of
Shakespeare's characters of Isabella and
Angelo and the Duke embedded in
the city of Chicago,
even though they won't be like any Angelo or Isabella
or Duke that anyone has ever seen on a
stage.
[Schmucker] I think for me, the thing that I have
been most excited about is the new
relationship and I feel like I've
developed with the city since working on
Since I Suppose and with One Step.
I feel like I have been given access to
a city I've lived in for almost 20 years
in an entirely new way.
I've seen areas of the city that are new to me,
I've engaged with it in exciting ways,
and in some ways, I've looked at the city
and really looked at it and really
engaged with it for the first time.
That has been truly exciting.
[Henderson] There is no
elevator speech for this kind of
work. In fact, we don't want there to
be. We want there to be
a shared sense of adventure, a shared
sense of risk, and a shared sense of
engaging in something new.
A new form, a new experience,
and along the way, hear a
telling of Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old
Measure for Measure
that you will never experience
the likes of again.
[Ritchert] Our work is often
based on theatrical challenges.
Our route was, "Can we create a performance
without performers?"
And eventually,
the answer to that was "yes."
This is, "Can this experiential theater approach hold...
language
and character and even some notions
of plot?" That is still to be
decided, but it will be decided quite soon:
when we open.
[closing music]