Posted by grillcover on Dec 12, 2022
The last couple months have been a torrent of trips, shows, deep organizing, and scrambling to catch what freelance work has actually come my way. I’m beginning to accept incomplete 2022 goals, ready to arise renewed with ambitious plans in the New Year.
But today is one of my favorite days of the year, and closes the season for Broken Box Mime Theater: our 11th Annual Black & White Ball! This yearly winter fundraiser is a chance for our broad artistic community to celebrate this unique work that has surprised and impacted so many. Adorned in black-and-white attire of any kind, friends, family, collaborators, and fans come together for drinks, dancing, and a special show.
I’m pretty far behind on my journal updates, and I still intend to catch up in coming months. But on the eve (and morn) of the B&W Ball, I wanted to reflect on what a busy year with BKBX it’s been, and invite readers to join us tonight in-person, online, or with a small contribution to keep the work alive. Get tickets here, with discount code: BKBXFAM.
BKBX 2022, Year In Review
Having returned to in-person gatherings in Fall 2021 with our company residency, we began 2022 sorting through inspiration and ideas for our first mainstage show of new work since winter 2019. Some of the mimes were split between the writing process and rehearsal for a trip to Denver to perform with the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, which I was glad to see streamed from afar. From what I hear, the experience of live accompaniment was truly special.
In February, the company took a retreat together to pitch and stew over the scores of stories we had for the show. After years off, having experienced so much, with three new company members, we were all brimming with ideas. We didn’t come close to resolving our creative differences, and we wouldn’t settle on the title until much, much later, but by the end of the weekend our shared creative vision was definitely beginning to take shape.
Above: I think I'm actually mid-pitch in the above photo from our show proposal retreat... Poster design by Adrian Ferbeyre. After a couple months of rehearsals, Take Shape ran 4/1/22 - 5/1/22 in Manhattan.
In an effort to put the worst of the COVID years behind us, we’d made a pledge to ourselves that we wouldn’t write directly about the pandemic. In the end, though, it became clear this show was in many indirect ways about the pandemic, and a reflection our shared traumas and desires to reconnect. And it was a thoroughly pandemic-era performance – with understudies stepping in, and for many in the audience their first time back to the theater. But it resonated deeply, and we were grateful for some of the best reviews we’ve had yet.
“It took me more than ten years to see a performance by Broken Box Mime Theater, and I'm ashamed of how I've squandered away over a decade of playgoing. If all their shows since the company's inception in 2011 have been as fun, inventive and, surprisingly, socially relevant as their current offering, Take Shape, I would have become a regular attendee years ago.” - Michael Dale, BroadwayWorld
The show ran for five weeks, our longest run to date. When it ended, I shifted gears right away to teaching weekly way out in Far Rockaway in a District 75 public school. D75 is a district of schools for students with a variety of special needs. Our class, “Physical Storytelling” was a mix of mime storytelling, social-emotional learning, and physical awareness with body language. The flexibility of mime was crucial for this curriculum, as our sites ranged from elementary to high school, each with three highly diverse classes of students with specific and often differentiated needs.
It was a little rocky being back in a school environment teaching mime and storytelling, but the wonderful students and clear impact of the work made it so rewarding. With early mornings and still coming out of my shell, I knew my limits and only taught at one school. But the company’s education work has expanded and deepened across the city to where we taught in 13 different schools last year, many of them extended multi-week curricula.
Above: We stopped at Baltimore’s Black Cherry Puppet Theater at the end of our summer tour, spent an hour restaging the show for their delightfully quirky space, and then played for a warm local crowd. One of those perfect little theater happenings.
After the school year was over, I was thrilled to join a small team of mimes on our debut trip to Washington D.C. and Baltimore. It was my first time back to D.C. since my harrowing day on the ground at the Capitol Riot, but this time I was with some of my closest friends working on something super fun. While we were there, we brought our kids show to the incredible outdoor amphitheater at Wolf Trap, and a pop-up of favorites to Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (CHAW). I saw some old friends, found some closure, and had a blast sharing our work with new cities.
Coming into the Fall, the next major projects were the remounting of BKBXKids! Asks Why for a tour to Seattle, and a pop-up of sci-fi and technology stories we called Frankenstein. But first we snuck away as a company for a week in September to the forest for our annual residency to reconnect and rejuvenate. We had the opportunity to revisit work not taken up for Take Shape, devise without a deadline, and overhaul Asks Why, some of our most challenging and pertinent work.
I hadn’t originally been a part of the Asks Why process, but came aboard after another company member had to step back. The project is an extension of our children’s work, and had grown out of conversations during the summer of 2020 about how to address tough questions for kids about racism. Inspired by a Sesame Street Town Hall, the team set about figuring how we could give our own mime answer to the 9-year-old who asked, “If Black people contributed so much to the development of this country and the world, why are Black people treated so badly?”
That summer I was participating in the parallel work of the uprising against police brutality and systemic racism, through abolitionist policy pressure and direct action. I’ve continued this work in various forms since, and was grateful to return to the artistic front. It was also a sign of my emotional recovery that I could engage in the vulnerable, earnest, wonderful space of children’s theater, and catch up with the deep research and incredible theatrical & pedagogical creativity of my peers.
Written and performed by company member Regan Sims, the mime ensemble brings to life her journey through her own questions about racism, and her experience in America as a Black woman. Originally conceived in the height of COVID and presented as a remote multimedia streaming experience, the new stage show retained some of those technical elements with projections and live video of the performers and interactive audience portions. After development in New York, we brought it to debut at the Seattle Children’s Theater for two weeks in October, playing in rep with our classic kids show, Destination: Everywhere!
This tour was incredible. Despite some technical difficulties at the theater, our tight-knit team powered through all obstacles to debut for beautiful, appreciative houses. Students, teachers, and families were moved at times to tears from the work. We were so grateful to receive this amazing write-up of the show, which really picked up on a lot of what we were trying to do. A special audience of visiting theater artists, producers, and teachers gave a standing ovation, and we’re working to figure out where else we can take the show. I’d never been to Seattle before, and though nearby wildfires gave the city the worst air quality in the world for some days, it was great to spend real time there with my friends and collaborators.
We had a couple of weeks before remounting Asks Why along with Frankenstein at the 14th Street Y, but between shows we had another run of education programming, this time with the “Big Feelings” class at the Heschel School in Manhattan. This is a social-emotional learning curriculum that BKBX has taught for years about embodied emotions, and techniques for processing feelings in a healthy way. I’d never had a chance to teach it before, so it was fun to drop in for a couple days as a co-teacher.
With Asks Why fully staged, our focus turned to remounting an ambitious line-up of pieces for Frankenstein. This included a newly structured and refined version of "Starship Excelsior," a sci-fi space opera I’d written for the 2015 show, Above/Below. The central storyline of a sentient robot and its conflicted creator became a suitable frame for the theme of the show, mixed with other pieces about technology and the monsters we create. A little light on the laughs, but it’s a rock solid setlist and audiences had a blast. The shows weren’t without hitches – more understudy shuffling really tested the resilience of the ensemble, but in the end the audiences were none the wiser for either show.
I've taken a little bit of a break to catch up with work and other responsibilities since November, so I haven't been as involved in the planning of the B&W Ball or the performance tonight. But I'll be donning some tails and dancing shoes and looking forward to celebrating!
And with that, I hope to see you tonight, Monday night, so we can close out the season together! I’ve given myself the goal of some office hours in the next couple of weeks to see if I can close the year strong, so with any luck (and some focus) you’ll be hearing from me more soon.
To the mimes!