The Toledo City Paper depends on readers like you! Become a friend today. See membership options
Elevator Repair Service (ERS), an award-winning New York City theater company known for their experimental theater pieces, in 1991 and performed in a dozen countries. Known for tackling a broad range of subjects and literary forms, combining elements of technology, slapstick comedy and lo-tech design. ERS is working with the BGSU theater department. The University’s Creative Minds series. Chair of the Department of Theater and Film, Jonathan Chambers, a long-time fan of ERS, is thrilled to welcome them to BGSU.
Defining a ‘Residency’
“ERS will be coming in October to start an intensive short-term residency with a small ensemble of students, primarily from theater,” explains Chambers, “they will work with students 8 hours a day, Saturday through Tuesday. On Wednesday we’ll present the Creative Minds talk where we’ll show the piece that the students developed from their work with ERS.” Chambers is interested in ERS working with students because of their focus on ensemble work and a commitment to collaboration. The company creates its pieces through extensive collaboration. Each work, developed over the course of a season, has several work-in-progress showings before small audiences as well as touring productions, culminating in an extended run in New York. ERS artist director John Collins relates his inspiration to start the company, “I wanted to make theater where there’s room for mistakes. It gets exciting when the planned things fall apart and the unplanned things start happening.”
Experimental Theater
Many ERS pieces center around reading verbatim from novels, Supreme Court transcripts, debate transcripts (between James Baldwin and William F Buckley). Collins said, “It’s always fascinating to see how speaking something out loud in front of people transforms
it. It’s interesting to use something like a novel that wasn’t written for the stage so there’s tension between literary form and theater.”
There’s problem solving involved in the sense that they aren’t condensing or changing the novel. Instead of trying to smooth it out and make it fit the stage in an appealing way, Collins is interested in the ways it doesn’t fit. The clash of these two forms is what is interesting. “I think we’re at our creative best when we don’t know where we’re going.”
An ERS performance has included projections of film or imagery on stage, with an actor reading Hamlet in synch with a projection of Richard Burton’s 1964 film of Hamlet. Collins described it as transforming a movie of a play, back into a play. ERS loves to force them-
selves into awkward situations that demand a creative solution.
Chambers has said the ERS doesn’t use the same kind of hierarchy, when creating original pieces, that more traditional theater uses. “It seems to me that they’re deeply interested in free association. I think when creating pieces, they’re more interested in making an audience experience something rather than just understanding it. Their performances are sometimes messy, but that’s ok. Messy is where it’s most interesting.” Chambers’ ideas regarding students working with ERS, “I think most of our students have a pretty conventional idea of what traditional theater is capable of, and I think ERS will open them up to a range of possibilities of what theater can be.”
Wednesday, October 8, 7pm. Free and ope to the public. bgsu. edu/arts
