Going Digital: Speaking to the Artists of Corkscrew 4.0
Max Berry
At the start of this year, the Corkscrew Theatre Festival was set to premiere it’s fourth summer season of five world premiere works and four readings. Then, of course, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced every theatre in the country to close, the company was forced to reevaluate their plans for this summer. While in late March, prospects of an August festival seemed hopeful, it quickly became clear that any in-person production was not possible. Though, this, of course, did not stop Corkscrew from creating. When asked what the conversation was in switching from in-person to online, Corkscrew Literary Director, Haleh Roshan said:
“Our primary mission is supporting our artists; once we decided not to present live in August 2020, it was an obvious choice to offer the exact same production slots to the same artists for 2021. Neither, though, did we feel good about simply waiting a year and doing nothing whatsoever this summer. Our literary director, Haleh Roshan, rather quickly conceived of corkscrew 4.0, based on her Extremely Online life and experience with new-media art.”
Though, they were not alone in putting this festival together Roshan also shared all of the incredible people and organizations that helped bring this new kind of festival to life:
“With enormous fundraising assistance from our executive director, Alexander Donnelly, and the budgeting and management skills of Artistic Director Thomas Kapusta, the festival was able to immediately offer financial support to the artists in addition to the originally provided commissioning payments, for them to conceive of and execute at a high level unique new internet experiences based on their beautiful plays. The festival was also able to hire independent new media production company Sheep Eats Wolf to help us actually create the creative assets and build the web infrastructure—and together we did the dang thing!”
Rather than simply perform these plays online, Corkscrew opted to create unique digital experiences. On the website, they’re described as “It’s more like if you had the PDFs of the plays saved on your computer and then your hard drive crashed and you took it to a sort-of shady data recovery place. And when you picked it up a week later everything was there again but scrambled. Distorted. Fragmented, but revealing in a new way.” This lets the audience experience the work at their own pace and hopefully gets them excited to see these plays next summer.
I had the opportunity to hear from some of the incredible creative teams that are participating in this year’s festival and hear a little bit about what their experiences have been with this new medium. Playwright Andrew Sianez-De La O from “The Ortiz Twins Are Coming Home”, playwright, Serena Berman and director Jake Beckhard from “Yankees” and director Katherine Wilkinson, of “Bloom Bloom Pow” all had amazing insights into what it means to be making art during this time.
1. What was the process of making these new virtual pieces like? Did you learn anything new about your play that will help you moving forward?
Andrew Sianez-De La O (The Ortiz Twins): We chose early on to lean into the whimsical nature of the play and go with an art/music digital piece. It was great to explore the world of this play in a way that wasn’t its scenic design or props. We got to dig into its real-world counterparts and animated inspirations and it forced me to talk about my play using artistic languages that I wasn’t familiar with.
Serena Berman (Yankees): It was a lot of fun! And so much more work than we thought! Our initial conversation went something like, “Let’s make something as simple as possible and film it on webcams.” And then that turned into four videos, a super ambitious website design, a bunch of complex editing...I think maybe we don’t actually know how to make things easy for ourselves???
Jake Beckhard (Yankees): Yeah no, this turned out to be an endeavor . Because once we got into it, we realized we weren’t just filming some appendix scenes to the play, we were creating a Web Art Experience and learning what that entailed on the fly. And yet, the scenes are still inherently theatrical. They have digital stages but the characters live as fully there as in the play.
Katherine Wilkinson: Making this digital work, I embraced that creativity is like water; it takes all different shapes. Working on Bloom Bloom Pow as an online adventure helped me embrace different parts of my artistic skillset and become curious about the work in new visual, interactive, and aural ways.
Bloom Bloom Pow is very much about climate change, unsustainable living, and the expansion of deadly forces in our water. And, Genevieve has crafted all of this using a queer lens.
Onstage, queerness emerges through actual bodies in relationship to one another. But in our digital work, we craft a journey where we FEEL the terror of a crumbling eco-system using queerness as a subversive storytelling mechanism. Queerness became not just a part of the plot, but a vital tool to articulate our point of view through the journey.
In our digital work, queerness manifests as a fracturing of reality; the audience can never exist in silence; they are always being looked at, yelled at, or moved from place to place. Our digital queer experience is as disrupted as the earth is at this moment.
2. What are you most excited about with this festival?
Andrew Sianez-De La O (The Ortiz Twins): These digital pieces are a testament to the ways in which we as creators, and audience members, can interact with this work in a digital landscape. Each play was approached in such an amazing and unique way that built upon its message.
Serena Burman (Yankees): I’ve been a huge Corkscrew fan since Day 1 (I got to act in Kaela Garvin’s incredible play High School Coven in the festival’s first year), so I was really excited for this weird ambitious play to start its life there--along with Jake and our amazing producers at Less Than Rent, basically my dream team. Corkscrew is impressively committed to a sky’s-the-limit sensibility, which is exactly how they and their tireless collaborators at Sheep_eats Wolf approached this summer’s project. Knowing what went into the process for Yankees , I honestly can’t wait to see what the other productions are cooking up.
Jake Beckhard(Yankees): Serena and I are artistic partners, and we’ve developed a bunch of her scripts together. But what’s special about Yankees and this piece in particular is that when you visit it, you can really live inside the manic world where our sensibilities meet. Because Corkscrew believed in the ambition of Yankees -- and introduced us to brilliant collaborators -- we got to expand its universe.
Katherine Wilkerson (Bloom Bloom Pow): I am thrilled that Corkscrew was unafraid to take on digital mediums right away. I'm thankful that they didn't go dark at this time. They are boldly saying to the world - PLAYS ARE VALUABLE EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT IN PERSON. I love that. And it gives me hope that we will continue to adapt and play until we can meet in person again.
3. Describe the rehearsal process for these digital pieces. Did you learn anything new about your play that will help you moving forward?
Andrew Sianez-De La O (The Ortiz Twins): As I was only working with a composer and a graphic artist, the majority of our rehearsals were emails and zoom meetings, but it was so amazing to work with creatives that were approaching this process with the same excitement and zeal as the first day in the rehearsal room. There was a real sense of energy that I had so strongly missed!
Serena Burman (Yankees): Our producers had the idea of trying to capture a certain authenticity with college age actors. Which we are...ahem...not anymore. So we did an open casting call and got to see some amazing new talent. Once we picked our crew of five, we met with each of them on zoom to read through the scripts and suss out everyone’s physical spaces. Shooting was a whole process of multiple devices, muting / unmuting, uploading to shared folders, yada yada yada. It was both completely tedious and really invigorating because we were essentially making it up as we went.
Jake Beckhard (Yankees): We jerry-rigged this insane multiple-device way to shoot scenes on Skype while directing from Zoom. The videos are found-files. We needed a very specific, authentic feel. We got it. And, I would not recommend it as a style of filmmaking. But also, the actors were so game. They owned their characters - their props, their costumes, even the quality of light in their quarantine spaces. No spoilers, but the end of Areon Mobasher’s video is going to be part of how I think of Clark forever.
Katherine Wilkerson (Bloom Bloom Pow): Our experience is a choose your own adventure game; therefore, our creation time included lots of LONG feedback emails to our designers and creators. Genevieve and I storyboarded the experience and spent much of the process honing how we can control time and space in a digital realm. It's HARD! There are so many external factors that we are not used to. Much of the process was coming up with wildly ambitious ideas and then regrouping and asking ourselves, without all the bells and whistles, what is the story we want to tell right now and WHY? And honestly, that is how most of my theatre productions flow as well. We start big and continue to focus focus focus throughout the process.
4. What would you say to someone skeptical of digital theatre? What aspects of it excite you?
Andrew Sianez-De La O (The Ortiz Twins): The real triumph of digital theatre and, ironically, what makes it so easy to dismiss, is how accessible it is. The majority of my family and loved ones will likely never see the work that I do, because of the near endless number of barriers that are placed between capital T theatre and the audience that my work specifically is written for. As long as I work in this field, I will always push for accessibility and digital theatre is doing that in a really exciting way right now.
Serena Burman (Yankees): I would say “Hey! I feel you! Me too!” ‘Digital theater’ is something of an oxymoron, and also a constant reminder that we’re currently living in a weird apocalypse-tinted sorta-life. But I do think there are opportunities for new types of expression here. I like digital art that uses virtual space to its advantage rather than trying to pretend it’s not there. The best show I’ve seen so far is Tim Crouch’s I, Cinna through the Unicorn Theater in London (Tim Crouch is probably my favorite working theatre artist, absolutely look him up if you don’t know him). It wasn’t written for Zoom, but they managed to make it feel like it was.
Jake Beckhard (Yankees) Also: I don’t know if this is “digital theatre”! Most of the scenes are one-shots, so they’re definitely in a theatrical language, but they’re not live , and isn’t that “anything could happen” feeling an essential part of theatre? I think maybe digital spaces are like, necessarily mixed-media. There’s no such thing as web art that is just one “medium” - look at the filetype anarchy of a group like Jodi that’s been making internet art since the nineties. Theatre before The Shutdown mostly didn’t explore what it could bring to the lunch bunch of online art. Now we’re stuck at home, so we gotta.
Katherine Wilkinson: I have a lot of mixed feelings about theatre artists engaging in digital work. There are already digital artists out there who have been working in these mediums for YEARS. And for us to show up and say, WE GOT THIS is a bit condescending. Also, a controversial opinion, I think Zoom is live television and not theatre. It’s a tricky space!
What I will say is that our digital experience is very much an experiment. We are trying to understand new aspects about the world of the play through an audience-driven experience. And in this time of unknown, engaging in creative investigations, no matter what the medium, is valuable.
So, we welcome your skepticism and hope you will take part, no matter what baggage you have about the internet and theatre and digital work. We have a ton of baggage too, and we'd love to chat about it with you on Zoom with a refreshing beverage!
As you can see, the lack of a stage has not stopped these artists from making some incredible art. The new restrictions and digital space has forced them to get even more creative with what they are saying. While not what they expected for the summer, it is clear that the art is still filled with passion and creativity. I will certainly be logging on. And I hope you will too.
To access these digital pieces you can go to: https://corkscrew4pt0.com