ARTicles vol.4 i.2b: Tilting at Windmills in the Air!

The UnPOSSESSED, Double Edge Theatre’s adaptation of Don Quixote, is a story of hope bound within fantastical imagery. From the moment that Carlos Uriona’s Knight of the Woeful Countenance rises out of a pile of books, the audience experiences the world through his eyes. Shadow puppets transform into humans engaged in a never ending dance between the elusive dream and the searching dreamer. Don Quixote’s battle towards his enigmatic Dulcinea echoes the quest for meaning and beauty in a chaotic world. The UnPOSSESSEDis enhanced by an evocative original score by Justin Handley.

The events of 9/11 prompted Klein to explore the question of how art can interact with today’s world. “In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, despair overtook me,” writes Stacy Klein, the founding director of Double Edge Theatre. “I began to find my work empty and ineffectual, incapable of changing the world or even touching just one person.” The UnPOSSESSED, Klein writes, “exists in the juxtaposition between the external nightmare that we have created, and the impossible dream that we must risk creating.”

Faced with the question of how to respond to the chaos of the world, Klein and her artistic partner Carlos Uriona turned to Miguel de Cervantes’s Adventures of Don Quixote. Although the novel was written four hundred years ago, Klein observes that it explores “similar dilemmas and ominously parallel questions about idealism and fanaticism, cultural wars and social decay, and individual honor and the nature of patriotic rebellion.” When we want to ask questions and look for answers which are beyond the ream of words, where can we turn? Where can we turn to ask questions and seek expression beyond the realm of words?

Double Edge Theatre, founded in 1982, is an ideal site for examining the pursuit of an impossible dream. As an artistic community, DET develops original theatrical performances based on long-term collaboration between artists and their community.

International artists/performers gather at DET’s rural Ashfield, MA home/farm to participate in training, practice, performance, research, and cultural exchange. While there, they live and work together, growing their own food and tending to the business of the farm.

Founder and director Stacey Klein melds adapted texts with with physical training derived from Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s Teatret Laboratorium. Working together, over time, the company devises sweeping theatrical events which explore what lies beyond the reach of words. Their resulting productions combine vivid, visceral imagery with intense physicality, spectacle, and circus. Over the past twenty years, DET’s devised performance cycles have been presented and lauded internationally.

Shari Perkins is a second-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard.

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