1991 After spending a year adapting Dostoevsky’s epic novel, THE POSSESSED, with my collaborator Robert Lyons, I began rehearsal with a 14 person cast. About a week into rehearsal when we began the process of taking exploratory work and translating it into staging, I began to instinctually feel the space for the first time as a director. In the past, I had intellectually analyzed the space and made my choices. It was liberating and thrilling to instinctually feel what the strongest choice spatially was.
MAD SHADOWS
1997. My dance-theatre adaptation of Canadian novelist Marie Claire Blais’ first work, MAD SHADOWS, was centered on an intelligent but ugly girl’s relationship with her hatefully vain and shallow family and her attempt to create her own better family. I had been exploring using a gestural vocabulary in my work since 1991. But this project, aided by a long eighteen-month development process using the same strong cast, enabled me to create a very deep work that fused gestures and emotions. The jarring, flailing but still stylized gestures of a girl in unbearable pain brought her agony home with our audiences.
Kristin Marting 