Pictures of the 2007 show by Lava Alapai from the secret Many Hats vault are here.
Flash forward again: in 2007, directors Megan Kate Ward and Kristan Seemel generously asked PCS if we could perform Rest Room in their brand spanking new one at the Armory during a quieter summer month. For some reason, they said yes.
We decided the piece would need additional dancers to adequately fill the large women’s room under the main floor. Among the crop of eight movers that Lava recruited (and apparently I auditioned, though I don’t remember that) are several Portland luminaries, including one Beth Thompson, appearing in their second Portland show. This auspiciously marked the beginning of a long term collaboration that endures between us today, now as Artistic Director and Managing Director. Yo and Paige joined us again, hallelujah. Because I was trying to get better at communicating my vision to collaborators for work that didn’t start with a script, I made this zine to share with the cast - an image morgue with a poem that illuminates the journey of the main character.
L-R, Lava Alapai and Annalise Albright-Woods, photo by Yolanda Suarez
Annalise re-composed the audio track with the incorporation of two new interviews. One was with a co-worker, who generously sat down and shared a gutwrenching story of near suicide with me when we really didn’t know each other at all. The other was a rangier narrative I thought would help to give more of a through-line to the piece by parsing it out in segments over the course of the show. The idea was that having me-as-main character telling the audience a story would strengthen the piece as a play, instead of feeling like a lot of disconnected voices providing information as soundtrack to dance. So, I performed the story in voiceover by paraphrasing the original source recording, and it was woven into the larger score. This, IMO, didn’t really work at all; I don’t think the story or my performance were half as compelling as for, instance, the co-worker’s interview. Turns out the piece thrived on audio verité.
Working on my makeup instead of my choreo. :/ Photo by Yolanda Suarez
Working with the chorus in the PCS bathrooms was an unforgettable experience. The bathrooms were absolutely brand new, for one thing - like, I think we ripped plastic off of the stall doors. We tested and perfected various body lengths to bathroom architecture: can everyone grip the toilet paper dispenser and push the door forward extending both arms? Can you touch the hand of the person next to you over the stall wall? Once we got going, the tenor of this group devising was one of wild abandon. At one point we decided that everyone would belly crawl on the floor UNDER the stalls toward one end of the room as an “exit,” while at another point Jaime Flynn perched on TOP of the stall walls IN THE SPLITS. These were their ideas! Unfortunately in managing the choreography of an 11-person piece, I dropped the ball on truly perfecting my own movement score, and was never happy with my own character’s climax and ending. This is the piece where I’d learn the hard way that I would not be able to perform in my own work to a level that would satisfy me, and realized I’d need to direct from outside. *sigh.
Our ad in the Drammy program that year.
Lava upped her video game by positioning a camera to shoot directly into one of the stalls and projecting the feed on the outside of the stall door. This offered the audience a way to “see inside the stall” with seemingly X-Ray vision, which was a fantastic device for contrasting private/public, offstage/onstage behavior. The effect of the LED light on the reflective metallic surface was eerie, dislocating. Somewhere, there is a hilarious picture of a camera gaffe taped to the ceiling in order to achieve this.
We again performed multiple times, letting slightly bigger groups of 8-12 in at a time. Mead Hunter generously wrote about it on his blog, pictured below (you can read through the post by clicking on the page icons below the image).
One more story: I was never that great of an actor, a better performer I’d say. I was in the habit of not eating through tech, getting really run down, and finding an emotional breakthrough (mostly through exhaustion) in our final dress run that I could never get back in performance. One such experience happened with dear Rozlyn “Skeeter” Reynolds: my character busts out of a stall to find Rozlyn at the counter, dealing with one of those days-of-the-week pillboxes. We’d created a lazzi of opening and closing the little container lids, checking and re-checking with paranoid, compulsive repetition. The audio featured my mom during this moment (again), and I went to pieces - I want to say unexpectedly, except looking at the mounting evidence as I write this, I see I most certainly should have expected that. Let’s just say it wasn’t staged that way. From within the scene Rozlyn looked at me with such a startle, as though she was afraid she’d done something wrong, or that I was not okay and might run from the room. We played through and checked in later, and I had no better explanation for her. Her eyes unlocked something in me that opened the goddamn flood gates.
A promotional image