Portraits

Ellie Heyman at St. John’s Lutheran Church

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EH: …I’m thinking so much about the role of art in our crazy world right now, and yes, it’s always been important, but the feeling of immediacy is stronger now than ever before in my life. People need to remember their own humanity and they need to be finding it in each other, and I think our brains can lie to us, they can justify anything inside of our minds, where our bodies are not very good at lying to us. When something feels wrong, it feels wrong.

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Jinger Leigh & Amélie van Tass at the Palace Theatre

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AVT: I was always interested in the history concerning performance, and a hundred years ago, magicians were the rockstars. When they entered the stage, people would come, and they would scream and cheer and…the girls would go crazy for Houdini, for example. You can imagine nowadays, it was very similar. And I think there were some very golden times of magic too, but I think now is a new time and it’s coming back anew—although it’s an old thing the show presents it in a different way. And people are very excited about it, and magic is coming back—differently.

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Morgan James, Torya Beard, & Richard Amelius at St. John the Divine Cathedral

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Morgan: Right around Christmas of last year, I had a dream that I did Jesus Christ Superstar with Shoshana Bean as Judas. I didn’t know Shoshana very well at the time ­– I didn’t even have her number. [Richard and Torya] were coming over for Christmas dinner, and when they came over, I said, oh, I had this dream, and they both immediately said, when are you doing that? That needs to happen. So I asked a friend for Shoshana’s number and I texted her: It’s Morgan James. I had this dream. She said something to the effect of WHEN ARE WE DOING THAT? and I thought, ok, there’s three people that I like a lot who don’t think I’m insane.

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Ayodele Casel in her studio

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AC: …That is one of the wonderful things that tap dance has given me: it teaches you to recognize your individuality from the get-go. In improvisation, you cannot be anybody else. If you aren’t being yourself, you aren’t being authentic, you aren’t being interesting, you aren’t honoring the dance that you’re doing, you aren’t honoring the art form and most importantly, you aren’t honoring yourself because we all have our own unique and wonderful point of view. If you’re paying attention, you learn very quickly to start honing some authenticity.

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Diane Paulus for the Interval

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“I think my interest in the American musical theatre is in shows that can do all of those things: they move you and they entertain you. And to be entertained, that’s a human need, the idea of diverting oneself to see something, that’s part of what we need as human beings. We also have a need to learn. We also have a human need for spectacle, which to me is defined by seeing something larger than yourself. Why do we go to a mountaintop and look at the horizon or go to an ocean? Because it’s spectacle, and you feel awe in the presence of something larger than yourself. The human need for ritual, that’s also why I love theatre. We move through something as a group. I love to do theatre that tries to drive on a lot of those cylinders. It would be great if it could be entertainment, be spectacle, be ritual, and also make us feel and think and teach us something.”
~Diane Paulus
(Full Interview)

Montego Glover at Lincoln Center

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“The good news, I feel, is that I have yet to meet a character that I didn’t have something in common with, even if on the surface we appear to have nothing in common. So I look for women—I’ve yet to play a man, but I’m sure it’s on its way—who have a story to tell, who I find interesting and compelling, since that’s the hook into wanting to tell the story. So interesting, compelling, heartfelt stories is really what I’m after.”

Montego Glover
Full Interview

Amber in Alphabet City

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