April 18, 2002
Ex-student becomes producer of prof’s show
One of the wonderful things about teaching is, your students graduate and become professionals themselves. And once they do, all sorts of opportunities for collaboration exist.
Take Robyn Hunt for example. Last summer the drama professor got a call from a former student, Andy Jensen, who is now Studio Series Director at On the Boards, Seattle’s contemporary performance center. Jensen was calling to ask her to interview a colleague for his newsletter. When Hunt found out about his position at On the Boards, she was quick to ask if he would be interested in a show of hers, a drama-dance collaboration called Prix Fixe.
As a result of that connection, Prix Fixe will be opening at On the Boards next week. Not only that — the show itself grew out of a collaboration between Hunt and another former student, Peter Kyle, who studied acting with her while earning his MFA in dance.
“It’s wonderful to see a student go on and succeed,” Hunt said of Jensen. “It wasn’t uncomfortable at all to be pitching a show to someone I knew as an undergraduate.”
For Jensen, who graduated in 1993, Hunt’s proposal might have been an opportunity for revenge. Hunt rejected him when he auditioned for her advanced acting class. But the admiration society is mutual. “Robyn rejected me because I was too young for that class,” he said. “I wasn’t ready. Because of her, I went on to take technical classes that year and wound up managing the Cabaret Theatre in Hutchinson.”
Not bad experience for what Jensen is currently doing. On the Boards is a presenting house, booking shows that are ready to perform but that don’t have a space of their own. Jensen is responsible for finding those shows; his studio series is performed in an 85-seat black box and concentrates on Northwest artists working outside the usual boundaries of their field.
The show that Hunt and Kyle have created certainly fits into that mold. It consists of two unrelated pieces with a shared cast of 10 actors and dancers. Hunt’s half of the program is called Phototrope — indicating its theme of bending toward the light
“Seven patrons think they’re coming to a restaurant to eat and instead they’re kind of moved around like in a dream by three chefs who are manipulating them,” Hunt says of the piece. “The text is poetry by David Wagoner and Gary Soto, the point being that what we remember and what we say to each other is what we eat and that’s how we bend toward the light.”
The piece originated in a workshop, Physical Approaches to Acting, that Hunt and Kyle — now a part-time lecturer at the University — taught last summer to students from both dance and drama. Kyle’s piece, Skippy-O’s Dream, turns most of the cast into the “tinies,” miniature people who live in their world oblivious of the ordinary-sized Sir Robert Hooke, a character based on an obscure scientist of the 17th century who, among other things, was the first to coin the term “cell.”
“Hooke is the only one who speaks in the piece, and what he says is largely text from Hooke’s book, published in 1665, called Micrographia,” Kyle says. “This was one of the first books about some of the first microscopic investigations.”
The title of the piece is from a work by Cicero, The Dream of Scipio, in which a Roman soldier is taken high above the earth in a dream and everything appears small to him.
Prix Fixe is, Jensen says, just the sort of show he’s looking for when he prowls the contemporary circuit or talks to actors about work they have that doesn’t fit into the usual mold. “I want to produce theater-based shows that will challenge the theater-going folks and dance-based shows that will challenge the dance audience and provoke people,” he says.
That agenda of inviting audiences in to new experiences is one Hunt and Kyle can also get behind. For all three, the opportunity to collaborate has been the happy result of the University climate, where teachers and students can become colleagues.
Prix Fixe runs Thursday through Sunday, April 25–May 4 at 9 p.m., at On the Boards Studio Theater, 100 W. Roy St. Tickets are available by calling 206-217-9888 or 24 hours a day at http://www.ontheboards.org.
