Featured Member Profile

The performance team of Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl first collaborated in 1997. Their premiere work took place in a grove of trees in Austin, Texas, over the course of 12 hours and was designed to be experienced from passing cars. Nearly 13 years and thousands of frequent-flier miles later, they have won accolades and awards and are still going strong, exploring the boundaries of philosophy, science and personal expression. Their newest show, Terrible Things, debuted in December and will be remounted at the COIL Festival at P.S. 122 in NYC beginning January 8th.

Lisa and Katie, could you please briefly summarize your work?

We are a collaborative team who create performance both inside and outside traditional theater spaces. Over the years, we have devised a body of work that is attentive to the performer/audience relationship, and searches for new approaches to narrative through the accumulation of text, image, physicality and architectural element. How can each project generate its own questions, logic and energy? In answering this question, we want our audiences to feel like they are inside of an experience, rather than watching something happen “over there.” When we make a show we create room for the audience to feel like they have slipped into the private headspace of a performer they are watching: an intimate, associative, surprising place.

I read on your website that since your 1997 performance, The Grove, the two of you have never lived in the same city, and that each of you splits your time between two cities. How does this impact your work? Logistically? Inspirationally? Both?

Lisa splits her time between Brooklyn and New Orleans, and Katie lives in Austin and comes to NYC frequently to work. Lisa used to live in Minneapolis, and many of our projects have been made and/or performed there.

Logistically it can be crazy — we are constantly looking at our calendars. However we’ve grown to love the intensive work sessions we create for ourselves, which can last anywhere from two days to three weeks. When we are in these sessions, we are truly IN them. We clear our calendars and really get down to it, because we know that when it is over, we’ll be far away from each other. It turns into a kind of intuition overdrive, which is good for the work, we think. We draw TONS of inspiration from each of our home cities — they really do feel like three homes, and we have friends, audience and collaborators in each of them. The big challenge is how to stay an active part of all these communities. It’s something we’re working on right now.

Would you please describe your current show, Terrible Things?

Our performance work most often combines a scientific or philosophical idea with the extreme yearnings of a character in the midst of a personal crisis regarding the relationship between herself and the universe. In Terrible Things (our first dance theater piece) that character is Katie, and the crisis she finds herself in has to do with the bounded nature of experience and identity: “How did I end up being this person, in this place, with this past? What about all those other selves that made different choices — where are they?” With her, we flirt with the tantalizing thought (that she supports with theories of quantum mechanics) that “anything is possible and everything is happening.” Katie’s spoken words — a trippy roller coaster ride through recollections, reflections, and imaginings — becomes the frame for the visual content of the show, which is tightly controlled and totally surprising: the black and white world unfolds into glowing squares of yellow and red, the walls and floors reveal trap doors, and 650 bright white marshmallows are constantly being moved, shifted, and rearranged to create new spatial configurations. Another layer of content is provided by the three totally killer female dancers who, throughout their choreography, sometimes have their own identities and sometimes share Katie’s. We designed the show so these elements all reflect each other rather than illustrate each other — again, our way of letting content accumulate by allowing things to exist side by side in space with room left for the audiences’ interpretation to enter in.

I don’t know anything about quantum theory and quarks…(!) Will I still understand and enjoy Terrible Things?

YES! While we worked hard to make sure that the physics in the show was not “Physics Lite,” we also tried to make the physics streamlined and clear. Warning: this is NOT a new-agey approach to quantum physics! There are lots of books and movies out there that try to use quantum physics to “prove” that we can live the life we want just by imagining it. Our show is more objective than that, though it does explore how we use theater to imagine that anything is possible…

As voyeuristic as it may sound, I like how you use your blog to write letters to each other. Is that also “performance” in a sense?

Definitely! We developed the blog specifically for Terrible Things, which is kind of a voyeuristic show, in that you really get up close and personal with Katie’s life. We wanted to use the blog to introduce this voyeurism to our audience, and also introduce some of the quantum physics theories we would be using in the show — we hoped it would begin to allow our audience to free-associate with us, even before the show began. We’re excited by this breed of “peripheral performance” that we discovered through the blog, and want to keep creating things like it for future shows. We like that the experience of a show can extend beyond the theater: audiences who come to the show after reading the blog will experience a dimension, a texture, to the work that those who haven’t read the blog don’t. It’s a nice way to accumulate narrative, the way we described earlier.

A review of one of your previous performances, Bird Eye Blue Print, described you two as able to lead your audience members “through an experience that leads from A …to A from a different point of view, rather than on a trip from A to B”. Would you say that’s true? Intended?

I do think that is intended and true. We’re very much interested in presenting the audience with something that seems unknown and strange, and then giving them the…special glasses that they need to see that thing from the inside. In one of our early shows, for example, there was this whole section where we took the audience behind our set pieces so they could see how they worked — which created a different kind of magic for them. Sure, now they knew the trick, but they felt more connected to the world of the performance as a whole. We’re hoping to use a similar theory as the structural basis for our next piece, How to Build a Forest, which lets the audience in on the entire assembly process of a simulated forest on a stage before adding the “stage magic” that turns it into the kind of theatrical experience they might recognize.

What do you hope your audience members bring to your performances?

Lisa: We hope they come ready to receive.
Katie: We hope they come interested to discover.

What do you hope they take with them?

Lisa: We hope they leave more attentive to the world around them.
Katie: We hope they leave more intrigued by the world inside them.

What motivated you to become members of Fractured Atlas?

Fiscal sponsorship. Our budgets weren’t quite big enough to justify going 501(c)3, but we REALLY needed help managing our grants! Also, Katie and our friend Sxip were one of the first projects Adam (Huttler, FA Executive Director) supported — we think it was in 1999 or early 2000. It was called Blood is the Only Good Adhesive in Heaven, and Katie and Sxip trouped up to Harlem where Adam had his little office room and pitched the show, and Adam fronted them some money which let us rent the space and make it happen. The show was a great success, they paid Adam back, and after that we’ve always had a warm place in our hearts for Fractured Atlas! So it was nice to join up as actual members.

How has your Fractured Atlas membership benefited you?

Your super-streamlined approach to helping us keep our budgets in order and disburse our funds is probably the biggest benefit to us. However we have also purchased liability insurance through you guys and gone to you all for lots of grant advice.

Who and/or what are your biggest influences?

Directors like Pina Bausch, whose aesthetics are lush, controlled, and welcoming; theorists like Cliff Maclucas (of the Welsh company Brith Gof), who practice deep and purist forms of site-specific theater; artists like Yoko Ono, who widen our own sense of what is possible; architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, who stringently consider the way bodies move through space; writers like Caryl Churchill and Mac Wellman, who constantly create new forms; theater companies like Frontera (an Austin company that does not exist anymore) and the Foundry Theater, who persevere with intense personal vision; choreographers like Deborah Hay and Emio Greco, who work with intense personal discipline; and novelists like Flannery O’Connor and Italo Calvino, who build complete worlds, often with their own logic.

What has been your greatest success to date?

We don’t mean to be cute, but we really don’t look at our work that way anymore — we’ve done SO many projects together, in so many different kinds of venues… It is impossible to compare the show in the vacant boutique in Austin, performed to 12 people, to the show at the Walker Arts Center performed to 200. However, our show Nita & Zita holds a really special place for us — not so much because we won an OBIE for it (although that, of course, was totally awesome), but because of how much of our lives we gave over to it. We worked on that piece for about five years, during which time it felt like we were being LEAD by these two ghosts… They were telling us what we were allowed or not allowed to discover about them, they spoke to us and, through the show, we spoke back to them. It was a pretty amazing feat of collaboration, in lots of ways.

What’s next on your professional horizon?

A piece called How to Build a Forest, a project of Creative Capital which will premiere in NYC in 2011. It’s a performance installation which involves Katie and Lisa constructing and deconstructing a simulated forest on stage over the course of an eight-hour work day. You can learn more about it here.

How can we learn more about your other projects?

The best way is visit pearldamour.com and read through our project descriptions — you’ll find photos, videos and press!

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Images, top to bottom:
1-3) Scenes from Terrible Things, December 2009. Photos by Justin Bernhaut.
Video: Excerpts from Bird Eye Blue Print, 2007.
4) Scene from Bird Eye Blue Print, 2007. Photo by Miguel Lopez.