ARTicles vol.4 i.4d: Unfamiliar Worlds

John Herndon: What are you trying to capture with your costumes for Island of Slaves? Where do they come from?

David Zinn: The sources are varied. Some are from contemporary fashion shots, some from the 80s club/performance icon Leigh Bowery, and some from the videos and installations of L.A. artist Paul McCarthy, which deal with entertainment that pushes the bounds of cruelty. They seem like pictures from a party that’s way out of control.  They’re about the uncanny aspect of carnival, as in Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay on the Middle Ages [Rabelais and His World], about the fear of the hidden and the suppressed. They get at extremely deep-rooted notions about what we’re afraid of, what we’re trying to keep out of civilized society. It’s only possible to experience the freedom of carnival if it’s extreme.

JH: How do the costumes and set work together?

DZ: I hope they don’t work together. I hope everything about this place is disorienting. We’re setting up a sterile space in which a weird, carnivalesque event is taking place. The room is being occupied but in a foreign way, in a way that is not usual for it. The lighting will help with this disorientation. It’ll use all the theatre tricks: mood, revealing, framing, blinding, seducing, distracting, celebrating. The audience should share the experience of the masters onstage. They should feel off-balance. Olly’s Prison was straightforward: a character was a cop, so he wore a uniform. This production is the opposite of that.

JH: You have worked with Robert Woodruff several times.  What aesthetic do you share?

DZ: Growing up, I liked both musical theatre and the Wooster Group. From one came pure entertainment, and from the other came the creation of completely unfamiliar worlds. I like both, and so does Robert. He’s a master storyteller and stager, yet at the same time he is interested in the unfamiliar. He understands that something can be so ugly that it is beautiful and so beautiful that it is ugly. I like that. We both want to tell the truth and find that unexpected approaches are better ways to do so.

We like certain things – apertures, low spaces, spaces that reveal other spaces, surprises. The sets that I’ve done with Robert are charged spaces that allow collisions – in the case of Olly’s Prison some very literal collisions. In everything I do I try to make a reverberation chamber.

In Island of Slaves, there is a large space, but it is not a large, vacant space. It is haunted; it has a history. The characters’ lines and actions bounce off each other and the set itself. They resonate.

John Herndon is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute.

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