The five of them have gathered at the old
trolley-repair-shop-turned-City-Light-warehouse to clean up. The
warehouse is in the middle of that no-man’s-land where Dexter Avenue
crosses Mercer Street. A mountain of sod molders in the center of the
floor. The crushed remains of a herd of life-size
papier-mâché horses are stacked nearby. A wedding dress
ruined by fake blood and dried stiff is draped over a chair. The
chair’s legs are sawed off halfway to the ground. Earlier this summer,
Implied Violence converted the warehouse into a theater and presented a
triptych of original shows—BarleyGirl and Versus and Eat, Fight, Fuck, a loosely related cycle they called Our
Summary in Sequence—but since the warehouse wasn’t built with
theater-making in mind, they had to create everything, including a
place for the audience to be. Instead of investing in tiered platforms,
which is what any other theater group in the city would do, they just
sawed the legs off wooden chairs to varying heights.
“We’re keeping the wedding dress?” says Jessie Smith, a
dancer/choreographer and Implied Violence’s treasurer.
“Yeah, it’s archival,” says Lily Nguyen, the sound designer.
Ryan Mitchell, the dauntless, smirking covisionary of the group,
lifts a heavy flap of sod and heaves it into the back of a pickup
truck. This will be the second or third trip to the dump today. “All
this chicken shit is going to give us that disease,” he says. The sod
has chicken shit in it because some of it had been the floor of a
chicken coop housing 40 or so chirping chicks. A golden, haphazard pool
of them featured in the climactic moments of BarleyGirl.
“Oh yeah. All the chicken shit we’re inhaling? It’s terrifying,”
says Megan Birdsall, Implied Violence’s technical director. She’s the
one who thought to tell everyone to get a tetanus shot back in 2003,
when the group was creating bushes out of rusty rebar for their first
project, a restaging of Lord of the Flies at Cornish College of
the Arts. That was shortly after Mitchell and Mandie
O’Connell—Implied Violence’s artistic director and managing
director, respectively, even though the level at which they collaborate
blurs the distinction—met on campus. O’Connell, who shares
Mitchell’s air of dauntlessness, happened to be standing there when
Mitchell said out loud one day that he needed a place to live. They
were roommates within days.
“Everyone at Cornish was bitching at us because they thought we
should get the rights to it or some ridiculous shit,” Mitchell
remembers, heaving another flap of sod into the truck. When classmates
heard about their elaborate plans for the show, “They all said, ‘You’ll
never be able to afford it, you idiots!’ And then we stole all this
shit from under I-5. It took us three days to steal it.” They got
rebar, beams, platforms, heavy wire, and huge concave glass shapes.
They filled one of the concave glass shapes with fake blood. “That was
the pig.”
It’s fitting that Implied Violence came about because of a housing
crisis (Mitchell’s), and that the raw material for the first project
was construction debris, because in the ensuing years members of the
group have lived in, made theater in, and been evicted from lots of
different places people aren’t supposed to live or make theater in.
Like the defunct U.S. Rubber Building in Pioneer Square. Or a
restaurant-supply storage facility south of Safeco Field. Mitchell has
spent uncountable hours, when not hauling cargo for a produce company,
scouring the city for spaces to live and make theater in. A while back,
a real-estate agent inadvertently gave him the code for a lockbox on an
International District building. “I made a key to the building and a
sticker with a different telephone number on it and put it over his
number so people wouldn’t be able to call on it, and we rehearsed and
prepared” new work there. “That is how aggressive and hungry we are for
space in this city.”
Their work insists that theater can be as
dangerous/infuriating/unpredictable as life is, and that theater can
happen everywhere that life happens. Once, riding bikes with friends in
Pioneer Square, I stumbled across some hubbub in an alley. Two sets of
cords extended across the alley, creating a square—a boxing
ring—and then two guys came out, sweaty and drunk, and began
knocking the shit out of each other, slamming into the concrete walls,
slipping, bleeding. The crowd began taking bets on who was going to
win, and I put in five bucks, and then a cop car trying to drive
through the alley shined its headlights on the scene, lighting it up
like you wouldn’t believe, but the guys kept throwing punches and the
crowd kept hollering, and then stuff started pouring onto the boxers
out of a high window—water, marshmallows, glitter,
feathers—and then, just before the last round, the boxers and
their groupies and the refs and the bet-takers vanished. With
everyone’s money. This was a production of the Villainaire’s Academy,
an offshoot of Implied Violence, and Mitchell was one of the
boxers.
Implied Violence has made shows in a field, in a
soon-to-be-demolished Aurora motel, and on the roof of an apartment
building in the middle of the night before it was razed for
development. For that last one, you had to go to a downtown crepe stand
on a certain morning and buy your ticket from the crepe-makers (Nguyen
among them), which made getting to see the show kind of part of the
show. To get onto the roof that night, you had to climb up a ladder
through a ceiling, a hole that turned out to be, once you got onto the
roof, center stage—the lights on you, the cheering crowd
embarrassing you, and still more
getting-to-see-the-show-as-part-of-the-show. Implied Violence had
covered the roof in dirt and planted flowers in it (for one show!), and
they kept the audience warm with whiskey and blankets. The standout
performance was O’Connell’s. In addition to being a playwright and a
director, she is a fierce, mysterious performer. She played a woman
who’d drowned her son in a river and was having to tell the story over
and over again, in increasingly frantic iterations, with dancing.
As we drive toward the dump, Smith, who also runs the Dead Bird
Movement dance company, says, “We’ve always been trying to figure out
ways to integrate movement in theater that’s not totally bogus.” For
BarleyGirl, Smith choreographed paroxysms of birdlike gestures
that one character, Bird, constantly slipped into, and sometimes the
entire company—a wave of freaky biological compulsion amplified
by all the chirping chicks. “But since I’m the one with the pickup
truck, I also have to run tons of errands,” she says. “My friends are
always making fun of me because I’m always like, ‘Uh, I have to go find
86 pinwheels and a bag of red-white-and-blue confetti and a
headstone.'”
In addition to the spectacle of it—a teeming, saturated visual
field—BarleyGirl was told in gorgeous stabs of dialogue.
“I love you, Barley Girl, and I want to kill you,” a soldier says. “Is
that why you’re dying?” she replies. A Civil War soldier tries to
explain the historical importance of his dying, but fails to summon the
words, to seem important. It was written by O’Connell, who has words by
Gertrude Stein tattooed onto her arm and, like Stein, thinks like a
cubist about text—constantly repeating, with variations, certain
phrases so as to propel a many-sided idea/feeling forward.
Back at the warehouse, I ask O’Connell if there’s anything Implied
Violence’s shows have in common. Her answer: work. “A real,
crazy, intense amount of difficulty, but strength in overcoming
difficulty,” she says. You get the sense that she and Mitchell and the
rest don’t walk around with their chests out, feeling innately
talented; they’re simply willing to work harder than anyone else to
make theater you don’t want to miss. Even getting into this City Light
warehouse—a Herculean effort involving city and county officials
who thought it impossible, icy receptionists, unresponsive real-estate
agents, the preoccupied superintendent of City Light, etc.—was a
piece of work. But duress can be source material. O’Connell looks over
my shoulder at furniture and props that have to be taken to storage.
“Speaking of work,” she says, and gets up.
AWESOME!