Gallathea
John Lily
2011 UC Davis
Gallathea (2010-11) by John Lyly, a predecessor of Shakespeare. This was a genuine experiment directly in collaboration. I worked with the international dance/theatre performer Keith Hennessy (http://circozero.org/current), the Hollywood costume designer Liz Galindo (who had just finished There will be blood and Benjamin Buttons), the videographer/filmmaker/actor John Zibell, and Dylan Bolles, a fabulous musician who brings together Japanese musical instruments and United States folksong (he installed a classical Asian drone instrument that the actors interacted with throughout the performance – random tonal music…). All four were listed as co-directors of the production, and worked with each other and with me to create and build the show with a young set designer Gian Scarabino. It was an amazing piece, but met with extraordinary resistance because the one thing I was working against was the character psychology that usually gets loaded on to early modern theatre. I felt it was a play written before modern ideas of ‘identity’ and that sexuality was also framed in a completely different way (the play pivots around two women, one dressed as a man, who fall in love), in other words a kind of pre-post-dramatic play that had lots of potential for current theatricality. There was a lot of full-frontal actor-audience engagement, and the projection mapping was partly by the videographer and partly by actors in the play – cameras were left around the set and they could pick them up and use them as they wished.
