Right now I'm working on a new solo, Memory's Storehouse, which is the first part of a performance I'm doing with Lizzie Olesker. The two of us will each perform our own solos, followed by a third section we're making together. The overall title is Tiny Lights. We worked on it this summer at Tofte Lake Center in Minnesota and have each shown bits of the project at New Georges Trunk Show. Much more to come.

In July 2010 I directed my play, Staying Afloat, developed at Dixon Place and through workshops and residences with New Georges and Voice and Vision, at the Ice Factory Festival at the Ohio Theatre. In Staying Afloat, two women and a polar bear find themselves adrift on a melting ice floe sometime in the near future. They strive to survive and make a community in the face of birth, death, and climate change.

"...there is real wisdom in this play, and immense imagination and stagecraft."
--Martin Denton nyctheatre.com

"Lenora Champagne's Staying Afloat...has the makings of Waiting for Godot-like existential story...the set effectively evokes isolation and longing."
--Chris Kompanek, On the Culture Front, Huffington Post

TRACES/fades, my inter-generational play about Alzheimer's and our national inability to remember history, developed over three years at HERE and 3LD through a HARP residency, was presented by Soho Think Tank at the Ohio Theatre in 2008. TRACES/fades featured visual projections by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty. During the performance, there are projections of writing that fades, is erased, and reconstituted. The writing is important not for its content, but for its grace, and as a sign of shifts in technology from convent girl cursive to impressions from an old Royal typewriter to contemporary computer fonts. The inscribed traces of writing and print disintegrate and re-form as the main character's mind focuses on powerful memories and images, moments both personal and political, which register and make an impression, then transform and fade.

"Smart, witty, fun...Three generations of women discuss their histories, their problems and desires set against the backdrop of loss and decay....a nursing home...doubles as a surreal memory-cabaret... Images fade in and out of focus...a bodiless hand writes and unwrites names, poetry. Handwriting degenerates and disappears as an outright example of the language that constitutes us...Consciousness disappears; writing (performance?) haunts."
--Obscene Jester

"Most of the story unfolds in the nursing home where Ann now lives; Champagne and her collaborators capture the sad and vaguely surreal ambience of that place with uncanny and affecting fidelity....The production is stunning, and blessed with a wondrous cast."
--Martin Denton, nytheatre.com

TRACES/fades is published in Plays and Playwrights 2009.

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 recent 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.

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).