Dead Sometimes - Project Artaud San Francisco, june 27-30, 2018

Performance by Howard Fisher, Kathryn Crim and Anne Walsh

Developed by Jocelyn Saidenberg, Howard Fisher, Kathryn Crim and Anne Walsh Working from text by Camille Roy Directed by Jocelyn Saidenberg

“Dead Sometimes” was the rearticulation, condensation, and abstraction in movement and repetition of Camille Roy’s 1993 play Sometimes Dead is Better.

Collaborating with actors Kathryn Crim and Howard Fisher and with direction from Jocelyn Saidenberg, we built upon our earlier live reading of Roy’s play over a month-long residency at San Francisco’s Project Artaud.

Using improvisation that set limits and generative constraints with regard to space, duration, rhythm, and force, we developed miniature scripts from Roy’s original play and new material Roy contributed based on our evolving work. Adding movement, voice, props and costume, we produced “Dead Sometimes,” a string of scenes bound as distinct units by a logic of movement and repetition. Each of these scenes represents the genesis of relation, but relation which is often frustrated or compromised, rent by grief of loss. Sometimes they approach allegory, the moment when uttered language overlaps with a social interaction to produce the fiction of personhood.

Sometimes Dead is Better   

Poet’s Theatre at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive October 14, 2017

Written by Camille Roy Directed by Jocelyn Saidenberg

A play in Five Acts.

The year is 1999.

The action takes place in a hospital room.

Dramatis Personae

Philip: A retired architect, on his death bed - Howard Fisher

Nurse: his nurse - Hannah Ehrlinspiel

And Three Dead Queens:

Red Queen - Anne Walsh

Queen of Whores - Tonika Sealy-Thompson

Drag Queen - Kathryn Crim