September 2011
3 posts
Anatomy of a groan (symphony)
The tribe becoming an ensemble →
WBEZ interviews Beau about the ties that bind Curious and the tribal connections behind Jenny’s Still in Play, this week on the MCA Stage.
January 2011
1 post
October 2010
4 posts
Being available...
Yesterday, as I was sitting in Office Hours, an older man was walking by. He was going slow, laboring to move across the long lobby towards the door. He was old, like golfer old; a cap, a cardigan, comfy shoes, no cane, but he looked like he could have used one. Somewhat bent over, and with a determined trajectory towards the door. I was working on the physicality of availability, not being...
Office Hours starts up...
Tomorrow I begin the great experiment, Office Hours, again, at MCA, as part of the developmental residency. In some ways I don’t even really understand what I am doing, but something about the idea of sitting down for an hour and being available for direct conversation with someone appeals to me. Last year at this time, and for some years before that, I would have had no interest...
Curious Goings On, Upcomings, Findings Out
Now that we’ve closed Jet Black Chevrolet and The Flowers Are Dead, what’s next? Scott’s play, McMeekin Finds Out, receives a handsome production by the Route 66 Theatre Company; Rieger puts the finishing touches on his short film, Just the Burrito, in time for a winter premiere; Moniz begins rehearsing her adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s Mexico, featuring Bivens and Test;...
September 2010
4 posts
New Beau play for Win's company
World premiere at the Chicago Cultural Center. Starts next week. Please join us.
Privacy →
magnusjenny:
We are coming up on the 2nd in-house visitation of our MCA residency, and it is a workshop with the renowned Butoh artist Diego Pinon Sepp. I have not yet met the man, I have been corresponding with his stateside facilitator Nicole LeGette, and today, she told me that some of my plans…
Teaching Artists
As the residency with MCA continues, and more things become clarified, I am really excited to add one more facet of the complex gem that is my artistic practice, and that is being a teaching artist. Though I might cynically say that if I were stinkin rich I would stop teaching because I only do it for money, it is, in fact, a big part of my life, and my art making mind. It does sap me, I won’t...
Indirection and the Event
I don’t read plays. I don’t like reading plays, and on the rare occasion that the text of a play is in front of me and I find myself reading those words on the page, that dialogue and those insufferably necessary stage directions, it doesn’t matter what the play is, I tend to become a little bored, my mind wanders and I get maybe ten pages in before deciding to abandon the whole...
August 2010
16 posts
Audiences and the Not-I
Had a disturbing experience last night. In an audience watching a show of little children, not a great show, but one they wrote and were tremendously invested in, and half the audience was there for the next show, in fact, to be in the next show, all african americans who wrote their show as well, but teenagers. Sitting in the back, lots of talking and rustling papers, and I lost my mind a...
Post Mortem
I have been too tired to really understand what just happened.
I know it was good most of the time, a few moments of feeling bad, or not even actually bad, more like not as good. I had one or two little twinges of worthlessness, despair, and self-hate, but not nearly what might once have been. Only one tiny irk with Stefan, which I addressed immediately and we moved on, and much laughter and...
Getting Ready for Our Close-Up
Glimpses from the MCA workshop (Saturday): “Prepare to….”
Frickin Tired
Had a low moment yesterday when people from the museum came in to watch and what we were doing at that particular moment was pretty lame, and I unfortunately left with that feeling. The whole thing is going swimmingly, people are really getting into the whole theateretical aspect of the work, thinking along conceptual lines and trying to observe how each experiment answers or doesnt answer some...
Theatre as an esoteric practice...?
I had fun! Yay for me! I am usually so in my head and worried and harried that it is hard for me to let down the proverbial hair, but now I know, get a bunch of old friends in the room and it just feels good…So wonderful to see everyone and to work on something in a loose and energized way. I think back to days of old when my attempts, (as I saw them), to work on my theateretical ideas...
Collaboration
I have a really hard time collaborating. Funny, cause I have kinda built my whole ethos around collaboration as a radical act of political will…but really, in my heart, I am a control freak who doesnt trust anyone else to do it right, and I am pained by other people and their needs. I get into a martyr-y state about how no one else thinks of all the details, and if you dont want me to act...
Interns
Just met with Marianka, our intern from MCA for the duration. We actually have 3 interns for this process, count em, 3! We have Marianka, italian gal drummer ( gonna have to do some gal drumming with Nia for sure); Briana, Curious’ intern who we met when Beau and I taught a playwriting class at U of C; and Anthony, Peformance Dept Intern at MCA who was one of my Office Hours conversation...
Beginnings are Important
Well, the first day was so great! Lots of loading in and sitting around, but doing it with Xia, and getting his 24 year old perspective on things was really wonderful. We spent some time setting up different tables for office Hours, landed on a big wooden one, it felt like people could sit around that table and talk more easily. Everybody dropped in and said hello, and the Office Hours project...
Starting Somewhere
I always think of the advice that came to me from I don’t remember where: when you are in a hurry, slow down. Be methodical, and make fewer mistakes because you arent frantic. So today, the day the residency officially begins, I got up early, in order to have time to really think about what to bring to the museum, and how to orient myself towards this fairly significant event. Xia is...
Moving Fast and Moving Slow
Speaking to Yolanda Cursach at the MCA yesterday about upcoming plans and how to frame the time they have given us, meaning what language to use to describe it, how we should be named in the context of their institution, etc…one thing she said to me was about how the museum moves slow and doesnt feel comfortable with moving fast. This was such an interesting clarity for me, because I know...
How to Speak About Plans
Talking to participants on a cell phone is tricky; especially my TMobile nightmare that drops out and I cant tell if they are still there or if the call failed. I am feeling a little manic as I speak to people, basing what I say on who I am talking to. The so-called ‘production staff” gets a bit of a different rap than straight up participants, because I am wholly committed to the...
Conversations and Privacy
We have an agreement in my house right now: mornings, I am in my room working and speaking on the phone, and I am left alone to do that. otherwise the demanding eyes that stare at me while I am trying to think make me uneasy. “shoo!” I say. “Go make yourself something to eat…” Thank the gods Bryn and Amy showed up and took Lena to the mall. think about that...
Terror and Horror
Lena told me a while ago that horror is when its happening to other people and terror is when its happening to you. This makes so much sense. I am feeling a terror of the horror as the workshop approaches. Here is what I dont want to happen: I dont want to be a running around maniac, yelling myself hoarse, trying to make people understand my vision. That would be no fun. At all…Yet...
How To Prepare Something You Don't Know What It...
This is the countdown to the big first workshop at MCA. Some things are already not what I wanted, meaning particularly Stefan is in Berlin and not here with me to prep. That is a major bummer, but we are going to try for some modren technology by skyping a convo about what our plan should be…Other things that are coming into focus: the who, for sure, though its all so complex with who can...
July 2010
1 post
He can't go on, he'll go on
This has been quite the summer for Beau. Not only was he the principal architect and producer of the Critic’s Choiced Three Story Animal, for which he scripted three pieces, acted in no less than four, and directed nearly as many. He also provided the producing and directing chops for the exemplary (and Reader-recommended) staging of 4:48 Psychosis, Sarah Kane’s final play—which closes...
June 2010
4 posts
Conferences
About to go to the TCG Conference for the first time, when things are in Chicago, one really has to make the effort. However, someone forgot to tell TCG that these few days are when CPS is off school, so theater professionals who have grade school aged children cannot both attend the conference together unless they have daytime babysitting in place…In our household, we are splitting the...
Not Just a Critic's Choice— Let It be Your Choice,...
Three Story Animal is Critic’s Choice in the Chicago Reader this week. Here’s what the Reader’s Tony Adler has to say about it:
There’s an elaborate calculus behind this five-week performance series. Curious Theatre Branch has combined a bunch of variables—texts, authors, actors, time slots—according to a system that ought to yield an interesting array of...
Theater in Three Dimensions: Newcity Interviews...
Hey!
Monica Westin of Newcity profiles Beau O’Reilly, Chris Sullivan and the Three Story Animal this week. You can read the full article here.
One of the Stories Animal
If tonight’s rehearsal was any indication, this series - I’m calling it a “series” - that Beau is curating/performing/directing/writing might be wonderful. I watched a rehearsal of a new(?) Beau piece called “The House in the Trees by Lake,” essentially a first-person short story dramatized and acted by three amazing people - Adam Rosenberg, Judith Harding, and...
Galvani at the Fringe
It was a “glittering historical riff” according to Time Out and an “artfully eccentric, psychologically probing, intriguingly veiled character sketch” according to the Chicago Reader. And now congrats to Shawn Reddy, whose Magpies show The Great Galvani will be performed at the New York International Fringe Festival in August! Maybe you remember Galvani when it debuted in...
May 2010
11 posts
On Vulnerability
Attention all conference aficionados! Next Thursday, June 3rd, Jenny will be appearing in Exposure—”a conference exploring vulnerability.” It all starts at 7:30 on the dot and takes place at Outerspace, 1474 N. Milwaukee. Reservations are recommended, and you can do that here.
This is co-curated by our good friend Clover Morell, and here’s what she had to say about it...
WatchUnderneather hotel version, bad resolution..
WatchCrooked Mouth Madison Mother Fools May 8 2010 “Assume the Worst”
Facebook
If nothing else, Facebook is super great for the happy birthday wishes….
Seen: Magnus-Schoen at 6x6
1 tag
Seen: ElvisBride 'Focusing'
Two views. Count’em. Two.
The Ways to Get in Touch
Having a bit of frustration getting in touch with someone from whom I want something, I am thinking about all the ways I have to professionally get in touch…phone, facebook, email, buzz, fax. I then remembered the very first phone machine Beau and I got, back in the day. We were living on Erie St. with Rachel X. and 12 year old Colm would come to stay on occasion, and we were doing the...
Considering the Thanks
Having participated in many many events over the years, both from the position of the artist and the producer, I am thinking a lot about the acknowledgement of work, both towards the person making it, and towards the persons making it possible. Recently, I made a big push, one that I had made before but not on the scale this was with these people, and I produced work of other people, with them,...
2 tags
Seen: 6x6
Not only is Banners & Cranks the first cantastoria exhibition in North America—this weekend marks the first time in maybe the history of the world that a group of performers attempts to improvise off of painted scrolls that they’ve never ever seen before. What will they come up with? Songs, stories, foley sound effects, dance—each night of the weekend six scrolls are interpreted by two ...
April 2010
16 posts
1 tag
ElvisBride does Double Door + Morseland
Because we love good music, weird music, brilliant music, and especially good weird brilliant music, we’re compelled to mention that our friends in ElvisBride (the band!) have a couple of shows coming up this week…
On April 28th (that’s tomorrow) they lend some opening tunes and incidentals to the 2nd Story at Morseland. On May 3rd (that’s Monday) they share a bill with...
The Team
Working hard at theater means being away from home at night. For most people, this is not a big deal, just do the cleaning and laundry during the day or sleep late in the morning or on the weekends, go shopping some other day…But for people with children, being away at the theater at night is really a constant struggle to figure out whether they are being irresponsible towards one world...
McGough Returns. And Returns.
Some late-breaking news: This weekend only, Matt Test’s The Partially Triumphant Return of Bad McGough, Exiled Leader of This Land is receiving an encore performance as part of The Mill’s Etcetera IX. You may know this piece as the third part of I Am in a Small Space for a Reason I Don’t Understand, which premiered at the 21st Annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival in January. If you...
The Burn
Nothing quite like the staggering burn of trying to get a show open, the momentum of the last week, maybe that’s the whole gist of it, running like mad until you are kind of loping along, the stitch in the side, but knowing that there is no stopping, (though a few times in all my years, there was a stopping, when the realization that it wasn’t going to happen like you thought and...
The Black Curtain
While Stefan and I were hanging the black curtain today for the InterArts Thesis show, he up on a too short ladder, rickety-ing the zip ties to the ever more drastically disintegrating I-guess-you-would-call-it-faded-mauve colored curtain that has been up there since 1959 at least, and I, footing the ladder and handing the grommet holes in the curtain up to him, along with the zip ties, all the...
That Master, the moment...
Tonight, while speaking with an impending thesis student, who was on the freak about all the things she couldn’t really control, I said things to her that I then thought about afterwards as philosophical questions about live performance…for instance, she is worried that everything will never be perfect in performance because she has to rehearse in pieces…I said that she should...