Lenora Champagne: currentrep

Right now I am developing Staying Afloat a new performance work for two women and a polar bear. Set on a shrinking ice floe in the near future, the play follows the struggle to co-exist in a world of shrinking options. Voice and Vision Theatre has assisted work on this project with a residency at the Envision Retreat at Bard College in summer 2008, and a subsequent reading of the script at the Envision Festival at the Ohio Theatre in May 2009.

Recently I created an inter-generational performance, TRACES/fades, with older actors and performers (in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s) and a young girl. While most of my performances have been solos, TRACES/fades is a larger scale work, with music by Daniel Levy, visual projections by Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons, and movement as well as scripted text. The work is set in an abstract space (designed by Liz Prince) that evokes the day room of an assisted living facility. The action and images shift as the mind of the central character—a woman with Alzheimer’s— flickers from her present-day circumstances to her past experiences, notably to moments in which national crises affected her life and that of her family members.

In TRACES/fades, the medical condition of Alzheimer’s is used as a metaphor for Americans’ short-term historical memory loss — our national tendency to forget recent history, and to accept assurances and explanations out of a kind of faith in authority. The action of the hunt or search—the act of looking and of trying to uncover (and recover, as in becoming well or whole again) —runs throughout the piece. Within a stark room, there are projections of writing that fades, is erased, and reconstituted. The writing is important not for what it says, but for its visual grace. The main character’s convent girl cursive (in which she records her uncle’s death in World War I) is overlaid with impressions from an old Royal typewriter (as she prepares for the work force during WWII and supports herself during her husband’s stint in Korea). Her stenographic marks (practiced during the evening news during the war in Viet Nam) fade as traces of Arabic lettering and contemporary typefaces appear. The inscribed traces of writing and print disintegrate and re-integrate as the woman’s mind focuses around powerful memories— nostalgic moments, both personal and political, which register, then transform and fade.

Traces/fades bears some relationship to my previous work, Eye of the Garden, in which the world of adolescent girls within convent walls was explored on a landfill bounded by the Hudson River. Working in collaboration with the performers and with sculptor Claudia Fitch and composer Glen Velez on this commissioned project for Creative Time’s final “Art on the Beach” was a rich experience that resonated with spectators, evoking a lost time, queer obsessions, and silent mysteries.

Much of my work retains elements of autobiography, reflecting my belief that the strongest work implicates people (the performer as well as the audience) in addition to moving them intellectually, emotionally, or aesthetically. I ground my work in the personal and particular in order to expansively critique or reflect upon the wider world.

For example, in my solo, Mother’s Little Helper, I used my mother’s fifties-era church-sponsored guide to “the facts of life” to ironically comment on the encroachment of the religious right into contemporary politics and social policy. In a performance punctuated by Cajun stories, young girls’ word and clapping games, and sweet potatoes, I explored the scary place girls and women currently find themselves in.

I developed “TRACES/fades” as a HARP (HERE Artist’s Residency Program) artist at HERE Arts Center. The script is published in Plays and Playwrights 2009.

MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPER solo

In the age of Bush, a former Cajun-American Princess draws on her Louisiana roots (and a 1950’s guide to the facts of life) to help raise her daughter in a world fraught with post- 9/11, pre-adolescent danger.

“…a lively meditation on motherhood and the state of the world… unfailingly smart and charismatic… persuasive and entertaining… genuinely funny.” —Martin Denton nytheatre.com

“treacherously insightful… sardonic and poignant… chilling and sadly ironic… slightly wacky.” —AmericanTheatreWeb.com

“achieves wisdom and humor” —Village Voice

The text and introductory remarks of Mother’s Little Helper are published in the “Generation” issue of Performance Research.

THE MAMA DRAMAS solo

The Mama Dramas is comprised of two solos, Wants and Dusk.

WANTS (part one), directed by Robert Lyons, explores the ironies of desire, longing, and fulfillment in the story of a woman who wishes for a child and finds a baby in the woods. In DUSK (part two), directed by Rachel Dickstein, the same woman tries to capture the wonders and dangers of the world in stories to her daughter, finding in the telling space for herself.

WANTS was commissioned by Dance Theatre Workshop, where it premiered, and was subsequently presented in The Public Theater’s New Work Now!. “Champagne’s poetry burrows under the skin in a way that is elegant and painful…in this comic sigh”, said Laurie Stone of the Village Voice. DUSK was developed at New Dramatists, Dixon Place, and the Knitting Factory, and was published in Performing Arts Journal, winter 2001. THE MAMA DRAMAS was originally produced by HERE Art Center (NYC).