By Laura Latzko
Many companies are producing interdisciplinary works blending theater, dance and film. With her newest interdisciplinary piece Compass, Rachel Dickstein of Ripe Time delves into power structures in America and the ways in which women and nonbinary and transgender individuals fit within these systems.
She will premiere Compass at ASU Gammage on Saturday, April 22. It is presented as part of the Beyond series.
Rachel Dickstein is a director, choreographer and devisor of theatrical, operatic and dance performances. She started the Brooklyn-based company Ripe Time in 2000.
Through the company, she often tells female-focused stories through works of literature she has adapted using movement-based storytelling techniques.
Her newest piece Compass is broken down into seven sections, which represent the stages that a community activists and advocates often go through in their careers.
“It begins with the question of how can I take action, if someone is young and not necessarily experienced in activism? Then, it goes through different sections of risk, anger, action, impact, and eventually we get to our final section, which is rebuilding for the next world. It’s coming up with new proposals after experimenting with what one’s voice could be as a changemaker,” Dickstein says.
For the piece, Dickstein worked with five performers, who act and dance in the show.
The company started working on the piece in 2019. Dickstein says she usually takes about three years to develop each new piece.
They did one workshop production of the show in January at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Queens, New York.
The piece has evolved over the last few years. At first, it was more focused on women in elected offices but later became broader in scope.
“It became really clear that there are leaders in many other scenarios than elected office and that it would be better to talk about leaders in a school setting, leaders in a community activism setting, so that it wasn’t purely about voters and the American political system,” Dickstein says.
The show started with a focus more on cisgender women but soon started to encompass people from different marginalized gender identities, including transgender and nonbinary individuals.
“What we have observed in our interviews and in the time that we have been developing the piece is that there are trans and non-binary folks in leadership positions that are offering alternatives to that male patriarchal system, as there are also women,” Dickstein says.
The production also touches on leadership structures in Native American communities.
“There was a sense that there are seven generations behind you and seven generations ahead of you. You are in that continuum. That guided our seven-part structure for the piece. Women and non-binary folks in leadership positions is not a new idea. In fact, this country was guided by matriarchal structures before it became more patriarchal. So, we want to identify those roots instead of seeming like we have reinvented something,” Dickstein says.
The actors have played an active role as co-collaborators in the piece, helping to shape what it has become. This is a process called devising.
“Devising is the process of making theater where the actors in room build the piece with you. The writing of the text and the staging was created in collaboration with the ensemble. So, the time it takes is because the writing happens in the rehearsal studio,” Dickstein says.
Dickstein says the piece is similar in many ways to other Ripe Time productions, but the source text is interviews with different types of leaders.
“It’s very visually-based. It’s very dynamic, in terms of the choreography, but there’s also a commitment to rich language and the various characters who we have interviewed or researched, who are leaders in their own ways,” Dickstein says.
To prepare for the show, Dickson and her team interviewed people from different regions in the country. One of the subjects was from Tempe.
She and her team tried to talk to people of different races, ethnicities and age groups.
Interviewees shared stories about how they have impacted their communities, when they have witnessed and been inspired by other leaders and what issues are important to them.
Dickstein says each interview gave her a window into a different life experience, often different from her own.
“I’m a New-York-City born-and-bred person. When I interview someone from Montana, they had a very different life growing up in a rural environment. Yet, there’s also a lot shared. I certainly felt very lucky to be privy to the stories and hope the audience will feel the same,” Dickstein says.
There were some prominent women that the team wanted to include but couldn’t interview because they are deceased, including Shirley Chisholm and Wilma Mankiller. They used research material, text from speeches and other sources to shape their monologues.
The actors tell the different stories through a combination of text and dance.
“When you are balancing text and movement, sometimes you do things physically instead of saying them with words. The editing process is about balancing the different modes of storytelling,” Dickstein says.
Event Details:
Compass at ASU Gammage
When: 7 p.m. Saturday, April 22.
Where: ASU Gammage, 1200 S. Forest Ave., Tempe.
Admission: $20 general admission.
Further Details: 480-965-3434. asugammage.com.
