A multi-disciplinary performance piece, Apollo [Part 2]: Dark Side of the Moon, takes as its subject the intersection of the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War Space Race, situating two unique and powerful forms of liberation in the same zip code, in the same decade. From this convergence explodes an epic narrative of America. The story, as I want to tell it, has a broad historical and geographic scope, ranging from the U.S. Civil War and 19th century France [Jules Verne and his stories] to Nazi Germany, to the American South of the 1960s, provoking difficult questions about the moral cost of human progress, and the nation we intended to be and the nation we have become.


Dred Scott, Jules Verne, Charles Mason & Jeremiah Dixon, Jean-Charles Houzeau, Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, Sergei Korolev, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Lyndon B. Johnson, George Wallace, Charlie Smith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Astronauts, Astronauts’ Wives, Civil Rights Workers, Seminole Indian, Journalists, etc.


A multifarious story, Apollo crosses the boundaries of several disciplines. It seeks to advance the multi-disciplinary scheme by creating a three-dimensional poem, of text, movement, music, projections, design and idea. Its collage-like structure evokes several forms and genres—cabaret, documentary, puppet show, movement-theater, fantasia, science project—weaving them into a dynamic whole, with tonal shifts from lyrical to comic to tragic to absurd. The goal is to delve into character, relationships and history by exploding the mere fact, and mining the emotional and poetic events within. The narrative will be non-linear with multiple events or lines of action sometimes occurring simultaneously, alternating between non-verbal sequences and text-based scenes. Text will be comprised of first person accounts, official documents, reportage, fragments of literature and poetry, and newly imagined scenes. The piece will be scored throughout with a layered soundscape by Randy Tico. The material calls for epic treatment, demanding a rigorous exploration and invention of forms, and providing stimulating acting and performance challenges.


The piece will be created through long-term collaborative workshops with director/writer, actors, composer and designers. There is no script, nor even an outline before we begin. It is built from the inside-out, the outside-in, the ground-up and the sky-down. This entails lots of reading and discussion, and more up-on-our-feet-hands-in-the-dirt work. Each phase of development consists of the following four steps.

1] Intensive period of research
2] Collaborative development workshop with actors and composer
3] Public presentation of the work-in-progress following the workshop   
4] Written draft of a script based on the workshop and results of showing

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