Last weekend, Sofia and I returned to the studio to explore source material for an upcoming new work with some old and new friends. Even though we’ve been creating new work for the past five years, every time I step into the studio to delve into a potential new piece, I have first day of school jitters. I have to remind myself to take a moment to breathe, focus only on the present moment, silence my inner saboteur, and dive in with an open heart. New work developed by an ensemble is scary—you never know what’s going to happen–and that’s why I ultimately love it.

While it might appear that Sofia and I have been hibernating since this past November, it has been anything but humdrum. After we wrapped up our workshop about femme pirates and our production of Le Cirque Féerique (The Fairy Circus) this past fall, we took a hot second to ask ourselves:

We’ve had countless brainstorming sessions over coffee-and-pizza slices (at our new favorite hang out, the Geek Love Cafe at Moon Palace Books), in addition to meeting with writers, writing grant applications, fabricating puppets, and oh so much more. We’ll be holding our open call general auditions over the next two weeks, before making our big 2019-2020 season announcement in mid-April. Until then, we will be bursting at the seams trying to hold in our excitement about all that’s in store for the future. Keep your eyes peeled...
 
xoxo,
David.

It follows a clever princess named Judith who must run away from her home to be with her lover but she and the beau are shipwrecked and separated. Judith vows to be reunited with her love but along the way, she meets men who keep trying to marry her. In each case, she agrees to the wedding but tricks her suitors at the last minute and kills them, captures their ladies in waiting, or steals their treasures. Eventually, she assembles a mighty crew of lady-pirates and by a strange miscommunication, ends up as the king of another land! Needless to say, I was head over heels for this fast paced adventure that lets a princess have all the fun and “close-calls” of the stories from my childhood that seemed to be reserved for courageous (male) royalty and benevolent (male) street urchins. It inspired me to stage a play that lets women and queer folks move through a traditionally masculine narrative without question, judgement, or being “saved” by another character.

This fall, we focused on generating content based on some of the following questions:

• What happens if the crew encounters sea monsters from our collective remembering of sea tales? What if they meet a cyclops, Poseidon, the shark from Jaws?
• Is our main character a princess? Does she need to chase after her prince?
• Can we have a love story between our supporting characters? (YES- WE CAN AND WE WILL!)
• What is funny about this narrative? When do we need to take this seriously?
• What benevolent sexism from our own lives has a home in this story?

I had the absolute privilege and delight of working with some of the most creative, sensitive, and silly performers in town: Addison Sharpe, Bethany McHugh, Jasmine Porter, Jex Arzayus, Mickaylee Shaughnessy, Morgen Chang, Nora Huxtable, Stephanie Johnson, Stephanie Ruas, Suzi Love, and Victoria Pyan.

Based on the content we generated, I will be creating a new draft of the script that we will workshop again in early 2019. We’ll be sure to keep you all posted on upcoming workshops and public readings over the next year!

      - Sofia

David's Little Red co-director Laura Lechner writes an update on the status of the short film:

It’s been almost exactly a year since we shot our short film, Little Red. Our cast and crew definitely lucked out, as Minnesota last October was an autumnal paradise (sorry about that early snowstorm, everybody!).

After spending all last winter in post-production, we realized our film out into the world this spring. So far, we’ve had the pleasure of screening Little Red at several festivals, including the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image, NewFilmmakers NY, and the Austin Spotlight Film Festival. And in November, we’ll have another screening in NYC, as we’re an official selection of the New York Short Film Festival.

It’s been a pleasure watching our film on the big screen. Even though I spent hundreds of hours as the editor of the film watching and re-watching (and re-watching and re-watching...) it, it was truly special to see and hear it larger than life, and with an appreciative audience. So far, Little Red has been very well-received. At both NewFilmmakers NY and the Artists Forum festivals, I was able to participate in a Q&A, and the audiences asked thought-provoking questions. One of the joys of art-making is to hear how others interact with your work, and in both my formal and informal discussions with audience members, I gained new insights through different viewer’s interpretations of the film.

At the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image, David and I were nominated for Best Director. I was proud to accept this recognition on behalf of the two of us, and am happy that our work was recognized out of 40 short films that screened at the festival.

I know both David and I are excited to continue to share Little Red. We’ll keep you posted about any and all opportunities to watch our film. We hope to have a screening in Minneapolis, sometime soon!

      - Laura

I can't believe that Le Cirque Féerique (The Fairy Circus) closed nearly two weeks ago. Thank you to our brilliant actors for working so hard at developing this brand new script, our designers for making them look fabulous, our stage management crew for keeping us on task, and to our audiences for supporting new work. I was so sad to say goodbye to this show (and the dream cast!!!) after spending over a year working on it, but I suspect that this isn't the last time that you'll see this show. I hope to revisit it someday, sometime soon. THANK YOU!!!

xoxo,
David.

WOW! I can’t believe that the first week of rehearsals has already come and gone - it has been a whirlwind. As I prepared for our first day together at the start of last week, I couldn’t help but feel first-day-of-school-like jitters. These characters and this story had been rolling around in my brain for well over a year, be it leading a research group, collaborating on a script with a playwright, facilitating script development workshops, or fabricating a plethora of puppets and masks. But no matter how long you research or rewrite, preparing for the first day of rehearsal for what will be a world premiere script is always a little extra nerve-wracking.

Leading up to our first day of rehearsals, I was plagued with insecurities. I knew that I (as the director/conceiver/co-creator) was still fascinated by our script and source material, but would actors (some of whom were brand-new to the project) feel the same way? Would the questions and themes that seemed so inspiring and resonant to my research group twelve months ago, still ring through as powerfully today? Luckily for me, my fears were instantly smashed after a few minutes on our first day together - our entire ensemble has been a dream to work with since day one, and I couldn’t feel more blessed to have this amazing collective of actors bring these characters to life for the very first time.

This world premiere production has been a glimmer in my eye ever since I first accidentally stumbled upon Madame Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and her real-life friends while researching for another project way back in March 2017. I instantly felt a kinship with these forgotten souls, and almost immediately felt compelled to bring their historically-erased lives and subversive tales to the stage -- it’s rare that I so hastily or impulsively commit to a theatrical project. I still remember reading about how Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy helped her friend murder her abusive husband (and get away with it!), or how Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force dressed up as a bear in a traveling circus to rescue her imprisoned fiancé who she had been forbidden to marry. I remember immediately thinking -- these are my people and I have to tell their story!!!
 
I think of the first day of rehearsal as a way of uploading everything that I have on to the ensemble’s mutual desktop. I always try to bring in every relevant scrap of research, every idea that the design team has arrived at thus far, every hunch, and every question. I always like to share -- What do I know about our play? What do I not know? What questions do I still have? What is still left for us as an ensemble to discover?

Over the last week, playwright Emily Dendinger has swooped in from New York City to “exfoliate” our script with us, cutting, revising, and rewriting our text based on the discoveries and choices that the ensemble has made around the table and on their feet. We’ve also started animating puppets in the rehearsal room, which has informed several script revisions and generated new moments onstage. We still have a few more weeks of rehearsal before our week of technical rehearsals begin, and the only thing that’s certain for the future is that this script and production will change and evolve and grow based on the collective discoveries of the ensemble.

I hope that you’ll join us this coming October at the Off-Leash Area’s Art Box - this is bound to be a special one, and I couldn’t be more excited. Onward!
 
Fondly,
David.
 
Tickets are on sale now: https://www.artful.ly/store/events/15437
 
Le Cirque Féerique (The Fairy Circus)
Directed and conceived by David Hanzal
Written by Emily Dendinger, created in collaboration with David Hanzal and the ensemble
October 5-14, 2018 at the Off-Leash Area Art Box
4200 East 54th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55417

We are thrilled to announce that Sofia Lindgren Galloway is officially stepping on board as our Associate Artistic Director! Sofia will assist David with the day-to-day administrative operations of Collective Unconscious, in addition to directing some of Collective Unconscious’ future projects. As before, Sofia will continue to be involved in the script development process for all of our projects.

Our group of core collaborators is also expanding, and we are pleased to welcome long-time colleagues Eva Adderley, Leif Jurgensen, and Justin Leaf into the fold. Onward!

(L-R) In Minneapolis, Alison Ruth, Sofia Lindgren Galloway, and Libby Porter meet with NYC playwright Emily Dendinger via Skype to discuss research for Le Cirque Féerique. (Photo by director David Hanzal)

In exercising dramaturgical skills in a more generative way, I have found myself using different creative muscles, considering design elements in a way that I never had before, and feeling that pieces of myself have landed in the characters. This exploration into a new area of dramaturgy started with the weekly research group that met in October and November to discuss the play’s historical context, read fairy tales, and consider visual research that would inspire the piece. I loved that even the research for this piece was collaborative. The social component yielded different results than what one brain would come up with, and the pool of minds allowed us to expand our research into deeper terrain. From these discussions came the first drafts of the script in December.

(L-R) Sofia Lindgren Galloway, Leif Jurgensen, Parker Sera, Katherine Kupiecki, Heather Stone, and Sarah Modena performed in a reading of Le Cirque Féerique in February 2018 at the Alliance Française in Minneapolis.

I learned a lot about the play at the first workshop in February. One of the most striking realizations was just how funny the characters were! Watching the actors zip through Emily’s witty dialogue illuminated aspects of the characters that I had not considered, and cleared up questions of pacing. Several months, drafts, and many conversations later, we entered a second workshop at the beginning of June. And in addition to the new questions, observations, and realizations of the actors, which is all fun and interesting, an even newer and more thrilling experience occurred: we devised with puppets.

(L-R) Leif Jurgensen and Alison Ruth devise a scene with puppets during the June 2018 workshop.

Hesitant to give too many things away, I will just say that devising with puppetry has again altered and expanded what I thought was possible for the play. Perhaps someone more imaginative than I could have dreamed where this play would go, but I suspect the process has surprised all of the collaborators on the Le Cirque team. I think we are all slightly amazed with what the work has turned into and how far we’ve come. I’m excited for what lies ahead during our rehearsal process this coming fall!

Editing is all about making decisions, and sometimes those decisions (or just the thought of making those decisions) can seem paralyzing. If I choose one thing (for instance, one particular take of a close-up within a scene), that takes me farther and farther down a certain path, and it becomes harder and harder to move forward with other potential scenarios. But on the other hand, you HAVE to make choices, or else you’re just sitting there with 20 hours of raw video footage. Whenever I am editing, I like to remind myself of this Anne Bogart quote: "Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. ... To place a chair at a partial angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.” In order to construct a film, you’re in fact eliminating all of the other movies that you can potentially make.  ​

​Collaborating with David on Little Red has been a great experience, and I know I speak for the two of us (and the cast and crew) when I say that we’re VERY excited to share our film with you this coming April!
​​
        ~ Laura Lechner, Co-Director & Editor