Photo credit: Shokai Sinclair

View the complete video for Willy/Nicky here.

Read our Westword preview and OnStage Colorado review!

As the director, facilitator, producer, and conceptual artist for Willy/Nicky, I was excited to bring a new piece to life that explored themes of imperialism for a Colorado audience. Colorado has a fairly small devised theatre scene, and not many theatre artists here are familiar with devising methodology and pedagogy. In terms of both form and content, I wanted to bring to life a show that would challenge audiences to grapple with complicated topics through motif, metaphor, clowning, and historical verbatim text. 

I assembled an ensemble of six performers and one technician/stage manager. We began as a team by exploring our seed (themes), question (what we were grappling with relating to theme), anchor (tangible tools such as historical text, memes, specific props, etc) and structure (what form would we explore the themes within). We agreed we wanted to explore imperialism, and asked, “What are they distracting us from?” 

Our anchors were centered on the telegrams between Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas, also known as the Willy/Nicky letters. As the process developed, we also brought in letters from Rasputin, Czarina Alexandra, and the motifs of gloves (representing status) and potatoes (representing the working class).

During the first five weeks of rehearsal, as the director and facilitator, I cultivated a room that was playful and focused. Our first week was focused on building shared vocabulary, especially since most of the ensemble had never devised new work in this way before. Weeks 2-3, I brought composition prompts to generate scenes and moments. By Week 4, I facilitated our editing process as we carved the arc of our story from what had emerged in our compositions, assembled our script to document the material, and forged ahead into specifying, honing, and detailing into tech week.

As a director, the ship became exciting to steer during tech week, finding meaning in the architecture of our performance venue as we re-spaced and refined our show. Motifs and metaphors are powerful storytelling devices for me, and honing the arc of our potatoes, the gloves, the stumps that created our set, our characters, and the alley-seating audience banks was incredibly satisfying for me. I am so proud of our ensemble for creating this show and bringing it to full fruition in only a 6-week time crunch, and sharing the magic of devised theatre with the Colorado community.