“All Artwork Is a Magical Act”: An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein / Jennifer Johnson Photo by David Weiland “All Artwork Is a Magical Act” performance with live music and large-scale mythic An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein, storytelling replete with masks and pageantry, stilt by Jennifer Johnson walking and street theater, poetry and acrobatics. In the refurbished barn that serves as the ensemble’s Founded in 1982, Double Edge Theatre is a indoor theater, actors fly from the rafters, collaborative, residential theater company located suspending themselves precariously from ribbons or since 1994 on a former dairy farm in Western bars; at various sites around the farm, actors fly Massachusetts (on the ancestral lands of Mohican, through trees or suspend themselves high above the Nipmuc, and Pocumtuc people). Approaching the spectators. The effects are riveting: this is not farm from the village of Ashfield, where the carnival; it is magic. company and its directors live and work, one first encounters a striking feature of the theater’s training An autonomous, wholly artist-run organization, facility: a series of suspended cords, trapezes, and Double Edge was founded in Boston as a feminist nets towering above a grassy field, which serves as ensemble and a laboratory for experimental creative an apparatus with which actors—and the many process, a mission that has evolved into a year- students who visit the farm for training—can round ecosystem of collective living, farming and practice “flying.” Each year Double Edge Theatre environmental education, rigorous theatrical hosts both indoor and outdoor performances at the training, and collaborative artistic and musical farm, in addition to tours and performances, that creation. The group’s founder, Artistic Director integrate landscape and spectacle, intimate Stacy Klein, began training in Poland in 1976 with actor Rena Mirecka, founding actor of Jerzy Amanda Miller as the Pajaro (the parrot who figures Grotowsky’s Laboratory Theatre, while completing in Carrington’s 1977 novel The Stone Door), Travis a BFA in directing; she would later complete a PhD Coe as a flying Hyena (from her 1939 short story in Theater while creating the first two women’s “The Debutante”), Matthew Glassman and Adam theater festivals in the world in 1979 and 1980, in Bright as part of her oft depicted kabbalistic trio and collaboration with Susie Chancey. The name Hannah Jarrell as the Giantess (from her 1947 Double Edge extends, Klein has explained, from the painting), among others. Double Edge followed La ensemble’s first production, RITES, a Maga y el Maestro with a site-specific outdoor modernization of the Bacchae of Euripides set in a spectacle, Leonora’s World, performed at various woman’s bathroom in London; the double-edged sites around the farm; Leonora’s World premiered axe used in Bacchic sacrifices—the labrys—had in Fall 2018 and will be reprised as the company’s likewise been taken up by the feminist theologian fall spectacle this October 10-13. Mary Daly as part of the iconography of her work, and stands here for an instrument for What follows below is an interview conducted by combatting “isolation and erasure,” Jennifer Johnson, who co-created La Maga y el part of the ensemble’s core mission of art and Maestro and Leonora’s World and plays Leonora in social justice. both performances, with Stacy Klein (with whom Johnson co-created the performances) and the art One of the operating principles of Double Edge historian Susan Aberth, an expert in the work of Theatre—and a remarkably present aspect of any Leonora Carrington who serves as an artistic visit to the farm—is its fusion of vividly consultant for the project. In this conversation, experimental theater with a resounding commitment which has been adapted from the original to living culture, which (as the Theater’s mission transcription, the participants discuss Double statement describes), refers to (cultural / economic / Edge’s interest in Carrington and address the roles organizational / personal / political) work “created of magic in the living arts of the present. In and sustained within an open, honest, meaningful, particular, they address the exigency of relevant shared experience.” Carrington’s ecofeminist ideas about ritual, visionary experience, and non-normative forms of Over the past two years, Double Edge Ensemble, knowledge and thought in the face of contemporary led by Klein, along with Co-Artistic Directors and misogyny and the normalization of extremism and lead actors Jennifer Johnson, Carlos Uriona, and white supremacy. What does it mean, they ask, to Matthew Glassman, as well as Producing Director approach the life and work of Leonora Carrington Adam Bright, has developed a cycle of as a way to “prioritize imagination in times of performances related to the life and work of creative, emotional, spiritual and political polymath writer-artist Leonora Carrington (1917- uncertainty”— and thus as a figure central to the 2011), whose centenary in 2017 has led to a series very mission of Double Edge Theatre? of major exhibitions and the republication of Carrington’s writing. Double Edge’s first Upcoming touring dates for La Maga y el Carrington-related performance, Leonora & Maestro in 2020: Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, premiered at the Boston, MA: Arts Emerson (Technical Residency) Peak Performance series a t Montclair State February 24-28, 2020 University in March 2018, and received Albuquerque, NM: Revolutions Festival rave reviews. The performance reimagines the March 11-12, 2020 artistic and spiritual encounter in 1960s Mexico Orange, CA: Musco Arts Center City of the British-born surrealist and her March 18, 2020 mentorship of the Chilean-born filmmaker Detroit, MI: The Hinterlands’ Assemblage Alejandro Jodorowsky, drawing upon April 2-6, 2020 autobiographical accounts by Jodorowsky and, in Porsgrunn, Norway: The PIT Festival particular, animating the fantastic bestiary of June 19-20, 2020 Carrington’s fictions and images. The cast thus features Johnson and Uriona as Carrington and —Jonathan P. Eburne Jodorowsky, respectively, but also ensemble actors : : Jennifer Johnson: To begin with, since both of you and La Chasse (1942), and Down have quite distinct perspectives—you, Susan, as a Below (1940), Kron Flower (1987), among so many scholar and a Carrington expert, and you, Stacy, as others—and the Kabbalistic and Alchemical worlds a theatre director—could you each speak to how they depict. And then I started reading her books, you came across the work of Leonora Carrington? and Stone Door was for me astonishing. Susan Aberth: I was drawn to the work of Leonora SA: A recognition of one’s reality, seen in pictorial Carrington by complete chance. I was working on form. 57th Street in New York at the time and came upon Brewster Gallery where she was then showing. As I gazed at her work it awakened something long buried inside me, it was like speaking one’s native language after a long hiatus. I think there was a split-second decision I made while standing in front of a painting—that I would write my PhD dissertation on her. It was like a mystical experience. Stacy Klein: I had been working for several years on a Latin American Cycle, the fifth cycle of performances at Double Edge. This included Once a Blue Moon- Cada Luna Azul, which was an outdoor Photo by Maria Baranova spectacle revolving around co-artistic director Carlos Uriona’s experience in the military JJ: I know that for both of you, your work draws dictatorship in Argentina, his birthplace, as well as a from and uses different magical traditions. In the look into the cultural traditions of South America. work of Double Edge Theatre you can really see it After success creating two touring spectacles with in the recourse to the Kabbalah and Jewish this material, we decided to do an indoor piece mysticism throughout the company’s performance exploring the Chilean dictatorship and drawing history, as for instance, Shekinah and Sheba—the from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s books, particularly Feminine Divine archetypes we saw in Shahrazad: his memoir Where the Bird Sings Best (1992), about A Tale of Love and Magic (2013). Can you speak to his family’s migration to South America, told in a how you’ve used such imagery, as well as to how magical realist style. The failed election in the US Leonora used it I’m also interested in how happened right as we were starting to work, and I Leonora’s work invokes the Feminine Divine, and decided never again to do a performance that did how have you brought that forward as well, both not have a woman lead. Thus I searched for a Latin now and in the past? American artist (a visual artist, because I am drawn to an image-based artistry). I had never really SA: That’s a big question. worked with a woman painter before. And while I was searching I found a couple of really interesting JJ: It is; it’s large. Cut it into pieces and answer it painters from Argentina and Mexico. Then my how you want. friend told me about Leonora; she had just been to visit her son Gabi, who took her to Leonora’s SA: It’s a great question. I have had astrologers and house, and she thought I should look at her mediums tell me my mission on earth is to help paintings. I couldn’t believe that I had never seen reintroduce the Divine Feminine into the world, and her work before because it was much more familiar before they told me this I had already known it as to me than any of the work that I had done with any my mission from a very young age.