[ This Just In! ]

For Immediate Release
Date: July 25, 2000

Salvage Vanguard Returns from Retreat
The American Demons, Based on Dostoevsky and Columbine, One Step Closer to Completion

Austin, TX--Performing artists Dan Dietz, Deborah Hay, Andrea Moon, and Jason Neulander, returned today from an 18-day retreat designed to create The American Demons, a new performance piece based on Dostoevsky's novel Demons and on last year's shootings at Columbine High School. The American Demons opens September 15 in Austin.

The American Demons is a dance/theater piece using primarily found text from the novel and public records of the tragedy at Columbine High. Originally conceived by Neulander last year, the project draws parallels between Russian culture of the 1840s and 1870s and American culture of the 1960s and 1990s, particularly the notion of "youth revolution" and how the idealism of one generation is replaced by the cynicism of the next generation. The older characters in Dostoevsky's novel are members of a generation that caused sweeping social change. The younger characters are their children who have somehow become disconnected from their parents' senses of morality and idealism. This younger generation hopes to start a revolution based in violence and nihilism.

"Unlike some other adaptations of the novel, this piece is pretty experimental," says collaborator Jason Neulander. "Rather than tell a linear story, we chose to explore, though text and movement, the very nature of violence in our own society through the lens of Dostoevsky's great novel." The process towards creating the piece stemmed from Neulander's desire to work in a democratically collaborative environment. "I've been directing plays for about ten years and have become used to one person being in charge," he says. "I hoped, in this process, to explode that concept wide open."

All four collaborators have been equals in the creative process to this point. The process started in March 2000 with four week rehearsal intensive, and continued with July's 18-day retreat in Wimberley, Texas. Having just choreographed two new pieces for Mikhail Barishnikov's White Oak company, including a duet with Barishnikov himself, Deborah Hay brought a dance component to the theater-dominated project. "Every collaboration requires absolute faith in the process," says Hay. In fact, the project's original outline was generated through a process similar to the practices of Judson Dance Theater, the legendary company that Hay helped to found in the early 1960s. During the retreat, the artists worked together, starting from the outline created by Dietz, Hay, and Neulander in April. Each of the artists acted as writer, director, and performer.

"There were times," says Dietz, "when we felt like we were using every muscle but our strongest ones. The collaborative process forced us to exercise muscles we had never used before." That was because Moon and Dietz, two playwrights, were using found text, not material they were writing; Neulander, usually a director, was performing; and Hay, primarily a dancer, was now acting as well.

Ultimately, however, the artists were able to create imagery they never would have come up with on their own. In the opening sequence, for example, one letter falls from above, landing with the sound of a gunshot. Hay walks onto the stage and asks the audience to consider a what it might be like to live under a giant stone "the size of a house" that might crush them at any moment. She raises an umbrella over her head and letters rain down from above. Then Dietz, Moon, and Neulander step out as a group with umbrellas over their heads. All four performers lower their umbrellas together and examine the letters that are now on the ground. The voices of the Columbine attackers come from the envelopes. Dietz startles, looking above, as a chair descends, ultimately pinning him to the floor, as Hay, Moon, and Neulander look on.

"We don't always know what the images mean. The are quite dreamlike," says Neulander. "The main thing now is to take the individual pieces that work and craft a complete, holistic performance out of them." The artists reconvene at the end of August for three weeks to open the show in September.

The American Demons runs September 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, and 30 at the Blue Theatre (916 Springdale). Tickets cost $4.50 - $12. For reservations, call 512.474.SVT.6 or log onto www.salvagevanguard.org. The American Demons is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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