I am seated with 60 people, predominantly women, in a black box theatre in Cardiff, Wales, writing down my dreams. Two dreams, to be exact—followed by concrete actions I can undertake that will manifest them in my life. Provocateur composer/singer Helen Chadwick has guided us through her performance, Dream Through Your Singing Mouth, and now she urges us to join her in this exercise. We seal our nascent dreams inside envelopes, on which we write our home addresses. Helen vows to post each of the letters so that when we arrive home, our dreams will be waiting there—no mean feat, because while Helen is based in the U.K., home for me is Rhode Island, and women around me are jotting down addresses in Bulgaria, Chile, New Zealand. We are an international gathering, brought together through an accrual of time, relationships and daring. We are members of the Magdalena Project, celebrating Magdalena’s 25th birthday.
The Magdalena Project may quite simply be the biggest international theatre project you’ve never heard of. Birthed a generation ago from a series of bold conversations that led to bold actions, the project defines itself as “a nexus for diverse companies, individual artists and scholars whose common interest lies in a commitment to ensuring the visibility of women’s endeavor in the field of performance.” Magdalena’s website, www.themagdalenaproject.org, describes the various real-time and online meetings at which female artists have been able to engage in mutual discovery and encouragement. “Largely surviving on the goodwill of its members and sponsors,” the site notes, “it is a testimony to what we can achieve together in the spirit of community and unity.”
The 25th-anniversary festival of the Magdalena Project was held Aug. 16-21 at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre. Under the heading “Legacy and Challenge,” the gathering united many of the women who have created Magdalena meetings in their own countries. This includes not only the project’s founders but a second generation of artists and a third generation, of which I am a member. Since organizing a festival in 2005 in my hometown of Providence, R.I., I have been relatively silent in this network. Traveling to Wales meant reclaiming my voice within the organization—and having dreams, once again, that are visible to women around the globe.
This birthday party kicked off with a welcome from the Project’s founder and artistic director, Jill Greenhalgh, who assured us that the Magdalena Project is an absolute success story despite its relatively low profile. As an actress working with the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre in the early 1980s, Greenhalgh confronted her frustrations with that male-run company and wondered what it would take to create performances from a female point of view. Her fateful query was issued to actresses from other male-run companies at a festival in Italy that featured groups working in the Third Theatre (a term, ascribed to Eugenio Barba, that connotes groups or individuals devising theatre from a wide range of practices outside the mainstream). The ensuing conversation fueled a fire. Three years later, in 1986, Jill invited these actresses to participate in a three-week festival in her home city, creating a template for the festivals that have come after—and starting the ripples that still flow from the Magdalena Project today.
The ripples didn’t always flow easily. In 1999, the Arts Council of Wales cut funding to the Magdalena Project. Greenhalgh’s response was to give up Magdalena’s Welsh offices, thereby decentralizing the organization and freeing her up to travel to locales where women were interested in staging gatherings of their own. That gesture was a defining moment for the network, whose members have hosted festivals and meetings throughout Europe, South and Central America, New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, the United States and Singapore. In March 2012, Magdalena’s members will convene in India; plans for a festival in Turkey are in the works for the not-so-distant future.
Magdalena promotes women’s performance work not just through gatherings but through documentation, a central value of the project. The Open Page, a journal of women’s thoughts, questions and visions for theatre, published 13 editions between 1996 and 2008 and is readily available online and in print. At the August festival’s opening, Geddy Aniksdal, an actress with Norway’s Grenland Friteater, and Julia Varley, an actress with Denmark’s Odin Teatret and a Magdalena Project initiator, charged on stage to unveil the capstone of Magdalena’s publishing arm: the 25th-anniversary collection Legacy and Challenge, a handsome volume of essays, poems, reflections and telegrams from more than 40 women.
August’s gathering, like all Magdalena festivals, featured an array of strong theatre performances—mostly solos. The project offers female artists an opportunity to pursue themes and methods that interest and delight them as individuals, in counterpoint or in concert to the work that they may undertake in the mixed groups of which they are members. These solo works are windows into a wider theatrical world: Through Julia Varley, I have come to know the work of Odin Teatret; because of Teresa Ralli and Ana Correa, I know about Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, one of Peru’s most important theatres. Artists from several other theatres—such as Serbia’s Dah Teatar and Switzerland’s Teatro delle Radici, both founded by women—were on the program at Cardiff this year, as was a “cyberformance” developed by Helen Varley Jamieson, the project’s web queen (no relation to Julia Varley) and Paula Crutchlow, a U.K.-based theatre artist with a practice in digital media. The latter piece, called make-shift, was described by the artists as a “networked performance about connectivity and consequences”; they performed it in two donated homes and online at www.make-shift.net to live and virtual audiences.
The meetings and festivals organized under the banner of the Magdalena Project are impressive not only for the work they feature, but because each is a distinct conversation between the local organizing team and their own far-flung communities. Festivals are produced at a scale manageable by the hosts, and according to their available resources. (Cash isn’t the only resource that counts; huge festivals have been produced by indomitable women in Colombia and Cuba, where government and corporate monies for the arts are all but non-existent.) A defining characteristic of all such convenings is hospitality. Guest artists often secure support from their own arts councils or pocketbooks to travel, knowing that they will be housed and fed for the duration of the festival.
Without this tenet of hospitality, the festival I organized in 2005 would not have been possible. Visiting artists secured travel funding from their local authorities or corporations; my festival housed some artists in Rhode Island School of Design dormitorie s and fed them in that school’s refectory, while others were billeted by local performers.
Magdalena USA: Theatre-Women-Weaving took place in Providence in summer 2005. We hosted 34 artists from 10 countries and activated multiple performance and workshop spaces throughout the city. I modeled the event on the two other Magdalena festivals I had attended, programming training sessions for artists during the mornings, performances open to the public at night, and additional events such as panels and work demonstrations in the afternoons. My hope was that the visiting artists would weave their work through the streets and spaces of Providence and that a residue of embodied performance would remain.
The festival itself was exhilarating; an adrenaline-filled 7 days featuring 14 performances, 4 work demonstrations, 4 panel discussions, 9 workshops, and 1 “performed paper”—a hybrid of solo performance and academic research in which Australian artist and scholar Margaret Cameron delivered a lecture while standing on a rock and clad in a dripping raincoat. Artists from the U.K., Denmark, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Spain and Serbia connected with, and showed work alongside, Stacy Klein, founder of Double Edge Theatre of Massachusetts; New Orleans-based collaborators Lisa D’Amour, Kathy Randels and Katie Pearl; Suzukitrained actor/director Maria Porter; and artists from NACL Theatre in Highland Lake, N.Y., and New York City’s Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble, among others.
But the success of having organized such a large gathering feels short-lived, once everyone has gone home again. My trip to Wales was a powerful reminder that the most heat is generated when we are together. The week in Cardiff went by with the breathlessness of having every moment programmed. I held a workshop on acting with video that strengthened my confidence in my current line of performance inquiry. I worked with Italian actress Gabriella Sacco on her in-process piece set to the lyrics of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. I held a laptop during a reading of a new work of Gilly Adams (U.K.) and the U.S.’s Porter so that Cameron could see them via Skype. I thrilled to a work-in-progress showing of Julia Varley’s new solo Ave Maria, which combined rigorous physical and vocal craft with humorous puppet elements to honor the life and work of Chilean actress Maria Cánepa. Another highlight was a concert by Brigitte Cirla’s Voix Polyphoniques (France), set in the Llanduff Cathedral just out of the center of Cardiff. The concert was open to the public, and sold out.
That some of these women have been connecting to one another through their work for 25 years, offering challenging criticism as well as encouragement, is testimony to the project’s value, and for me a source of great hope. The network is not closed to men; there are supportive “Magda-lads” who work on festivals administratively and train and collaborate with us, but the project remains a shared space for women. Focusing on females has distinct benefits: Learning about the ways that many female theatremakers construct their practices and create their livelihoods—despite the particular challenges facing artists of our gender—opens up the possibility that I too can sustain a life in theatre. There’s a lot of practical information to exchange, once you’ve made the invigorating discovery that a director in Mexico City or Singapore struggles with the same challenge of promoting her work; or that the actor in Perth is in a performance group that operates in a similar way as your own. And when theatremakers with so much in common meet and begin to collaborate, that creates tangible job opportunities. The work comes to the forefront. The promise of the Magdalena Project is that each woman can enter into the network and interact with her colleagues not as a “woman artist,” but simply as an artist.
It is our last day in Wales. The participants gather for one last hallmark of Magdalena gatherings: the Final Round. We sit in an oblong circle, hip to hip. Jill introduces a rain stick that is to be passed so that each person can say what she needs to say without being interrupted. Many use the time to declare what they will do as a result of this meeting; others express gratitude at having the forum and the network.
The final feast of this 25th anniversary finds the Chapter Studio transformed to a banquet hall of Arthurian proportions, with four long tables breaking the space into channels. Over wine and exceptional food, the early-generation Magdalenas present the results of their week-long puppet-making workshop, Playing with the Dead. These indomitable women, who between them have over a century of performance experience, express their nervousness at showing new skills. Their generosity in exposing their play opens within me a desire to be similarly dilated through my work. My intention to keep learning is forged by their example.
I arrive home to Providence, fortified by the collective will to meet again. In the mail I find a squat envelope with a foreign stamp on it. Helen has kept her promise and posted my dreams to me. I open the envelope and hear my voice issuing from the small flap, exhorting me to follow those dreams. They have great power within them, as well as the support of fierce colleagues. We will meet again.
Vanessa Gilbert is an independent director who focuses on new work. As executive artistic director of Perishable Theatre, she ran the International Women’s Playwriting Festival and incubated hybrid performance pieces through the Resident Artists at Perishable Theatre program.
